5 ms·

The music industry's A.I. experiments

43 points by mitchbob 3y ago

mitchbob 3y ago
https://archive.ph/Qeide https://archive.ph/Qeide
aussieguy1234 3y ago
Yes, this will benefit record companies. But it will also benefit indie artists, who'll be able to create record label quality tunes with much less effort, just like Stable Diffusion makes it possible for anyone to be an "artist". "In April of 2023, an anonymous producer called ghostwriter used A.I. voice replications of Drake and the Weeknd to create a deepfake duet called “Heart on My Sleeve.”
- lynx23 3y ago
  > who'll be able to create record label quality tunes with much less effort, just like Stable Diffusion I have to ask. Was that cynical sarcasm or did you actually mean what you wrote? Because "record label quality" can go both ways...
- MotherFunker 3y ago
  > But it will also benefit indie artists, who'll be able to create record label quality tunes with much less effort, just like Stable Diffusion makes it possible for anyone to be an "artist". I don't think this is such a glowing endorsement of why people make music and produce music. I think AI will do amazing things to improve what we have and speed up the most frustrating parts of production (noise removal, time alignment, retuning, writing harmony parts to existing melody lines. Simply look at companies like iZotope (like RX or Neutron), Hush Pro etc - I know it sounds a little 'faster horses' but I really think AI needs to remove the 'hard' part and not the 'necessary part' of being a musician/artist/audio engineer. The 'black box' effect of AI that simply 'writes a song' feels less useful and less impactful, that's not what being an 'artist' should be about. I have a sneaking suspicion that major record labels are likely looking at AI for more boring and partially sinister means like DRM tagging/finger-printing, more advanced content-ID etc, heck maybe even virtual artists that they can spin up in-house so they don't have to pay anyone: the perfect 360 artist, geeze.
  - omar_alt 3y ago
    > heck maybe even virtual artists that they can spin up in-house so they don't have to pay anyone: the perfect 360 artist, geeze. Spotify would love to direct the listener just to in house AI music that does not pay royalties to the big labels ;)
    - earthnail 3y ago
      Yes, in parts. However, the majority of money is made with the major acts. Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, etc.. They are the main revenue drivers. Royalty free music improves the bottom line only marginally, which is still substantial for an established company like Spotify where small changes in margins count, but it's not revolutionary to the market.
- earthnail 3y ago
  > But it will also benefit indie artists Definitely not. Music is a market with too much supply relative to the demand. We have too many indie artists that don't make a living; lowering the barrier of entry will create even more indie artists and further worsen the supply/demand imbalance.
thro1 3y ago
No thanks, not enough dimensions. Music about what, when ? Not original - or missing emotional edge ? Check what Jarret had to play about april, think Svensson, with Brüninghaus resonating in your head - no need for artificial 'help'. Some old paintings have more depth and behind than nowadays movies (not minding fake news ilustrations). AI for muzak ? - this may work.
Notatheist 3y ago
An article so self-indulgent you find yourself longing for AI written ones. >Grainge sports an impressive pair of aural appendages that move up and down the sides of his head when he’s talking. I mean come on. 13 paragraphs of this before AI is even mentioned. The part where UMG's CEO is complaining about how "legitimate artists" deserve more revenue from streams was interesting. He's not actually complaining about AI here but about amateur artists getting as much money from streams as "legitimate artists". "Legitimate" meaning fame and a direct tie to UMG, as if those are the measures of a musician's worth.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  AURAL APPENDAGES, four letters: EARS. Is that right?
  - defrost 3y ago
    SCOT or BELL can also work, especially in a cryptic. a thing that is added or attached to something larger or more important. "they treat Scotland as a mere appendage of England" and they never shut up about it. I guess this is a comment about context.
- omar_alt 3y ago
  I was going to say it read like a puff piece about a corporation that makes most of its money from legacy back catalog
Animats 3y ago
Look for desperate, heavily funded lobbying efforts to create new expansions of copyright, or something like it. LLM-based music generators do what musicians do - listen to a lot of stuff and then generate their own music. Most popular music isn't that original. It's mostly about branding.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Yep, between photographers, graphic artists, and musicians I've already seen a massive number of people clamoring for expanded copyright. The wildest thing is, just a couple years ago these people were some of the most vocal against the copyright system, especially those hit by take downs on youtube and other sites.
  - visarga 3y ago
    Creatives forget the tools AI companies will develop for attribution will be applied on their own works as well, and unwanted attributions might pop up. We don't like to admit how much our own creativity is just derivative from a place we forgotten about. But when they make the attribution microscope, it won't be just AIs getting scrutinized. We have plenty of content with attribution to train such a system - books, art, scientific papers, media articles, even social network comments, we know author and date. We can index everything by author and search against the index to find influences. We can train "text -> author" and the use it for "new text -> attributions". But will such a system ultimately enable or block creativity? Even past works stand to be revealed in all their influences. Might be embarrassing. On the other hand generative models will be safe as they can sample around problematic attributions and still complete their tasks. We might end up having to use AI for writing in order to ensure copyright safety. The irony. "I heard you don't like AI in creative fields so from now on you need to use AI to ensure other creative's ideas are not used by mistake, or risk getting sued."
    - freedomben 3y ago
      Fascinating thoughts, wish I had more than one upvote to give. You make a great point, this could end up backfiring spectacularly because it may expose how unoriginal a lot of work really is.
conradfr 3y ago
The article seems to focus on A.I in relation to big artists and pop music (and that one rich CEO) but the first casualties will be the "stock" music market, and then TV shows & movies composers / producers / artists. It's not totally there yet but it's improving. Is it already happening in the stock photos world? > the music industry (....) now appears to be more profitable than ever. Tell that to the music professionals actually producing that music.
