4 ms·

This got me mulling over what would happen if AI became better at writing pop songs than humans. So let's game it out... Most of the pop hits of the last 30 y

by RajT88 3y ago

This got me mulling over what would happen if AI became better at writing pop songs than humans. So let's game it out... Most of the pop hits of the last 30 years come from a small handful of songsmiths. Most pop stars already don't really write their own songs, they are more the 'Figurehead' of the whole experience. Their overall look and stage presence are the major selling point (some of them can't really sing without autotune, looking at you Britney). So a handful of songwriters will be out of work, and nothing much will change. Mayyybe a few artists will sign away their likeness and voice to churn out album after album, hoping the public is none-the-wiser. Pop music may become still more homogenous, since part of the huge pop hits is the unexpected twist worked in that makes it "pop". It'll be kind of a reverse Hatsune Miku, but things won't change that much. I think the appetite for a completely synthetic pop star is not there in the West - they'll have to be tricked into it. Pop stars are already arguably artificial in some form.

cortesoft 3y ago
> So a handful of songwriters will be out of work, and nothing much will change. It would be more than that, though, if AI truly becomes as good at writing pop songs as that handful of songsmiths. Currently, those songsmiths are the limiting factor for pop stars. As you said, there aren't many, and they can only write so many songs per year. Because of this, choosing which pop stars get to sing the songs they write is a big factor in determining who becomes successful. If suddenly AI can pump out as many pop hits as we like, that limiting factor goes away and the whole market changes.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  >Currently, those songsmiths are the limiting factor for pop stars. Anything to support that conjecture? Pop songs take off because they're marketed properly AFAICT. Writers choose from many songs, all good, producers largely decide which songs and groups will make it. Songs can be around for years before being given to a star to make into a hit. Of course marketing now can be 'going viral', and that can be various degrees of organic and paid promotion.
  - porkbeer 3y ago
    All the marketing and production wont give the human impact of a well written song.
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      Yes, but the conjecture was that well-written songs are rare. Well enough written songs to be best-selling pop songs seem abundant?
deleted 3y ago
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lacrimacida 3y ago
Yeah, interesting to see how it plays out but my gut feeling is that it’ll get from bad to worse. Hope I couldn’t be more wrong and this will shake up the industry but with generated music and cloned voices I’m almost inclined to not even compare them. It’s a new thing altogether.
deleted 3y ago
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ethbr1 3y ago
I'd take a step back, and ask what makes art (music, visual, etc) valuable. To that, I'd respond "scarcity." It's hard to imagine highly valued art (either culturally or monetarily) without scarcity. Consequently, I expect the next few decades will see similar progressions to the past, when technology encroached on scarcity (e.g. painting after the photograph, live performance after consumer video/music playback). Scarcity will reestablish itself in whatever guise remains technically feasible, and again become valued. In the case of LLMs and diffusion, I expect it will be creating things that are so novel they could not have come from AI. Hopefully skillful, deep parody and the absurd will reassert themselves, as post-JS-Daily-Show I think that's been missing in culture. But it sure as shit isn't generic pop music, which will be the first thing to be churned out of humanless hit factories and flood the market.
- mattnewton 3y ago
  I think something can be valuable and abundant, what you really mean is what makes the value capturable. If truly good songs were cheap to create then people making good songs won't be able to charge as much as they do, but consumers will arguable experience more value through an abundance of good songs.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    >consumers will arguable experience more value through an abundance of good songs.// It is people's shared experiences of a song that makes a song most valuable (it's not the only value, of course). Having more songs means less shared experiences, more is less. Imagine going to a club where the DJ can play any of a million songs but only one person knows that song; compared to them playing a setlist of floor-filling bangers ...
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      The herd vs merit distinction is interesting, and I think they both have value. Maybe differently to different people, but non-zero. Imagine a handful of objectively "good" songs. Play them for a crowd where nobody knows them. Or, in a more humorous example, imagine the Beatles played tracks only from their second album, while touring for their first album. Would audiences be disappointed? I struggle to imagine an overly negative reaction. People love hearing songs they love, but they also fell in love with those songs for a reason. Well executed music is well-executed music.
IKantRead 3y ago
I think what you're describing is basically something I've pointed out in different contexts: for many areas concerned with AI, content is already effectively written by "AI", it's just humans following the algorithms rather than fully automated. - content marketting is already AI writing, it's just humans churning through the SEO optimized algorithms. - Mass digital stock photograph is AI generated "art". People that do that for a living have an exact formula for reproducing images that will sell en masse. - As you point out, a good chunk of generic pop music is churned out by musicians following algorithms behind the scenes and then manufactured to look like the work of a public performer. The parts of our content work threatened by AI are already cold, sterile, and machine generated.
- RajT88 3y ago
  Phrased a different way, but yes, we're saying the same thing. The AI revolution is actually just the next increment in automation of all these things.
Tijdreiziger 3y ago
> It'll be kind of a reverse Hatsune Miku, but things won't change that much. I don’t really agree with this for two reasons: 1. It is understood that vocal synths (e.g. Hatsune Miku) are not humans and that humans are not vocal synths. There are also humans covering songs originally sang by synths and vice versa, but everybody still understands what’s going on. (Heck, there are even synths based on the voice of real human singers, e.g. KAFU; it’s still understood that the singer and synth aren’t the same thing.) 2. Vocal synths are not fully AI and require a significant amount of ‘tuning’ to sound good (with various producers generally having their own ‘sound’ due to differences in tuning style). They are also just a voice, they don’t generate any instrumentals. Therefore, a human-produced song sang by a vocal synth is still a long way off from a fully AI-generated song.
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
Why do you think there will still be pop-stars? I'll just be able to generate music I like. Quite possibly I'll be able to provide AI generated avatars to help my meat brain associate menu options (with images) with a particular music. Possibly there will be curated such avatar/music generators, and more than likely, many of them will be naked. Hatsune Miku is a red herring I think. I expect we'll see more Milli Vanillis too.
- RajT88 3y ago
  You've said a lot of the things I was getting at. > Hatsune Miku is a red herring I think. I don't think we'll get more of these. > I expect we'll see more Milli Vanillis too. Completely agree, and definitely what I was saying. > Possibly there will be curated such avatar/music generators, and more than likely, many of them will be naked. I would make the case that pop musicians would be less popular if they freely got naked. The teasing of maybe being able to see a bit of rarified (and real) flesh is definitely a big part of the equation, which you're not likely to be able to reproduce with what people think is an AI.
  - lowbloodsugar 3y ago
    >I would make the case that pop musicians would be less popular if they freely got naked. If the system knows you are a prude, then they won't get naked for you. They'll get very good at learning "how much is too much" for any given person, for any given "what" (skin, private messages, flirting, etc). Human pop stars can't have relationships with every fan. AI pop stars can.
    - RajT88 3y ago
      > Human pop stars can't have relationships with every fan. AI pop stars can. I don't know if it will go that way, to be honest. But certainly, the film Her does show us what that might end up looking like. (Even though she was just a disembodied voice)

