6 ms·

Maybe I'm just getting older but I feel like the quality of both music and film has seriously declined over the last 5-10 years. Maybe the good stuff is still

Maybe I'm just getting older but I feel like the quality of both music and film has seriously declined over the last 5-10 years. Maybe the good stuff is still out there but lost in a sea of average garbage that has surfaced to the top. Something tells me AI isn't going to rescue us either. I just sampled a bunch of these generated tracks and they immediately remind me of the average, mediocre, soul-lacking content that most music and film is today.

chpatrick 3y ago
There was always garbage, you just don't remember it.
delusional 3y ago
There's plenty of really good creative music. If you only watch Marvel and Top 20 hits you won't know it, but there's plenty of good stuff out there. I've really enjoyed the last couple of Bon Iver releases and my favorite artist, The Tallest Man On Earth, just released his new album Henry st. Containing some super personal tracks. The music is fantastic if you just look a little.
rjh29 3y ago
You sound old.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
A flood of garbage film/music has always existed, we just don't remember it because its uninteresting. However, I think modern rec algorithms (like the Netflix home page) are recommending more mediocre stuff than the old system, and the streaming boom did produce an abnormal glut of junk. Anyway I think AI is going to spawn a music remixing/game modding/tv extending renaissance. They perform much better when pointing them at a good source (as you can see with the melody conditioning samples, and other stuff like sd img2img and finetuned llms).
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  It was a smaller flood though, when it required lots of money to record an album / make a movie. Gatekeepers kept most of it out. Now anybody can do it, so there is both a lot more chaff to sort through, and an outpouring of creativity.
- the_only_law 3y ago
  I won’t speak to music, as I listen to a lot of stuff, enough to know there is good stuff out there being made. But for movies and TV? Where do I find the good stuff? It seems Hollywood is creatively bankrupt and just milking people off boring franchises and cheap nostalgia through crappy remakes and sequels. My eyes rolled to the back of my head when I saw an ad for a show called “how I met your father” on Hulu.
  - berberous 3y ago
    For TV, hard to go wrong with an HBO series. Most recently, Succession was excellent.
  - Cyph0n 3y ago
    Those “boring franchises” are what bankroll the passion projects, artsy festival bound movies, and experimental content. As far as content goes, there has been a ton of excellent stuff just this year across movies, TV, and anime. One “organic” way to start is to look for recent recommendation threads on Reddit for a movie or show you really like.
    - wholinator2 3y ago
      See, I've seen this stated many places but never explained. How exactly does the money made by derivative bullshit go into valuable, passionate, art projects and not either directly into pockets or into the next billion dollar derivative bullshit thing? Generally, the bullshit costs way more to produce and market and advertise. And at least on paper, a significant amount of the money made is only recuperating costs for the 3 hours of incredibly CGI it took to make a 3rd 'ant man' or a 4th 'jurassic park'. The majority of actual indie art films cost ridiculously less than that because they're filming a movie, not a commercial. Anyways, my opinions aside, are there any articles with cited money trails that prove that billion dollar blockbusters actually fund valuable art and not just executives yahts?
satvikpendem 3y ago
You are getting older. Every generation thinks the same, that media is getting worse, discounting the survivorship bias that occurs when they look back on their favorite music and discarding all of the bad music that was present back then.
- SeanLuke 3y ago
  This is no doubt true, but there are a number of studies which suggest that, at least in the case of music, things really have gotten rather worse over the last two decades, thanks to corporatization and consolidation of the production model.
  - ddmichael 3y ago
    That's very interesting, any sources?
  - reducesuffering 3y ago
    There are more bedroom indie music producers than ever. EDM and "rap" are better than ever with many many good artists to choose from. One of the biggest breakout rap artist right now was just a random 20 year old working with other random bedroom producers just a couple years ago.
  - djur 3y ago
    The research on this topic that I'm aware of fails to account for the fact that the top 40/100 lists are less representative of what people are actually listening to than they used to be. If Drake can drop an album and have every song on it chart on the Hot 100 for a week or two, that's going to influence the analysis. That simply wasn't possible before music downloads/streaming. You can see the impact on the chart records -- artists from the past decade dominate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_chart_achievements_and_milestones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_char... ETA: And "worse" in these studies tends to be defined in terms of measurable qualities where contemporary pop music most differs from "classical" music.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
steve76 3y ago
[dead]
api 3y ago
You really have to dig for good music these days. The record industry is a zombie at this point and no longer does the job of discovering good music. It just churns out utterly formulaic pop that might as well be the output of a music generator like this.
esskay 3y ago
Theres loads of good music out there, it's just become extremely hard to find unless you're all in on scouring niche subreddits and soundcloud.
taude 3y ago
This is why I paid extra for services like Tidal and Roon. Their music recommendations are just better than any AI-driven stuff. Need actually human experts to curate playlists and such. I feel like the alg-based stuff is just a race to the middle.
- _sys49152 3y ago
  [dead]
sillysaurusx 3y ago
Counterexample: https://on.soundcloud.com/d6rX9goHHrSH3sQY9 https://on.soundcloud.com/d6rX9goHHrSH3sQY9 I agree with you. When gwern investigated AI folk music in 2019, I realized it could generate a wonderful variety of music, full of soul. Be sure to listen to several tracks before making up your mind. My favorite is “crossing the channel”, since I think GPT made a mistake at the beginning, and then generated the most reasonable sounding not-mistake, which turned out to sound so cool. My goal was strong, memorable melodies. Star Wars, not Marvel. GPT can come surprisingly close, if the input data format is right. Unfortunately I don’t think anyone except gwern has noticed that the input format is crucial: https://gwern.net/gpt-2-music https://gwern.net/gpt-2-music