- Xeyz0r 3y ago
  > Is it already happening in the stock photos world? I think for stock photos it's still early days. But soon when AI technology becomes so widespread that it's accessible to everyone, people will stop using stock photos. Especially if the level of image generation reaches almost perfection. After all with AI you can create anything without spending time searching for stock photos online
- krapp 3y ago
  >Tell that to the music professionals actually producing that music. I mean, that's how capitalism, and in particular creative industry, has always worked. Value is captured by management, not the people who create it. The celebrities who can afford to negotiate million dollar contracts and retain rights to their work are the exception, not the rule.
- scheeseman486 3y ago
  You're right that it's not there yet, but it's scarily close. I used a generative AI music tool to create ~1 minute snippets of fully mixed music. The tool offers 2 fields: Lyrics and a style prompt. From the initial audio you can generate continuations from them, creating different branches and there's some syntax to specify structure too ([chorus], [verse], [outro], (instrumental) etc). The quality of the compositions is quite good, though the choices it makes can be rather random just like any generative AI but that isn't always unwelcome. From there I picked the best and most interesting bits of audio, split them apart those apart into separate tracks (vocals, guitar, percussion) with another AI. At that point I can bring them into a music sequencer, pull them apart, time stretch, rearrange, anything. You can generate an instrumental with a lead guitar, pull it out and sprinkle it through the entire song. Re-spin vocal deliveries, mix and match them. This is a draft of something I've been working on: https://voca.ro/15yurCvoA9yR https://voca.ro/15yurCvoA9yR The main drawback is the quality, it's like a mediocre cassette tape recording much of the time and splitting it up into tracks causes some generation loss.
111111101101 3y ago
I've been completely blown away by the quality that I'm getting from Suno.ai Not all of it is good of course, maybe only 10%, but that 10% is of a higher quality than anything I could have produced myself. Example: https://app.suno.ai/song/08f43c50-3173-4a27-a0b0-3e8dfb10bded/ https://app.suno.ai/song/08f43c50-3173-4a27-a0b0-3e8dfb10bde...
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  I found it really jarring.
  - danielbln 3y ago
    How about a little datascience rap? https://app.suno.ai/song/fbfe344c-467f-47d2-b1a3-2b70cce651df/ https://app.suno.ai/song/fbfe344c-467f-47d2-b1a3-2b70cce651d...
    - inference-lord 3y ago
      What about it?
      - danielbln 3y ago
        You know what I'm asking. Is it also jarring, is it funny, is it interesting, etc.
        inference-lord 3y ago
        You're asking if I find it jarring ? All the rap music I like is trying to convey some type of deeper message, or make some type of important social commentary, and rap often delivers that in a powerful, fun and beautiful way. It's not just the rhyming that is impressive, it's the culture that goes with it. I get that it's kind of cute, and geeky to have the computer use statistics to produce rhyming sentences, but it just will never hit the same way as 2pac, Eminem, ODB, Marvin Gaye or Gill Scot Heron does, not matter how sophisticated it gets. People can argue all they like about humans "just being LLMs" but humans also bring real life experience, failure, suffering and meaning to their art, which IMO is very important for the art to be interesting and develop connection. Van Gough is like this, his work is interesting to me because I find his life and his story interesting. So I don't find that rapping jarring, but I don't care for it either, it does absolutely nothing for me and I'd never listen it a second time, it just sounds like a rip off or approximation of many artists I've heard before.
mediumsmart 3y ago
Great article. I think that music artists are still needed for live concerts. For creating music to listen to, not anymore. Collecting, searching and paying for music is done, soon.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
nadermx 3y ago
Why should anyone care what the copyrights industry's gripes with technology are? They have time and time again tried to stop innovation by blocking MP3 players[0], DVRs[1], Stream Recorders[2], and now AI, despite copyright existing being to further the arts and sciences, at least in the US. [0] https://cyber.harvard.edu/property00/MP3/rio.html https://cyber.harvard.edu/property00/MP3/rio.html [1] https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/appeals-court-sides-with-dish-in-the-hopper-case https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/appeals-court-sides-with-d... [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/github-reinstates-youtube-dl-after-riaas-abuse-dmca https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/github-reinstates-yout...
- earthnail 3y ago
  It's clear the industry can't stop it. The only thing they can do is shape it into sth that benefits it. Think Napster -> Spotify. Unfortunately, the way they've historically done it is to try and block anyone with force until someone came along who actually figured out a peaceful model for both consumers and producers (again, think Spotify). I don't think the AI game will play out any different. The cool thing is: it's a great place for startups. Big tech will get sued right away before finding product market fit with an AI product, but small startups can survive until they have enough product market fit to fund the defense for the lawsuits.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    You don't deserve the downvotes. But I disagree, I think they can stop it, at least for a long while, because of the enormous expense that it takes to train and run these models (at least for now). Nobody operating in legal gray or black territory could afford to do this. If they use the force of law to basically block legitimate uses, it will slow progress to a snail's pace. Meanwhile they'll use the tech to stay way ahead in the cat and mouse game, so when somebody does generate something they can block it/censor it right away before it's able to spread. That will be good enough for their purposes.
ChatGTP 3y ago
I couldn't get through the start of the article, this guy might be a nice person, but music has gone downhill quite hard in the last 20 years. If this guy is some type of shepherd for the record industry, then I don't have a lot of faith in the future of commercial music. Maybe the article got better later on but wow, that first 1/3...
coretx 3y ago
Funny. A 60+ IPR jihadi trying to copy/claim dated pirate parlance.

