I doubt I would turn to AI much for anything other than background noise while focusing on work. In fact, that sounds like a perfect use case for me. "Dear GPT, please compose a four-on-the-floor downtempo progressive track with soft pads, no vocals, and zero goddamned fake vinyl noise that runs for two hours straight..."

Yep. this is why I don't feel like AI used in this manner moves the needle for music: people only actively listen to the best 0.1% of music anyway. The ability to create music that is firmly in the other 99.9%, as this stuff very clearly is, just means that the ocean of mediocrity has more water dumped into it.

To the extent that sounding like everything else is a problem, how is ML generated music not going to have it?

And in general this isn't going to be a qualitative improvement in experience. ML algorithms for recommendation are searching the preference space in much the same way ML generation would, they're just doing it over existing stuff. If you really find 99.9% of existing material boring you're probably going to find a similar order of generated material boring.

Though I suspect 99.9% is hyperbole. My rate of "this is listenable and interesting and I'd like to come back " on Soundcloud is better than 1 in 25 on the worst day and better than 1 in a dozen on most, and the rate is often north of 1 in 6 for curated platforms like Pandora. It's never been easier to discover good new music to listen to with not much in the way of effort.

AI generated art has explored all sorts of weird spaces that few humans have touched.

It's not difficult to make computers create unusual, original, bizarre work. The difficulty comes in making it both original and enjoyable/interesting.

Also consider that AI-generated music is often going to actually be a collaboration between a human and an AI. The human will be acting at least as a curator, because not everything created by AI is going to be pleasing, so some selection and catering to human taste will be required.

Yes, and keep in mind humans are already doing this! It's very common to do tweaking of knobs on a synth/VST while recording and create a 10-20 minute audio file, commonly called a bass jam or mud pie, then select the best bits to use in a song. And of course, people use randomization tools to tweak the knobs for them. IMO use of AI to support this type of workflow is far more promising than going directly to the finished product.

https://sndup.net/njs2/

We may also disagree on how much good stuff there is coming out, but I agree there is a lot of noise.

Tackling the latter would likely exceed the entire effort I spent writing my little hobby game in the first place. I don't think it's even close; it was never a serious consideration. Some of these games I write in a single sitting. I do my best to piece background music together using a chord progression app, descriptions of keys and the notes they contain from Google, and premade drum loops and instrument samples. It comes out worse than if a real musician had made it, but getting a real musician was never really an option.

It's the same for the art. I don't have the time or money to pay an artist. They deserve to be paid fairly for their work just like musicians, but I don't have it and it's just a stupid hobby game. But even stupid games need art and music. So, homemade programmer art and music it is. The availability of better tools to help non-musicians hack something together is greatly appreciated. I haven't tried any AI stuff yet but I will next time.

When it's just me and some apps, I'm writing the background track in an evening after coding the game earlier in the day. If I bring someone else in, now I'm writing contracts (something I'm completely unprepared to do correctly myself, as a non-lawyer). It's too big of a jump for a one-day zero-budget hobby game that isn't very good and only my friends will play. Not when I can quickly cook up something myself using readily available tools.

For a more serious project with a budget, absolutely you find a professional producer, just like you get professional coders and artists. But this isn't that.

I've offered this to like 15 people. Some respond in utter confusion and blow me off. Most don't even respond.

This isn't 2005. The vast majority of people, especially "music artists" are not corresponding over email and are not exactly professionals either.

You are missing the point, most programmers are introverts and absolutely deplore doing cold calls and cold emails.

... this is almost TOO convenient.

- Find me, which is easy, just become an amateur developer yourself and scour the various places I frequent

- Think of and propose in great detail what you want. We will go back and forth over this, over the course of several days/weeks. Bonus points if we don’t speak the same language.

- Sign some form of agreement, really easy, just read this 5 page document and maybe hire a lawyer if you are unsure. All very easy.

- Fork over the cash

- Get deliverables in a few weeks, hopefully.

Now when you compare that with just firing up some website/app and getting on with your work, is that really better? I’m not seeing why you would just go to gmail.com if I could have just made you a very nice, very special email reader.

I have perfected my craft over thousands of hours you know. You should pay us the respect we deserve.