- pests 3y ago
  Where in your gwern link is the input format being crucial discussed? I couldn't find it.
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    I don’t know if gwern realized how powerful his model was. His examples are underwhelming, because you have to prompt it in a certain way to get it to generate chords. He was showing me samples and they were neat, but boring. One day he posted something that sounded pretty amazing, and I was blown away. “More like that, please.” It had chords in it. He didn’t pursue it past that. I did. So it’s possible that no one is aware of how crucial the input format actually is to the success of the music that I was able to produce. (And “produce” is a fair description here — choosing the instruments was really important, and the model didn’t do it. It wasn’t as easy as press a button. It felt like I was suddenly a 15x music producer, since I made all those tracks in one night. Such is the power of ML.)
    - wholinator2 3y ago
      Do you have a write up anywhere with samples? I'd love to hear some of the better examples you have. I agree that most of what's out there is underwhelming
mensetmanusman 3y ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ6Mzvh3XCc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ6Mzvh3XCc This is a great song for contemplating loss of a loved one. I'm not sure AI music will ever reach these heights because it will have trouble understanding death.
InCityDreams 3y ago
You're getting older. I'm 62 and moving air always inspires me. The shit my children listen to annoys me as much as the shit I listened to that annoyed my parents.
anlaw 3y ago
It’s not just you; pop music compositions with key changes that add complexity have all but vanished since the early 00s: https://flowingdata.com/2022/11/22/decline-of-key-changes-in-popular-music/ https://flowingdata.com/2022/11/22/decline-of-key-changes-in... Automation tools and fine grained computed metrics have rounded off the edges of emotional experiences. See Bobby Kotick about taking the fun out of games: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/bobby-kotick-wants-to-take-the-fun-out-of-making-games/ https://www.escapistmagazine.com/bobby-kotick-wants-to-take-... Him saying that is around the time the music compositions start becoming similar. The mentality was not constrained to games. Nothing is allowed to be it’s own thing anymore. It has to be hypernormalized to have enough reach a billionaire CEO can profit from. MBA-ification of reality.
- kevinventullo 3y ago
  If MBA’s played any significant role in the development of Zelda:TOTK, I might have to change my opinion about them.
- djur 3y ago
  I disagree that key changes in popular music are a great measure of complexity. For many years a key change near the end of the song was an easy way to give the sense of a climax. The article your link is based on gives a good summary of it: > The act of shifting a song’s key up either a half step or a whole step (i.e. one or two notes on the keyboard) near the end of the song, was the most popular key change for decades. In fact, 52 percent of key changes found in number one hits between 1958 and 1990 employ this change. You can hear it on “My Girl,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” and “Livin’ on a Prayer,” among many others. To me, this just reflects one set of songwriters' cliches being replaced by another. Not necessarily better or worse.
  - wholinator2 3y ago
    While i do agree generally about key changes, i think the point is that it's just an example of something that sounds _interesting_. It's not just key changes, but all the little chances that an actual artist takes during creation, the things that sound good to some and bad to others are exactly what makes art, art. The change being witnessed isn't the loss of key changes, but the loss of everything that sounds different or interesting, in favor of a sound that is generally palatable to everyone precisely because it does not contain anything interesting.
skrebbel 3y ago
Sounds to me like you've simply stopped trying. When I was 20 I was a music snob into Aphex Twin and weird IDM. I thought all pop at the time was crap, like you seem to. But then I heard, I mean like really heard, "Bye Bye Bye" by *NSYNC and seriously that is a good song! I'm 40 now and I think it got way better even since then. Pop is so varied now! I really don't think music as quirky and weird as, say, Billie Eilish would've made it to the top of the charts in the 90s. I'd say that music like hers (and many charting artists of her generation) is a testament to how broad and compelling pop music has become. My generation thought their parents' music was shit, my parents' generation thought their parents' music was shit, and so on, all the way until at least the invention of Jazz. But the average Gen-Z'er thinks all the music is great! They invent new genres for every song, they wear Metallica t-shirts in 2023, and they mix 80s disco with 00's Brit rock like it's just what people do. And don't forget there's an endless long tail of music out there. There are so many good musicians and plenty of them have a sufficiently fancy label deal to be on Spotify and the likes. And otherwise they're still on Soundcloud, Bandcamp and YouTube. It's worth a deep dive!
- bluefishinit 3y ago
  > hey invent new genres for every song, they wear Metallica t-shirts in 2023, and they mix 80s disco with 00's Brit rock like it's just what people do. If this appeals to you, it's worth checking out Japanese music from the Showa era to present. They've long mixed styles in a way other music markets have not. You can hear city pop songs from the 80s with metal guitar solos, jazz progressions a samba beat and synths, all in the same song.
  - skrebbel 3y ago
    Hey wow cool! Got any representative sample to recommend?
    - bluefishinit 3y ago
      I like Mari Hamada, Meiko Nakahara, Akina Nakamori, Misato Watanabe, Seiko Matsuda, Saki Kubota, Yoko Oginome and definitely check out Juicy Fruits!
jimbokun 3y ago
I haven't been able to find it in years, but I remember an Onion headline saying "Music and movies were best when you, the reader, were 12 years old."
surfingdino 3y ago
The quality of what gets promoted and tops the charts has declined, but there is a lot of good music produced today.
visarga 3y ago
> remind me of the average, mediocre, soul-lacking content This model is just the equivalent of GPT-2 for music. It's not the GPT-4 yet. Music is trailing a few years from language. Used to be that language was about 5 years behind vision. Now language is the top.
ssnistfajen 3y ago
Good music/films that survived through decades or centuries of history are a prime example of survivorship bias. It has been easier than ever for any individual to create content of any type, and there will always be gems. AI isn't meant to "rescue" you from this problem, at least not in the present stage. You are looking for a mission that was never claimed.

