Zach WeinersmithNow and then there's a headline about an AI musician going huge on some platform. For me the most fascinating thing is that when this happens, and I look up their album or singles, their songs are almost identical. Not like when you say "all of ACDC's songs are the same." Like, they're just tons of tiny variations. Check e.g. the singles by the AI named Eddie Dalton.
Or there was another popular one called Breaking Rust, I believe, who was a sort of modern hardcore country singer. Nearly every song began with him humming, in the same cadence, followed by the same bluesy percussion. And all were some variation on the theme of being a tough guy who doesn't care about other people's opinions. Like, dozens of these songs.
And with this sort of thing I always wonder whether it's that they're (a) gaming the system, or (b) discovered something humans actually wanted all along, in some sense, but which artists would've never produced.
I mean maybe we really just want Oasis to play 83 slight variations on Wonderwall, but they wouldn't.
Frosch B@b_age I dunno, like, some of these are really popular as far as I can tell. And, in my experience, people who aren't into this stuff can't tell AI from real. Or, just aren't trying to.
@ZachWeinersmith to be honest, i can't really tell, i don't listen to that kind of stuff. i just can't imagine people are that ... gullible? there must be some rigging involved
@b_age For me the AI voice tech is still not there. Like it really sticks out. But maybe if I didn't know it was AI and it just came on spotify I wouldn't notice?
@ZachWeinersmith i already disliked mainstream-, radio-style music before "AI" came up, so i don't have a good base for comparisation but still think i can recognise that generated stuff, because it being so arbitrary, exchangable
Trantion@ZachWeinersmith @b_age I heard that it's often "popular" because the creator is using bots to "listen" to the music enough to get a significant proportion of the streams in a specific musical genre
Petra van Cronenburg@trantion Exactly this. And you can cheaply buy packages of followers, likes, or reviews, meanwhile made by KI bots. @ZachWeinersmith @b_age
@ZachWeinersmith We don't know if such clicks are generated by real human fans or by bots, only curious people, or something else.
My physiotherapist plays such slop for a calming atmosphere because he can't afford the high royalties the collecting organisms take from therapeuts. You can hear it, it's like blubbering mud. No breathtaking, no different emotions in the "voices".
Patients accept it because we know that therapeuts are so badly paid (France). Many clicks. 1/2
@b_age
My physiotherapist plays such slop for a calming atmosphere because he can't afford the high royalties the collecting organisms take from therapeuts. You can hear it, it's like blubbering mud. No breathtaking, no different emotions in the "voices".
Patients accept it because we know that therapeuts are so badly paid (France). Many clicks. 1/2
@b_age
@ZachWeinersmith 2/2 Then happened the music accident. The slop in endless repetition "hallucinated" into a mix of calming "Yoga sound" and death metal. 🤣 You could hear the patients cry out loud in different rooms. And it was like a virus ... death metal came back .. in the calmest moments ...
@b_age
@b_age
Daniel Gibson@NatureMC @ZachWeinersmith @b_age
this is hilarious :D
I find (some) death metal soothing, but alternating with wildly different music won't help
@Doomed_Daniel Imagine you’re there to have the after-effects of whiplash treated, lying on the massage table waiting to relax, when suddenly some headbanger bursts in. 😈 😂 @ZachWeinersmith @b_age
Angela Carstensen@NatureMC @ZachWeinersmith @b_age
Some people do find death metal very calming 🤘🥰
Enola Knezevic@AngelaCarstensen @NatureMC @ZachWeinersmith @b_age I hate when they (doctors, dentists, hairdressers) play music, any music. If I want music, I have my own headphones/earbuds. But I prefer silence and when I listen to any music it is active listening. It is not a background to life. But slop: everything I heard, regardless of the (attempted) genre, was unlistenable.
At a doctor's office I also wouldn't want music playing in the background.
@AngelaCarstensen Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bmI90xiWLM
Ylvis - Improvised hidden radio at the dentist's office (Eng subs)
@rhelune With my dentist panic I would leave at once, even if I don't understand a word. 😱 🥶
@NatureMC @AngelaCarstensen That's why I do not like pranks, even non-malicious ones. Ylvis first pranked people, then asked for an apology with a bottle of wine, but some people said that the prank had brought up their trauma. Luckily they have stopped doing pranks since.
(If you turn on the subtitles you are gonna see that they are scaring people about local anaesthesia used by the dentists 😱 )
@rhelune Well, the dentists allowing this were a-holes. @AngelaCarstensen
@NatureMC @AngelaCarstensen Agree, regardless of the presents for the pranked.
@AngelaCarstensen @rhelune Fortunately, it's calm at the doctors. It's playing in the massage rooms of physiotherapy, and I suspect more for the therapists who do a very hard job the whole day.
@NatureMC @ZachWeinersmith @b_age
is streaming real music more expensive than slop on spotify? I thought it was a flatrate?
or are there streaming services for therapists with different pricing models?