by RajT88 3y ago

cortesoft 3y ago

> So a handful of songwriters will be out of work, and nothing much will change. It would be more than that, though, if AI truly becomes as good at writing pop songs as that handful of songsmiths. Currently, those songsmiths are the limiting factor for pop stars. As you said, there aren't many, and they can only write so many songs per year. Because of this, choosing which pop stars get to sing the songs they write is a big factor in determining who becomes successful. If suddenly AI can pump out as many pop hits as we like, that limiting factor goes away and the whole market changes.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
>Currently, those songsmiths are the limiting factor for pop stars. Anything to support that conjecture? Pop songs take off because they're marketed properly AFAICT. Writers choose from many songs, all good, producers largely decide which songs and groups will make it. Songs can be around for years before being given to a star to make into a hit. Of course marketing now can be 'going viral', and that can be various degrees of organic and paid promotion.
- porkbeer 3y ago
  All the marketing and production wont give the human impact of a well written song.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Yes, but the conjecture was that well-written songs are rare. Well enough written songs to be best-selling pop songs seem abundant?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lacrimacida 3y ago

Yeah, interesting to see how it plays out but my gut feeling is that it’ll get from bad to worse. Hope I couldn’t be more wrong and this will shake up the industry but with generated music and cloned voices I’m almost inclined to not even compare them. It’s a new thing altogether.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ethbr1 3y ago