chpatrick 3y ago

There was always garbage, you just don't remember it.

delusional 3y ago

There's plenty of really good creative music. If you only watch Marvel and Top 20 hits you won't know it, but there's plenty of good stuff out there. I've really enjoyed the last couple of Bon Iver releases and my favorite artist, The Tallest Man On Earth, just released his new album Henry st. Containing some super personal tracks. The music is fantastic if you just look a little.

rjh29 3y ago

You sound old.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

A flood of garbage film/music has always existed, we just don't remember it because its uninteresting. However, I think modern rec algorithms (like the Netflix home page) are recommending more mediocre stuff than the old system, and the streaming boom did produce an abnormal glut of junk. Anyway I think AI is going to spawn a music remixing/game modding/tv extending renaissance. They perform much better when pointing them at a good source (as you can see with the melody conditioning samples, and other stuff like sd img2img and finetuned llms).

amanaplanacanal 3y ago
It was a smaller flood though, when it required lots of money to record an album / make a movie. Gatekeepers kept most of it out. Now anybody can do it, so there is both a lot more chaff to sort through, and an outpouring of creativity.
the_only_law 3y ago
I won’t speak to music, as I listen to a lot of stuff, enough to know there is good stuff out there being made. But for movies and TV? Where do I find the good stuff? It seems Hollywood is creatively bankrupt and just milking people off boring franchises and cheap nostalgia through crappy remakes and sequels. My eyes rolled to the back of my head when I saw an ad for a show called “how I met your father” on Hulu.
- berberous 3y ago
  For TV, hard to go wrong with an HBO series. Most recently, Succession was excellent.
- Cyph0n 3y ago
  Those “boring franchises” are what bankroll the passion projects, artsy festival bound movies, and experimental content. As far as content goes, there has been a ton of excellent stuff just this year across movies, TV, and anime. One “organic” way to start is to look for recent recommendation threads on Reddit for a movie or show you really like.
  - wholinator2 3y ago
    See, I've seen this stated many places but never explained. How exactly does the money made by derivative bullshit go into valuable, passionate, art projects and not either directly into pockets or into the next billion dollar derivative bullshit thing? Generally, the bullshit costs way more to produce and market and advertise. And at least on paper, a significant amount of the money made is only recuperating costs for the 3 hours of incredibly CGI it took to make a 3rd 'ant man' or a 4th 'jurassic park'. The majority of actual indie art films cost ridiculously less than that because they're filming a movie, not a commercial. Anyways, my opinions aside, are there any articles with cited money trails that prove that billion dollar blockbusters actually fund valuable art and not just executives yahts?

