What Happened to the Head of the Copyright Office? Link Drop

A round-up of the most important stories in music right now

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Today’s newsletter is link drop, meaning our monthly series for paid subscribers where I discuss art, news, and stories that have gotten me thinking and laughing in the last 30 days. This month, we talk about the death of lo-fi music, bands banned in the Soviet Union, a music licensing war, and so much more.

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AI News from Inside the Music World

“What Suno And Udio’s AI Licensing Deals With Music Majors Could Mean For Creators Rights” by Virginie Berger (Forbes)

Last month, we talked about how a year after filing a lawsuit against them, the major labels are now negotiating licensing deals with popular AI music platforms Suno and Udio. In this recent piece, Forbes speculated how this will affect smaller labels and artists. Basically, it seems like everyone else will have to follow whatever the major labels decide without having a seat at the table.

“How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene” by Kieran Press-Reynolds (Pitchfork)

Sigh.

In the mid-2010s, when I was in high school, the genre known as lo-fi beats was like a brain cleanse for all my time spent mainlining Minecraft and YouTube. The music was tender, with drums sizzling like kitchen pans and trumpet that zigzagged over the soundscape’s open pasture. Perfectly timed samples leapt out like flickers of a memory. Only a few channels soared back then; the mixes all had whimsical titles and background visuals that simulated the feeling of sitting indoors, cocooned in a duvet, while rain lightly falls outside.

Fast-forward to now, and the scene has putrefied into a wasteland of the percussive undead. The YouTube search results have warped into an apparent AI breeding ground, crammed with hourlong mixes full of soporific dreck. The channels have similar names and cartoonish Kawaii imagery. Even the comments of the videos, which have millions of plays, brim with what look like fake conversations—pseudoymous accounts prattling on about how the music helped them unlock their true potential in life.

“Up to 70% of streams of AI-generated music on Deezer are fraudulent, says report” by Dan Milmo (The Guardian)

I’m not against AI generated music in the abstract. I actually think there could be some cool applications of these tools. But I am concerned that music of this type will completely overrun platforms. If you can generate thousands of songs in minutes, how could AI generated music not eventually drown out everything else? After reading this piece from The Guardian, I have a new concern: fraud.