43 points by mitchbob 3y ago

https://archive.ph/Qeide https://archive.ph/Qeide

Yes, this will benefit record companies. But it will also benefit indie artists, who'll be able to create record label quality tunes with much less effort, just like Stable Diffusion makes it possible for anyone to be an "artist". "In April of 2023, an anonymous producer called ghostwriter used A.I. voice replications of Drake and the Weeknd to create a deepfake duet called “Heart on My Sleeve.”

lynx23 3y ago
> who'll be able to create record label quality tunes with much less effort, just like Stable Diffusion I have to ask. Was that cynical sarcasm or did you actually mean what you wrote? Because "record label quality" can go both ways...
MotherFunker 3y ago
> But it will also benefit indie artists, who'll be able to create record label quality tunes with much less effort, just like Stable Diffusion makes it possible for anyone to be an "artist". I don't think this is such a glowing endorsement of why people make music and produce music. I think AI will do amazing things to improve what we have and speed up the most frustrating parts of production (noise removal, time alignment, retuning, writing harmony parts to existing melody lines. Simply look at companies like iZotope (like RX or Neutron), Hush Pro etc - I know it sounds a little 'faster horses' but I really think AI needs to remove the 'hard' part and not the 'necessary part' of being a musician/artist/audio engineer. The 'black box' effect of AI that simply 'writes a song' feels less useful and less impactful, that's not what being an 'artist' should be about. I have a sneaking suspicion that major record labels are likely looking at AI for more boring and partially sinister means like DRM tagging/finger-printing, more advanced content-ID etc, heck maybe even virtual artists that they can spin up in-house so they don't have to pay anyone: the perfect 360 artist, geeze.
- omar_alt 3y ago
  > heck maybe even virtual artists that they can spin up in-house so they don't have to pay anyone: the perfect 360 artist, geeze. Spotify would love to direct the listener just to in house AI music that does not pay royalties to the big labels ;)
  - earthnail 3y ago
    Yes, in parts. However, the majority of money is made with the major acts. Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, etc.. They are the main revenue drivers. Royalty free music improves the bottom line only marginally, which is still substantial for an established company like Spotify where small changes in margins count, but it's not revolutionary to the market.
earthnail 3y ago
> But it will also benefit indie artists Definitely not. Music is a market with too much supply relative to the demand. We have too many indie artists that don't make a living; lowering the barrier of entry will create even more indie artists and further worsen the supply/demand imbalance.

thro1 3y ago

No thanks, not enough dimensions. Music about what, when ? Not original - or missing emotional edge ? Check what Jarret had to play about april, think Svensson, with Brüninghaus resonating in your head - no need for artificial 'help'. Some old paintings have more depth and behind than nowadays movies (not minding fake news ilustrations). AI for muzak ? - this may work.