satvikpendem 3y ago

You are getting older. Every generation thinks the same, that media is getting worse, discounting the survivorship bias that occurs when they look back on their favorite music and discarding all of the bad music that was present back then.

SeanLuke 3y ago
This is no doubt true, but there are a number of studies which suggest that, at least in the case of music, things really have gotten rather worse over the last two decades, thanks to corporatization and consolidation of the production model.
- ddmichael 3y ago
  That's very interesting, any sources?
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  There are more bedroom indie music producers than ever. EDM and "rap" are better than ever with many many good artists to choose from. One of the biggest breakout rap artist right now was just a random 20 year old working with other random bedroom producers just a couple years ago.
- djur 3y ago
  The research on this topic that I'm aware of fails to account for the fact that the top 40/100 lists are less representative of what people are actually listening to than they used to be. If Drake can drop an album and have every song on it chart on the Hot 100 for a week or two, that's going to influence the analysis. That simply wasn't possible before music downloads/streaming. You can see the impact on the chart records -- artists from the past decade dominate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_chart_achievements_and_milestones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_char... ETA: And "worse" in these studies tends to be defined in terms of measurable qualities where contemporary pop music most differs from "classical" music.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

steve76 3y ago

[dead]

api 3y ago

You really have to dig for good music these days. The record industry is a zombie at this point and no longer does the job of discovering good music. It just churns out utterly formulaic pop that might as well be the output of a music generator like this.

esskay 3y ago

Theres loads of good music out there, it's just become extremely hard to find unless you're all in on scouring niche subreddits and soundcloud.

taude 3y ago

This is why I paid extra for services like Tidal and Roon. Their music recommendations are just better than any AI-driven stuff. Need actually human experts to curate playlists and such. I feel like the alg-based stuff is just a race to the middle.

_sys49152 3y ago
[dead]

sillysaurusx 3y ago

Counterexample: https://on.soundcloud.com/d6rX9goHHrSH3sQY9 https://on.soundcloud.com/d6rX9goHHrSH3sQY9 I agree with you. When gwern investigated AI folk music in 2019, I realized it could generate a wonderful variety of music, full of soul. Be sure to listen to several tracks before making up your mind. My favorite is “crossing the channel”, since I think GPT made a mistake at the beginning, and then generated the most reasonable sounding not-mistake, which turned out to sound so cool. My goal was strong, memorable melodies. Star Wars, not Marvel. GPT can come surprisingly close, if the input data format is right. Unfortunately I don’t think anyone except gwern has noticed that the input format is crucial: https://gwern.net/gpt-2-music https://gwern.net/gpt-2-music

pests 3y ago
Where in your gwern link is the input format being crucial discussed? I couldn't find it.
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  I don’t know if gwern realized how powerful his model was. His examples are underwhelming, because you have to prompt it in a certain way to get it to generate chords. He was showing me samples and they were neat, but boring. One day he posted something that sounded pretty amazing, and I was blown away. “More like that, please.” It had chords in it. He didn’t pursue it past that. I did. So it’s possible that no one is aware of how crucial the input format actually is to the success of the music that I was able to produce. (And “produce” is a fair description here — choosing the instruments was really important, and the model didn’t do it. It wasn’t as easy as press a button. It felt like I was suddenly a 15x music producer, since I made all those tracks in one night. Such is the power of ML.)
  - wholinator2 3y ago
    Do you have a write up anywhere with samples? I'd love to hear some of the better examples you have. I agree that most of what's out there is underwhelming

mensetmanusman 3y ago

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ6Mzvh3XCc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ6Mzvh3XCc This is a great song for contemplating loss of a loved one. I'm not sure AI music will ever reach these heights because it will have trouble understanding death.