@Doomed_Daniel If you play music in public, independent from the technics, you have to declare and pay it at GEMA. They are a collecting organism for (real human) musicians.
There are laws for playing music in public. A therapist's rooms or a clinic are not private.
@ZachWeinersmith @b_age
There are laws for playing music in public. A therapist's rooms or a clinic are not private.
@ZachWeinersmith @b_age
@NatureMC @ZachWeinersmith @b_age
GEMA also exists in France? I thought it was German
How does it work? If you stream random playlists, do you really have to keep track of the actual music played and report that to GEMA? What if you play oldschool radio?
@Doomed_Daniel Please read Wikipedia about it. There are different collecting organisms depending on the countries. Yes, GEMA is German, in France we have the SACEM. You find their rules on their websites. @ZachWeinersmith @b_age
Willow Brook 💜@ZachWeinersmith @b_age
The unfortunate thing is that every media interaction can be botted now. Views, likes, comments. The only way you can tell is if they go up extremely quickly. Nobody's getting a million streams overnight or whatever. If they're getting Kanye numbers, something's up.
Sometimes comments can also be suspect. If usernames look generated or the comments are, like you say, slight variations on the same thing.
Dror Bedrack@ZachWeinersmith I dont really know. Maybe people do like that? Maybe people don't listen too well to music and just have it in the background?
I know I dont like that.
I know I dont like that.
Marc@ZachWeinersmith I think we're experiencing a kind of "fast food" of music. That analogy works closest for me - plenty of people are happy to eat a McDonald's hamburger even though they don't know where it's from, it was made almost entirely by machine, and it's not really good for them at all. But it's familiar, accessible, and pretty much the same each time.
@mdiluz I see it as taking all the vices of SEO slop and making them automatic!
@mdiluz Like at least so far, I don't see AI media as doing worse stuff than humans do. It's just lowered the cost to basically nothing.
@ZachWeinersmith yuuup. It's why I'm finally moving away from Spotify - it kept repeatedly auto-playing into AI music and while I can't deny it can sound good and I'll enjoy it in isolation, the come down afterwards finding out it was just music for music's sake and was devoid of any human connection? Ugh. Don't sneak junk food into my dinners, it's violating.
@mdiluz Same, though I was reading a book recently that said people under age 20 or so don't make the same distinction, or not as strongly. Could be more about age than generation, though.
eddy berthier@ZachWeinersmith I am pretty sure the answer to that question can be found by looking at the insane number of remakes and reboots being produced right now.
They may as well be AI generated (probably not long from now), would still work.
This is what humans want, not what humans need
They may as well be AI generated (probably not long from now), would still work.
This is what humans want, not what humans need
MrAptronym@ZachWeinersmith I believe with some of these, they have multiple same-y songs that are doing numbers. I am sure those songs' listeners overlap so it seems like both a and b are likely to some extent.
I have a friend who simply has spotify play country music when he is in the car. I have never seen him manually select or skip a song. I have been on four hour car rides where no more than 10 songs play in an endless shuffle. He is probably an ideal audience for this.
Jonathan Hendry"I have been on four hour car rides where no more than 10 songs play in an endless shuffle."
That's just any FM country station.
Rev. Johnny Healey@ZachWeinersmith (c) They paid a PR firm to plant a story about the AI musician being popular and this turns into people actually listening to it to see if it's any good. At some point people will realize it never is good and this will stop working.
Ricardo@ZachWeinersmith There's also (c): the bot produced "music" is "listened" by other bots in order to promote the slop machine to people that don't really care about music. All this genAI thing is for people who would be perfectly happy sitting on one of those flying chairs on Wall-e.
@ZachWeinersmith (also, those in the space ship descend from the billionaires that destroyed the biosphere in the first place, killing humanity. Wall-e is really a horror movie)
Viraptor@ZachWeinersmith
There's definitely some space for not-quite-muzak. Consciously, I wouldn't go for it, but then again, when I'm doing something else I'll sometimes shuffle the "liked songs radio" and not pay any attention to what is playing... and is that really that far off? There's some sweet spot for that "tune out but the vibe you enjoy" music. (This is from an analytical point of view. Personally I want those creators to GTFO of the streaming platforms.)
There's definitely some space for not-quite-muzak. Consciously, I wouldn't go for it, but then again, when I'm doing something else I'll sometimes shuffle the "liked songs radio" and not pay any attention to what is playing... and is that really that far off? There's some sweet spot for that "tune out but the vibe you enjoy" music. (This is from an analytical point of view. Personally I want those creators to GTFO of the streaming platforms.)
Mark Shane Hayden@ZachWeinersmith why not both?
Like, #GenAI #LLM literally "games the system" by design already so a) is already a given, but b) has even been a thing even before GenAI as the kind of thing to fill the silence in elevators, malls, cafés and dentist's offices.
People don't seek out b) but they might miss it if it were absent. Nobody cares about it more than that so it is just a set-and-forget thing.
Furthermore truly randomised play lists are now supplanted by algorithmic (aka "AI generated") play lists for such purposes which completes the feedback loop.