Notatheist 3y ago

An article so self-indulgent you find yourself longing for AI written ones. >Grainge sports an impressive pair of aural appendages that move up and down the sides of his head when he’s talking. I mean come on. 13 paragraphs of this before AI is even mentioned. The part where UMG's CEO is complaining about how "legitimate artists" deserve more revenue from streams was interesting. He's not actually complaining about AI here but about amateur artists getting as much money from streams as "legitimate artists". "Legitimate" meaning fame and a direct tie to UMG, as if those are the measures of a musician's worth.

actionfromafar 3y ago
AURAL APPENDAGES, four letters: EARS. Is that right?
- defrost 3y ago
  SCOT or BELL can also work, especially in a cryptic. a thing that is added or attached to something larger or more important. "they treat Scotland as a mere appendage of England" and they never shut up about it. I guess this is a comment about context.
omar_alt 3y ago
I was going to say it read like a puff piece about a corporation that makes most of its money from legacy back catalog

Animats 3y ago

Look for desperate, heavily funded lobbying efforts to create new expansions of copyright, or something like it. LLM-based music generators do what musicians do - listen to a lot of stuff and then generate their own music. Most popular music isn't that original. It's mostly about branding.

freedomben 3y ago
Yep, between photographers, graphic artists, and musicians I've already seen a massive number of people clamoring for expanded copyright. The wildest thing is, just a couple years ago these people were some of the most vocal against the copyright system, especially those hit by take downs on youtube and other sites.
- visarga 3y ago
  Creatives forget the tools AI companies will develop for attribution will be applied on their own works as well, and unwanted attributions might pop up. We don't like to admit how much our own creativity is just derivative from a place we forgotten about. But when they make the attribution microscope, it won't be just AIs getting scrutinized. We have plenty of content with attribution to train such a system - books, art, scientific papers, media articles, even social network comments, we know author and date. We can index everything by author and search against the index to find influences. We can train "text -> author" and the use it for "new text -> attributions". But will such a system ultimately enable or block creativity? Even past works stand to be revealed in all their influences. Might be embarrassing. On the other hand generative models will be safe as they can sample around problematic attributions and still complete their tasks. We might end up having to use AI for writing in order to ensure copyright safety. The irony. "I heard you don't like AI in creative fields so from now on you need to use AI to ensure other creative's ideas are not used by mistake, or risk getting sued."
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Fascinating thoughts, wish I had more than one upvote to give. You make a great point, this could end up backfiring spectacularly because it may expose how unoriginal a lot of work really is.

conradfr 3y ago

The article seems to focus on A.I in relation to big artists and pop music (and that one rich CEO) but the first casualties will be the "stock" music market, and then TV shows & movies composers / producers / artists. It's not totally there yet but it's improving. Is it already happening in the stock photos world? > the music industry (....) now appears to be more profitable than ever. Tell that to the music professionals actually producing that music.

Xeyz0r 3y ago
> Is it already happening in the stock photos world? I think for stock photos it's still early days. But soon when AI technology becomes so widespread that it's accessible to everyone, people will stop using stock photos. Especially if the level of image generation reaches almost perfection. After all with AI you can create anything without spending time searching for stock photos online
krapp 3y ago
>Tell that to the music professionals actually producing that music. I mean, that's how capitalism, and in particular creative industry, has always worked. Value is captured by management, not the people who create it. The celebrities who can afford to negotiate million dollar contracts and retain rights to their work are the exception, not the rule.
scheeseman486 3y ago
You're right that it's not there yet, but it's scarily close. I used a generative AI music tool to create ~1 minute snippets of fully mixed music. The tool offers 2 fields: Lyrics and a style prompt. From the initial audio you can generate continuations from them, creating different branches and there's some syntax to specify structure too ([chorus], [verse], [outro], (instrumental) etc). The quality of the compositions is quite good, though the choices it makes can be rather random just like any generative AI but that isn't always unwelcome. From there I picked the best and most interesting bits of audio, split them apart those apart into separate tracks (vocals, guitar, percussion) with another AI. At that point I can bring them into a music sequencer, pull them apart, time stretch, rearrange, anything. You can generate an instrumental with a lead guitar, pull it out and sprinkle it through the entire song. Re-spin vocal deliveries, mix and match them. This is a draft of something I've been working on: https://voca.ro/15yurCvoA9yR https://voca.ro/15yurCvoA9yR The main drawback is the quality, it's like a mediocre cassette tape recording much of the time and splitting it up into tracks causes some generation loss.