—

Seriously: cranking out tunes through some prompting vs hiring people through shady channels like reddit? Are you serious?

You give an analogy of software. I suppose I feel that art differs from this in some ways. E.g. originality, creativeness.

Reading many of these responses I'm gathering that perhaps I have too strong a notion of what kind of quality of music might be in demand. While the loops on the original article are impressive given their generative nature, I suppose I felt that there may be a demand for something more (Better sound design, more long term structure), but maybe I'm naive.

But thanks for giving me your perspective.

You hit a nerve because software development is also art and highly creative. I have given a significant part of my life - basically my youth - to it and I feel “creatives” think they are somehow special and that their work is fundamentally different and I don’t think it is.

It’s just that we have been cornered earlier than you guys. My skills are now only profitable as boring building blocks in corporate settings because nobody else will pay for proper work. Everybody expects easy access for free instantly to whatever digital service they can get their grubby hands on. If I talk about “craftsmanship” I get laughed out the room. Nobody gives a shit.

Now I’m like, yeah guys, that’s how it feels to have your skills commoditized. Deal with it. That’s kind of childish though.

The problem I feel is that I have an expectation of being able to front the cost of engaging someone to work on a project with me.

Working out navigating a working relationship on a smaller project seems fraught with issues.

I'm rarely inclined to spend dozens of hours listening to soundcloud when I have other things to work on.

I mean yes people create interesting music, perhaps it's a search problem? Knowing someone creates the kinds of music I'm interested in would help. But as someone making things, I'm trying to find someone who I can collaborate with who has an overlapping interest in what I make. Solving for that is not straightforward.

I've had much more luck with graphical art than music.

So yes, even though these systems are fundamentally worse, I can at least "collaborate" with them on producing something. Going from zero to one can be enough.

For music we could present such an image but it would then suggest I'd argue much more possibilities. We could narrow down by genre you would suppose but even then there are too many possibilities: genre's are not as strong categories as are the stylized "era's" of visual art, I would also claim. Moreover, we can "port" a fundamental structure like a melody over all sorts of strains of music. In visual art, any motif is bound to be changed depending on the era and the style we'd put it in, that is, I think that in music, there are elements that are stronger in visual arts and elements that are weaker in music, and vice-versa, with regard to a description we could give in English. It's probably more natural and more possible to ask about what a sort visual representation should be than what a piece of sound should be.

It's interesting how we can generate images I'd argue in stunning faithfulness to some prompts but we don't seem to be very close to the same standard, for some prompts, at generating music.

The guys in Infected Mushroom will have a field day with this stuff. Their whole thing is finding weird ways to create new sounds you never heard before.

Just another instrument, really.

If anyone knows anyone working on that, ping me. :)

When it's 3 am on a Saturday and I'm in the zone on a passion project, I'm not about to spend the rest of the weekend going back and forth with a music guy on Reddit.

I want a music robot that cranks out music on demand and responds to my every whim, and a real human being isn't going to want to fill that role no matter how impoverished they are.

Add to that, if I don't like something, want it tweaked, want something completely redone, or just flat out change my mind about some direction I provided later, I have to go back to them and negotiate a new contract, or find someone else to do the work. The costs add up over time, and there's an additional benefit to immediate feedback (or cost of delayed feedback, as anyone who has worked on a software project that takes forever to compile/check can attest)

I haven't used the music AI tools yet, but having played around with Dall-E a bit I can say that it's pretty enjoyable to be able to give direction, and bound it, then roll the dice and see how things turn out. I definitely feel some ownership of, and pride in, the resulting creation

All things equal, people are happy to support local businesses. The value prop here is far from equal.

the real meme is about how artists have always been grasping for financial respect in every market condition ever, and yet nothing has changed. people were never going to commission you, they were never going to book you. While they do appreciate the content. But for the few that would ever actually try to commission something, they encountered friction after friction after friction and collectively artists have been disinterested in solving. Because they're starving and preoccupied with fighting for scraps and modicums of respect at all.

The world’s has now solved many of these frictions.