A few years ago a paint company announced the colour of the year (the most popular selection sold that year) was "Agreeable Grey". This music and everything else GenAI makes without exception is "Agreeable Grey". Nobody seeks it out but it offends nobody so nobody really cares about it. It is just there to fill a space.
Leo Ré Jorge@ZachWeinersmith as others said, I think it's a mix of bots (like this case https://social.vivaldi.net/@brucelawson/116279073027746358) and people listening to music as background with algorithmic playlists.
I liked this long essay about AI in music that touches quite a bit of these issues (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk&pp=ygUKYWRhbSBuZWVseQ%3D%3D)
Bruce Lawson ✅ ♫ ♿ ✌️♂️✊ (@[email protected])
A man used LLMs to generate hundreds of thousands of "songs", then used bots to stream them billions of times, to collect $8m in royalties. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-pleads-guilty-music-streaming-fraud-aided-artificial-intelligence-0 Is there a better metaphor for late-stage capitalism than burning resources to make songs that are never listened to, then steaming them to robots that will never hear them, ad infinitum?
NoNotMeNotMeNo@ZachWeinersmith To me, 83 variations of Wonderwall sounds like something you would get in Satan's Waiting Room, as a "warm up" to eternal damnation. But maybe thats just me.
Paul Bernhardt@ZachWeinersmith I suspect it might be down to the generation process. If it's like image generation I assume you write your prompt, and get a couple songs out, and if the prompt is any good most of the songs are decent. If you feel like it's close but not perfect you just run the prompt or a slight variant again. At the end you have a bunch of songs that are all close to what you want, so you upload them all and see what happens.
@PaulB @ZachWeinersmith this makes a lot of sense, it's basically the logical conclusion of A/B testing with automated generation
Mans R@ZachWeinersmith > I mean maybe we really just want Oasis to play 83 slight variations on Wonderwall, but they wouldn't.
They didn't?
Grant Gould@ZachWeinersmith I keep thinking about the series of moments in _A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs_ where the unit of "productness" sort of switches from the performance to the song to the record to the LP album, and wondering if we're seeing a transition from playlist/stream to artist as the commodity unit. Like maybe it's a weird distraction to ask about "Eddie Dalton's" "other songs" -- they are all just images of "Eddie Dalton".
Bodhipaksa@ZachWeinersmith They're clearly gaming the system The big benefit for AI-scammers is economies of scale. The most successful ones use AI to create bot accounts to stream their songs over and over.
But some of them are presumably producing something that people want, which might just be music playing in the background, so that the quality might not be important, or it might be that some listeners just don't have a lot of taste and find AI-generated music acceptable.
trekkie1701c@ZachWeinersmith If they're lying about making the music, why not lie about who listens to it? They're looking for an easy, no effort out in making a thing; they don't actually care about the creative process, they just want the end product.
And part of that end product is popular success. Building an audience is hard, but there are so many services to game statistics and so many ways to fudge numbers. Like, make a book of your comics and sell a quintillion ebooks to someone for a penny. Congrats! You now have the best selling media in history. Sure, that's a bit of a stretch of an example, but I think you get the idea.
Some would say "83 variations? Sounds like a Grateful Dead concert tape library"
Salamandar@ZachWeinersmith Wild guess: they don't expect anyone to go look up the album or artist page and play through the whole catalog. It's all just fodder for A/B testing on playlists, hoping one variation will break out.
@salamandar @ZachWeinersmith
yeah - people who are actually into music will listen to whole albums and will be repelled by this, but people who just play some playlist with mixed artists (or "artists") for background noise won't notice
yeah - people who are actually into music will listen to whole albums and will be repelled by this, but people who just play some playlist with mixed artists (or "artists") for background noise won't notice
Nemo@ZachWeinersmith
Classical music works like that.
it's the same pieces, but endlessly varied by interpret.
I’m 481 Phones@ZachWeinersmith Related and entertaining: https://overcast.fm/+ABKKVfdumDc
A Song About Ethan — Hyperfixed
This week, listener Manon asks why are there so many songs on streaming services featuring her brothers name - Ethan. And why are they all about poop? Please become a premium member! We can’t exist without your support! https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/join LINKS: Get a custom song by Matt Farley: https://moternmedia.com/custom-songs Listen to A Song About Ethan on Spotify Benn Jordan’s Using AI to Detect AI Music Poopz’s Ethan Stop Pooping Your Pants or Move to France The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop, Puke, and Pee’s The Ethan Poop Song Reckless Otter’s Ethan Poop Fart Funny Song Super Poop’s Ethan Smells Like a Llama (Super Poop)
Brian Danger Hicks@ZachWeinersmith I suspect part of it is that the AI system only creates finished songs, so the process of refining the prompt results in a lot of similar outputs that they figure there's no downside to also releasing.
João Santos@ZachWeinersmith I would like to say a) but I've playlists composed entirely of covers of the same song.