People Like AI-Generated Music
What should we do about it?
Welcome back to Can’t Get Much Higher, the internet’s favorite place for music and data. If you’re new here, check out some of our popular newsletters from the last few months:
And if you just can’t get enough of my writing, check out my book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music that I wrote as I spent years listening to every number one hit in history. Now, onto some depressing news.
People (Sadly) Enjoy AI-Generated Music
By Chris Dalla Riva
While my wife and I were taking a car to the Naples airport a few weeks back, we sat in mostly silence. No, there was nothing ominous about this silence. We were on our honeymoon and had been traveling for a few weeks. It was a silence of tiredness. But like I said, it was not complete silence. It was mostly silence, the air quietly filled with some music from the radio.
This was a longer car ride, so we heard a lot of music from this radio. And I recognized none of it. Which is kind of shocking. If you stick me in a car for at least an hour and turn on a popular radio station, the odds of me recognizing no songs are vanishingly small, especially if they are being sung in English.
And these songs were. Much to my disappointment, we weren’t listening to local music. We were stuck with this anonymous, mostly terrible music sung in English. What was going on? Had the copious amounts of Italian wine erased my decades of pointless pop music knowledge?
When the next song came on—some uninspired neo-soul—I opened the Shazam app. If my ears were failing me, maybe Shazam’s would do better. Nope. Shazam, too, was stumped.
Given that our driver only spoke Italian, I figured I’d peer around his seat to what station he was tuned to. Maybe I could deduce what was playing that way. That’s when I realized that we weren’t listening to the radio. We were listening to a playlist on YouTube, a playlist filled exclusively with AI-generated music.
How did I know this music was AI-generated? Well, all the hallmark tells were there. The vocals had tinny, lifeless quality that remains pervasive in AI-generated audio, and the cover art was cartoonishly tasteless.
I was kind of disgusted. This isn’t a shock if you read the news. AI-generated music has received a tremendous amount of bad press over the last few years.
Variety: “Jack Antonoff Slams People Who Make AI Music as ‘Godless Whores’: ‘Bad Actors Will Willingly Reveal Themselves Through Slop’”
CNET: “I Only Listened to AI Music for a Week. It Was Terrible, but Not for the Reason You Think”
404Media: “Spotify’s AI Problem Is So Bad Random People Are Stepping In to Track the Slop”
Hollywood Reporter: “The Music Industry Crosses an AI Tipping Point”
NPR: “AI music is flooding streaming platforms. But listeners like it less and less”
Pitchfork: “Bandcamp Announces Ban on AI Music”
But despite the onslaught of bad press, there are growing signs of two things. First, listeners enjoy the stuff. Second, the music industry has no incentive to stop listeners from enjoying it. One recent song can help us understand why.
