Will Dead Artists Begin Releasing New Music with AI? Mailbag

This month we dive into questions about love songs, autotune, Teddy Swims, and so much more.

We’re back with another mailbag edition of Can’t Get Much Higher, or the newsletter where I answer reader questions. This month, we’ve got 2 questions for everyone and 5 more for paid subscribers.

Should you have a question for the next edition, you can submit it using the button below. If your question is selected, you get a free premium subscription to this newsletter for a month. Premium subscribers get access to our entire archive of posts, biweekly interviews, music industry link roundups, and priority when submitting questions.

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Do you think music sounded better (or was more honest) before autotune was normalized? I love hearing each individual instrument on a track from the 60s/70s. - Abby

As a guitar player, I also love being able to discern different instruments in a recording. Today, many pop hits feel like an anonymous amalgam of synths. Even so, I don’t think music “sounds better” or is “more honest” when it is made without autotune. Let me explain.

First, I’m very skeptical of the idea of musical honesty. It’s not that I don’t believe that some compositions are more honest than others, it’s that I think we apply our standards unevenly. I outlined this in a piece last year called “Recorded Music is a Hoax.” The fact that recording allows multiple takes and manipulation naturally brings us further from the “honesty” of a performance. A critic in The New York Times complained about this in 1959:

A small, flat voice can be souped up by emphasizing the low frequencies and piping the result through an echo chamber. A slight speeding up of the recording tape can bring a brighter, happier sound to a naturally drab singer or clean the weariness out of a tired voice. Wrong notes can be snipped out of the tape and replaced by notes from other parts of the tape.

Autotune is just one piece of technology in a long line that allows us to manipulate recordings. I do understand why it makes people angry. Something about manipulating the human voice just doesn’t feel right. But I don’t think most people would mind occasional vocal pitch correction if we didn’t demand perfection from nearly every other part of the recording process.

When you listen to The Rolling Stones, you are listening to messy recordings. Tempos speed up and slow down. Guitars are slightly out of tune. Not everything is exactly in time. But these small mistakes meld together in a very human way. On many contemporary recordings, producers fix every possible rhythm and tuning issue. The problem is that if you do that, then any slightly vocal flub will sound glaringly off.

As an example, imagine if a song by The Rolling Stones stayed perfectly in rhythm at one particular tempo the whole time. Mick Jagger’s wild vocal style would sound ridiculous over that. If we want fewer recordings to use pitch correction, we need to be more accepting of “errors” throughout the rest of the recording process.

In the history of pop music, have there been more hit songs written about falling in love or going through a breakup? - Stephen

Last year, The Pudding released what I think is the canonical piece on this topic. They tracked love songs in all their shapes and sizes from 1958 through today. What they found is that love song serenades (e.g., “Everybody Loves Somebody” by Dean Martin) used to be much more popular, accounting for 23% of all songs on the Hot 100. Now, that percentage has fallen to 12%. At the same time, songs about heartache (e.g., “Better Now” by Post Malone) have become the most popular love song.

The Pudding’s love song breakdown

Will AI eventually progress to the point where the estates of deceased artists will be able to release new material? - John