111111101101 3y ago

I've been completely blown away by the quality that I'm getting from Suno.ai Not all of it is good of course, maybe only 10%, but that 10% is of a higher quality than anything I could have produced myself. Example: https://app.suno.ai/song/08f43c50-3173-4a27-a0b0-3e8dfb10bded/ https://app.suno.ai/song/08f43c50-3173-4a27-a0b0-3e8dfb10bde...

ChatGTP 3y ago
I found it really jarring.
- danielbln 3y ago
  How about a little datascience rap? https://app.suno.ai/song/fbfe344c-467f-47d2-b1a3-2b70cce651df/ https://app.suno.ai/song/fbfe344c-467f-47d2-b1a3-2b70cce651d...
  - inference-lord 3y ago
    What about it?
    - danielbln 3y ago
      You know what I'm asking. Is it also jarring, is it funny, is it interesting, etc.
      - inference-lord 3y ago
        You're asking if I find it jarring ? All the rap music I like is trying to convey some type of deeper message, or make some type of important social commentary, and rap often delivers that in a powerful, fun and beautiful way. It's not just the rhyming that is impressive, it's the culture that goes with it. I get that it's kind of cute, and geeky to have the computer use statistics to produce rhyming sentences, but it just will never hit the same way as 2pac, Eminem, ODB, Marvin Gaye or Gill Scot Heron does, not matter how sophisticated it gets. People can argue all they like about humans "just being LLMs" but humans also bring real life experience, failure, suffering and meaning to their art, which IMO is very important for the art to be interesting and develop connection. Van Gough is like this, his work is interesting to me because I find his life and his story interesting. So I don't find that rapping jarring, but I don't care for it either, it does absolutely nothing for me and I'd never listen it a second time, it just sounds like a rip off or approximation of many artists I've heard before.

mediumsmart 3y ago

Great article. I think that music artists are still needed for live concerts. For creating music to listen to, not anymore. Collecting, searching and paying for music is done, soon.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

nadermx 3y ago

Why should anyone care what the copyrights industry's gripes with technology are? They have time and time again tried to stop innovation by blocking MP3 players[0], DVRs[1], Stream Recorders[2], and now AI, despite copyright existing being to further the arts and sciences, at least in the US. [0] https://cyber.harvard.edu/property00/MP3/rio.html https://cyber.harvard.edu/property00/MP3/rio.html [1] https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/appeals-court-sides-with-dish-in-the-hopper-case https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/appeals-court-sides-with-d... [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/github-reinstates-youtube-dl-after-riaas-abuse-dmca https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/github-reinstates-yout...

earthnail 3y ago
It's clear the industry can't stop it. The only thing they can do is shape it into sth that benefits it. Think Napster -> Spotify. Unfortunately, the way they've historically done it is to try and block anyone with force until someone came along who actually figured out a peaceful model for both consumers and producers (again, think Spotify). I don't think the AI game will play out any different. The cool thing is: it's a great place for startups. Big tech will get sued right away before finding product market fit with an AI product, but small startups can survive until they have enough product market fit to fund the defense for the lawsuits.
- freedomben 3y ago
  You don't deserve the downvotes. But I disagree, I think they can stop it, at least for a long while, because of the enormous expense that it takes to train and run these models (at least for now). Nobody operating in legal gray or black territory could afford to do this. If they use the force of law to basically block legitimate uses, it will slow progress to a snail's pace. Meanwhile they'll use the tech to stay way ahead in the cat and mouse game, so when somebody does generate something they can block it/censor it right away before it's able to spread. That will be good enough for their purposes.

ChatGTP 3y ago

I couldn't get through the start of the article, this guy might be a nice person, but music has gone downhill quite hard in the last 20 years. If this guy is some type of shepherd for the record industry, then I don't have a lot of faith in the future of commercial music. Maybe the article got better later on but wow, that first 1/3...

coretx 3y ago

Funny. A 60+ IPR jihadi trying to copy/claim dated pirate parlance.