I'd take a step back, and ask what makes art (music, visual, etc) valuable. To that, I'd respond "scarcity." It's hard to imagine highly valued art (either culturally or monetarily) without scarcity. Consequently, I expect the next few decades will see similar progressions to the past, when technology encroached on scarcity (e.g. painting after the photograph, live performance after consumer video/music playback). Scarcity will reestablish itself in whatever guise remains technically feasible, and again become valued. In the case of LLMs and diffusion, I expect it will be creating things that are so novel they could not have come from AI. Hopefully skillful, deep parody and the absurd will reassert themselves, as post-JS-Daily-Show I think that's been missing in culture. But it sure as shit isn't generic pop music, which will be the first thing to be churned out of humanless hit factories and flood the market.

mattnewton 3y ago
I think something can be valuable and abundant, what you really mean is what makes the value capturable. If truly good songs were cheap to create then people making good songs won't be able to charge as much as they do, but consumers will arguable experience more value through an abundance of good songs.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  >consumers will arguable experience more value through an abundance of good songs.// It is people's shared experiences of a song that makes a song most valuable (it's not the only value, of course). Having more songs means less shared experiences, more is less. Imagine going to a club where the DJ can play any of a million songs but only one person knows that song; compared to them playing a setlist of floor-filling bangers ...
  - ethbr1 3y ago
    The herd vs merit distinction is interesting, and I think they both have value. Maybe differently to different people, but non-zero. Imagine a handful of objectively "good" songs. Play them for a crowd where nobody knows them. Or, in a more humorous example, imagine the Beatles played tracks only from their second album, while touring for their first album. Would audiences be disappointed? I struggle to imagine an overly negative reaction. People love hearing songs they love, but they also fell in love with those songs for a reason. Well executed music is well-executed music.

IKantRead 3y ago

I think what you're describing is basically something I've pointed out in different contexts: for many areas concerned with AI, content is already effectively written by "AI", it's just humans following the algorithms rather than fully automated. - content marketting is already AI writing, it's just humans churning through the SEO optimized algorithms. - Mass digital stock photograph is AI generated "art". People that do that for a living have an exact formula for reproducing images that will sell en masse. - As you point out, a good chunk of generic pop music is churned out by musicians following algorithms behind the scenes and then manufactured to look like the work of a public performer. The parts of our content work threatened by AI are already cold, sterile, and machine generated.

RajT88 3y ago
Phrased a different way, but yes, we're saying the same thing. The AI revolution is actually just the next increment in automation of all these things.

Tijdreiziger 3y ago

> It'll be kind of a reverse Hatsune Miku, but things won't change that much. I don’t really agree with this for two reasons: 1. It is understood that vocal synths (e.g. Hatsune Miku) are not humans and that humans are not vocal synths. There are also humans covering songs originally sang by synths and vice versa, but everybody still understands what’s going on. (Heck, there are even synths based on the voice of real human singers, e.g. KAFU; it’s still understood that the singer and synth aren’t the same thing.) 2. Vocal synths are not fully AI and require a significant amount of ‘tuning’ to sound good (with various producers generally having their own ‘sound’ due to differences in tuning style). They are also just a voice, they don’t generate any instrumentals. Therefore, a human-produced song sang by a vocal synth is still a long way off from a fully AI-generated song.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

Why do you think there will still be pop-stars? I'll just be able to generate music I like. Quite possibly I'll be able to provide AI generated avatars to help my meat brain associate menu options (with images) with a particular music. Possibly there will be curated such avatar/music generators, and more than likely, many of them will be naked. Hatsune Miku is a red herring I think. I expect we'll see more Milli Vanillis too.

RajT88 3y ago
You've said a lot of the things I was getting at. > Hatsune Miku is a red herring I think. I don't think we'll get more of these. > I expect we'll see more Milli Vanillis too. Completely agree, and definitely what I was saying. > Possibly there will be curated such avatar/music generators, and more than likely, many of them will be naked. I would make the case that pop musicians would be less popular if they freely got naked. The teasing of maybe being able to see a bit of rarified (and real) flesh is definitely a big part of the equation, which you're not likely to be able to reproduce with what people think is an AI.
- lowbloodsugar 3y ago
  >I would make the case that pop musicians would be less popular if they freely got naked. If the system knows you are a prude, then they won't get naked for you. They'll get very good at learning "how much is too much" for any given person, for any given "what" (skin, private messages, flirting, etc). Human pop stars can't have relationships with every fan. AI pop stars can.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    > Human pop stars can't have relationships with every fan. AI pop stars can. I don't know if it will go that way, to be honest. But certainly, the film Her does show us what that might end up looking like. (Even though she was just a disembodied voice)