Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.

One can still buy artisan albums created by independent singers/bands. But they tend to get lost in the marketing/influencer noise and thus do not get worldwide success. As a result you have to search harder for them.

Artists have actually been moving back to the full album with goodies, even in mainstream pop with Beyoncé, Rosalia, RAYE, Charli XCX to name a few.

I feel like in those days I really didn’t appreciate albums. Storage was a premium so I would focus on bands greatest hits songs vs discographies. Both in terms of my burned cd collections and early mp3. I didn’t start getting into albums until terabyte hard drives were cheaper. Then I started pirating discographies and listening to the back catalog for the first time.

I really don't think we have. When I was growing up in the 90s it was the heyday of the pop single but there were still plenty of albums being produced and I think it's the same today.

charts will become totally meaningless.

Event data will be what matters most. That's how artists actually make their revenue these days anyways.

Yes it should be easy to find people in one’s immediate social circle who are listening to these tracks if they are that popular. I’ll wait…

Time for a cross, like the New York Times bestsellers.

This speaks more about how easy it is to buy botted vanity metrics on Spotify than anything.

The most obvious way you can tell this is inorganic is how all of the "Discovered On" are artist-specific playlists: "Eddie Dalton music", "Best of Eddie Dalton", "Eddie Dalton Hits", etc. A real artist may have some artist-specific playlists but generally their Discovered On will be more general genre playlists, like "Pop Hits" or "Hype" or "Gym Music" or whatever.

“Soon” we will see celebrity AI gossip?

Someone clearly missed the first season of Fruit Love Island[0].

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/ai-fruit-love-isla...

baby gronk got rizzed up by livvy?

I'll perform these songs by AI in concerts if the price is right. And that's how AI starts to leak out into the physical world. AI also hires human workers to do tasks in the real world using Task Rabbit and similar apps.

Maybe I'm just old (definitely I'm just old) but the live music experience has been completely destroyed for me, between bat-shit-crazy high ticket prices and the absolute collapse of concert-goer decorum. Who would have thought that a bunch of high, adolescent punks in the 80s or 90s would be more appropriately behaved than the 35-yr-old mom pushing past only to stand directly in front to film the entire show over her head on her iPhone, with a few breaks to live-tweet her awesome experience on social media?

right, but at least human hands used to touch the process. even in 2000s copy-paste boy band era it was at least human

Why?

If you think that AI generated beige music is nerdcore, you don't know what you're talking about. The best is far more sophisticated and deeply - sarcastically - self-referential that I think it would be a real challenge for AI to come up with something both compelling and meaningful.

So it’s perfect for the times. :(

the comments are very suspicious and very scary

I'd say the same thing about two thirds of the iTunes top 100. Different people love different songs I guess.

The lyrics of the one you linked are fairly strong compared to other songs on the top 100 list.

I’ve heard lots of music like this over the years. It’s catchy, the lyrics are very relatable to the audience of people who like this music. It might not be your thing, but it is certainly enjoyed by many, and there are albums written around this subject. Folk/blues are made of this subject.

Is it over all flat and boring? Somewhat. You can only hear the same thing so many times before it gets tiring.

It feels... commercial. I feel like I have to read a EULA and hit I Agree before I can listen to that.

The top 40 has rarely been about "art", though. The music there is highly formulaic and derivative, whose creators know well how to produce music that appeals to the masses.

The effect of this "AI" trend is that now humans with no musical background or experience can flood the medium, making it much more difficult for anyone to make a living from it, whether they're an artist or not.

Agreed. I find that particularly annoying, and I also seem to find that the spatial arrangement or stereo effect is muted for most instruments (or the model simply doesn't use that feature as well as a good human musician).

There are two arguments about AI art, one of them is trivially reducible to the “is sampling/collage art”. If you are spending time expressing something using AI produced components then you are producing art, and probably the amount of time you spend working on it (either developing your skills or creating the work) roughly will correlate to how much value others see in it. It’s no different than building a hip hop track out of drum loops.

The second question is more interesting, which is “does raw AI produced artwork have any artistic value” and I am going to punt on the “artistic” part of that equation and answer the “value” part with no, and not because people might not enjoy it, but it falls victim to the classic “my five year old could so that” critique of modern art, except in this case it is true. Anybody can go to an AI and produce some mediocre media.

Where this gets interesting again is _volume_. What AI unlocks is exactly that anybody can create songs, videos and images for _themselves_. The value of it is probably the pennies worth of time ajd expense they put into it, but it might he worth it for them to make something, be mildly amused by it and immediately dispose of it.

You wanted some shadowrun themed music, you got it and enjoyed it. You made something of value only to yourself, but that seems okay? Multiply that times billions of people probably eventually people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.