The frictions were:

1 hoping they found the right artist to begin with

2 hoping that artist is reliable and has any work ethic or structure in their life

3 not bruising that artists ego in however communication style is preferred

4 dealing with how completely segregated many artists are from contract negotiations and any aspect of the business world, but needing to secure rights properly

5 ego in securing rights properly without the artist overplaying their hand

6 waiting for the commission

7 revisions

8 circle back to 1

9 if you ever get past part 8, you have the issue of whether your new license can be used in an unforeseen way and medium in the future

getting burned in altruistic commissions of living artists is simply over now. all these frictions are solved with the free and immediate way.

> the real meme is about how artists have always been grasping for financial respect in every market condition ever, and yet nothing has changed. people were never going to commission you, they were never going to book you. While they do appreciate the content. But for the few that would ever actually try to commission something, they encountered friction after friction after friction and collectively artists have been disinterested in solving. Because they're starving and preoccupied with fighting for scraps and modicums of respect at all.

For anyone trying to make money off of music, they should have already been aware that most of the effort in making a living is the non-music work. Once your music reaches an acceptable level of quality it's more about finding and managing your fanbase, industry connections, getting booked at the right shows, promotion and marketing, maintaining professionalism, etc. than anything else. Which this particular AI doesn't help with.

An extreme example is Fred Again, who came out of nowhere and is now one of the biggest names in electronic music. His music isn't bad, but it's nothing revolutionary. As it turns out, though, he grew up in one of the richest neighborhoods in England, with Brian Eno as a neighbor, and went to the most expensive private school in London.

So no, AI music generation doesn't change anything here. It's similar to the startup mistake technical people make of focusing on picking the right tech stack instead of focusing on sales and finding product-market fit. The software/music is only about 10% of the challenge of making a successful business/career.

I did want to clarify that I was posting from an angle about those us who need music produced for our products, but were never going to commission it.

I think its important to understand that user story because a lot of artists don’t seem able to empathize with it. People are excited because they were never going to commission artists, and were also turned off from stock music licensing websites too.

Mine are and the same goes for most of the artist I indicate. The point wasn't that they were in it for the money, although many dream of being able to at least one day pay the rent with it (or maybe just groceries).

The rest of your response makes sense (although I think much of it could be said for all of hiring someone to do work). Anyway, thank you for providing your perspective.

As anti-social as it sounds, it's the conclusion that I've reached to after years of working with freelancers/contractors. I've contacted with >50 artists (>300 if "they send me a propose on Upworks" count) and worked with ~10 of them.

Don't get me wrong, I still choose human artists over Stable Diffusion. For now...

It's basically the same as with Midjourney. Before Midjourney I'd have to spend quite some time organizing with some human, explaining what I want, licensing terms, etc only to have to wait a significant amount of time for an image that I may not like.

With MidJourney for just a very small amount of money I can instantly get images that are exactly what I want, iterating extremely quickly. Just the fact that I don't have to deal with another human saves a massive amount of time.

TL;DR

1) Faster

2) Cheaper

3) Often closer to what you want, because you quickly iterate and can get hundreds of variations

I know the people who say that mean well, but it totally overlooks both how much the culture does (as you say) want to provide their art for projects to use it and create value together, and... reality. Shouting at everyone isn't the way to get them onboard, but shout they do, and it's one country in particular that seems to scream the most.

I'm in the UK and I can't walk down the street without tripping over producers, so maybe the way around the angsty people is finding them in person? Or... we just use AI. The robots solving our social issues is probably a thing.

I’m not going the AI-route. It’s frankly easier, more fun and it sounds better to compose the music myself, and if the project takes off and makes a dime, hire a pro to improve things later.

This is an insurmountable benefit. Literally the two most important things when it comes to me buying music at scale.

I made a mobile game a while back and composing and licensing music cost me $30,000 for a free to play game. That was the same as 6-months dev salary (devs in Belarus).

If I can save $30,000 and have zero delay, I’m just going to do that 100% of the time.

The only factor that a real musician can beat on is quality. But let me tell you, with zero marginal cost of production, quality will inevitably be better with generative.

I don’t think it’s going to displace a dedicated composer that gets the medium they are scoring for any time soon. But then that’s not what your comp was initially.

TLDR there are cases where “good enough” is going to be provided by generative music in the medium term. Unlikely for this to be anywhere adjacent to music connoisseurs.