InCityDreams 3y ago

You're getting older. I'm 62 and moving air always inspires me. The shit my children listen to annoys me as much as the shit I listened to that annoyed my parents.

anlaw 3y ago

It’s not just you; pop music compositions with key changes that add complexity have all but vanished since the early 00s: https://flowingdata.com/2022/11/22/decline-of-key-changes-in-popular-music/ https://flowingdata.com/2022/11/22/decline-of-key-changes-in... Automation tools and fine grained computed metrics have rounded off the edges of emotional experiences. See Bobby Kotick about taking the fun out of games: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/bobby-kotick-wants-to-take-the-fun-out-of-making-games/ https://www.escapistmagazine.com/bobby-kotick-wants-to-take-... Him saying that is around the time the music compositions start becoming similar. The mentality was not constrained to games. Nothing is allowed to be it’s own thing anymore. It has to be hypernormalized to have enough reach a billionaire CEO can profit from. MBA-ification of reality.

kevinventullo 3y ago
If MBA’s played any significant role in the development of Zelda:TOTK, I might have to change my opinion about them.
djur 3y ago
I disagree that key changes in popular music are a great measure of complexity. For many years a key change near the end of the song was an easy way to give the sense of a climax. The article your link is based on gives a good summary of it: > The act of shifting a song’s key up either a half step or a whole step (i.e. one or two notes on the keyboard) near the end of the song, was the most popular key change for decades. In fact, 52 percent of key changes found in number one hits between 1958 and 1990 employ this change. You can hear it on “My Girl,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” and “Livin’ on a Prayer,” among many others. To me, this just reflects one set of songwriters' cliches being replaced by another. Not necessarily better or worse.
- wholinator2 3y ago
  While i do agree generally about key changes, i think the point is that it's just an example of something that sounds _interesting_. It's not just key changes, but all the little chances that an actual artist takes during creation, the things that sound good to some and bad to others are exactly what makes art, art. The change being witnessed isn't the loss of key changes, but the loss of everything that sounds different or interesting, in favor of a sound that is generally palatable to everyone precisely because it does not contain anything interesting.

skrebbel 3y ago

Sounds to me like you've simply stopped trying. When I was 20 I was a music snob into Aphex Twin and weird IDM. I thought all pop at the time was crap, like you seem to. But then I heard, I mean like really heard, "Bye Bye Bye" by *NSYNC and seriously that is a good song! I'm 40 now and I think it got way better even since then. Pop is so varied now! I really don't think music as quirky and weird as, say, Billie Eilish would've made it to the top of the charts in the 90s. I'd say that music like hers (and many charting artists of her generation) is a testament to how broad and compelling pop music has become. My generation thought their parents' music was shit, my parents' generation thought their parents' music was shit, and so on, all the way until at least the invention of Jazz. But the average Gen-Z'er thinks all the music is great! They invent new genres for every song, they wear Metallica t-shirts in 2023, and they mix 80s disco with 00's Brit rock like it's just what people do. And don't forget there's an endless long tail of music out there. There are so many good musicians and plenty of them have a sufficiently fancy label deal to be on Spotify and the likes. And otherwise they're still on Soundcloud, Bandcamp and YouTube. It's worth a deep dive!

bluefishinit 3y ago
> hey invent new genres for every song, they wear Metallica t-shirts in 2023, and they mix 80s disco with 00's Brit rock like it's just what people do. If this appeals to you, it's worth checking out Japanese music from the Showa era to present. They've long mixed styles in a way other music markets have not. You can hear city pop songs from the 80s with metal guitar solos, jazz progressions a samba beat and synths, all in the same song.
- skrebbel 3y ago
  Hey wow cool! Got any representative sample to recommend?
  - bluefishinit 3y ago
    I like Mari Hamada, Meiko Nakahara, Akina Nakamori, Misato Watanabe, Seiko Matsuda, Saki Kubota, Yoko Oginome and definitely check out Juicy Fruits!

jimbokun 3y ago

I haven't been able to find it in years, but I remember an Onion headline saying "Music and movies were best when you, the reader, were 12 years old."

surfingdino 3y ago

The quality of what gets promoted and tops the charts has declined, but there is a lot of good music produced today.

visarga 3y ago

> remind me of the average, mediocre, soul-lacking content This model is just the equivalent of GPT-2 for music. It's not the GPT-4 yet. Music is trailing a few years from language. Used to be that language was about 5 years behind vision. Now language is the top.

ssnistfajen 3y ago

Good music/films that survived through decades or centuries of history are a prime example of survivorship bias. It has been easier than ever for any individual to create content of any type, and there will always be gems. AI isn't meant to "rescue" you from this problem, at least not in the present stage. You are looking for a mission that was never claimed.