Unfortunate Developments in Music

Why Does The AI Get To Do Music?

 Absurdly, there are AI platforms that basically do art and music and your homework for you. You type in some prompts and out pops the product of a million things mangled and distilled for your liking. It's created a weird world where you might enjoy your creative pursuits but your output is insignificant next to the power of AI to just endlessly create stuff. Some of it is okay, some of it is interesting, some of it is awful and some of it is disturbing. AI music, is firmly in the disturbing camp

There's already a great quote out there saying we want AI to do the washing and laundry so that we can do the music and art; not for the AI to do the creative stuff we enjoy and in the process tug us out of our domain. It bears repeating if for no other reason that we should not lose perspective on how exactly it is that AI has come to do these creative pursuits. Pertaining to music AIs, the simple answer is that the AI Tech stole the music in order to teach their algorithms what recorded music was, and how these genres and subgenera were meant to sound. Now the labels are suing them and rightfully so. Looked at from the label's point of view, the AI Tech people have basically sampled everything and are using it to create infinite numbers of remixes. That's not going to fly. 

We'll see how all that goes. If the labels win, well, that's how the music industry's always been and if a bunch of techno bros thought they were going to bust copyright this way, they had another thin coming. If the AI Tech Bros win, I think that is going to be the final nail in the music industry. It's hard to imagine because right now nobody is exactly saying their favourite music is AI music - but you just wait and see. If the AI Tech bros win, then it's going to be a free for all - and as usual the Indie musician will lose out. 

Spotify Is Probably Going Broke

In the last year, Spotify decided it would not pay out to the small end of town. If an artist doesn't have regular listeners, they won't get paid for plays on their songs on Spotify. They set a threshold and it's 100 listens from at least 500 unique listeners. The reason they cited for doing this was to make it easier to do the accounts. It's been the talk of the virtual town square for many months now. The new regimen came into effect in April. And just like that, the small indie artists and all the experimental types were cut out.  

It's understandable on one level because they would save a lot of money if they didn't have to figure out royalties for all the minnows of the music world. At the same time, not paying people for their music being played is pretty indefensible from a copyright point of view. 

The other thing that's surfaced recently is that Spotify itself makes and publishes its own AI music. They're short, but they fill airtime. Increasingly, they are put out under fake IDs pretending to be indie artists, and in turn, it earns a portion of the money pool back to Spotify. And that makes you wonder, if Spotify wants to have its hand in the till to draw some of that cashflow into its own coffers, they must be doing it hard. it's one thing to steal from defenceless indie artists who can organise and sue Spotify, but it's another thing to be siphoning off money from the pool of money that's supposed to be share with the labels and their artists.

All this leads me to think that Spotify ain't making real coin at all. And if it keeps going this way, it's going to keel over and die when nobody invests in this Ponzi scheme anymore. 

Jimi Was Broke

There was an article doing the rounds this week about how Pete Townshend ran into Jimi Hendrix just before he died. When asked how he was doing, Jimi replied he was broke. Townshend then went on to tell the story of how he too was shortchanged by Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp. Kit Lambert stole the money from The Who's earnings and bought a place in Venice. 

It's kind of strange because Jimi Hendrix also built Electric Ladyland Studios, so it seems a bit odd that he would say he was broke. He had a world class recording studio but he was also broke. Go figure. 

The issue of money and music seems to be eternal. Mozart didn't exactly become rich writing 41 symphonies and all those crowd pleasing operas.  Bach and Beethoven didn't exactly become millionaires on the back of their music even though together with Mozart, they're the most famous and influential German composers. I don't think Chopin died wealthy, nor did Schumann. Liszt and Brahms died wealthy but they seem the exception. Even in the classical world, the baseline is you don't make a whole lot of money doing music. And that's okay. 

The vaunted connection between fame and fortune are not that well entwined when it comes to music. The fact that Spotify severs that connection for the average indie musician is kind of mean - but maybe that's just what people should expect from a tech enterprise? You weren't making a gajillion bucks on Spotify anyway. We should ask ourselves what Jimi would have said about all this.