There's two fallacies I think you've touched on here, one is that there is an "objectively best" music. Music is so tightly coupled to cultural movements, very subjective, and extremely broad in scope, it just can't be the case.

The second I feel is that people would still be interested in AI music in a meaningful way. I think AI music has a following now because it's interesting and novel, and that gives it a story, but once it's mainstream, that story is boring and people will go back to seeking real culturally relevant music.

Sure the music on TikTok/IG and friends could be generated, but I am not sure I care too much. Those platforms are almost entirely vapid, void of authenticity already, the music being fake too doesn't detract that much.

> one is that there is an "objectively best" music.

Case in point, I enjoy some shit. No way AI will replace lo-fi recorded-in-underground-bunker limited-cassette-tape-release atmospheric black metal / noise.

I mean it might, but here's a take from a different angle: art is not just the end result, it's the process and the story behind it. Nobody objectively gives a shit about a selfie from the early 1500's, but because of its provenance the Mona Lisa is considered one of the most valuable pieces of art out there. Nobody gives a shit about a database row with an ID, timestamp, user ID and the text "just setting up my twttr", but because it's the first tweet and it's put on a trading platform and it might appreciate in value, someone spent $2.5M on it.

You slag of TikTok because every generation will slag off whatever the following generation(s) do, that's normal. But the generation following you see that differently, and in two decades they will still reference some of the more iconic clips they've seen. I mean I do it with really bad movie voiceovers from nearly 20 years ago, as well as terrible porn intros. It's part of culture.

Anyway, there will be a place for AI generated anything alongside the handcrafted stuff. Like how there is still a market for handcrafted goods alongside the mass producing machines. Or hand-drawn art in the age of digital. Or physical valuables in the age of electronic money and cryptocurrencies.

"Process is art"

I am old enough to remember when people were afraid that Muzak would take over.

It did not.

I was at a Chinese restaurant, around a year and a half ago, and realized that the music they played was a sort of “ersatz” music. It was familiar tunes, like Scarborough Fair, or Hotel California, slightly modified, and strung together. Vocals were basically wordless humming.

There is an entire industry, based on musicians, providing “stock music,” and it’s been around for a long time. Sort of a musical equivalent of Shutterstock. Some of this music is quite good. Most is fairly boring.

Music is way too connected to our emotions to be reliably synthesized. AI would need to advance to be able to produce emotions and creativity, before it would threaten the music industry.

Also, there’s always the “tabloid” aspect of the industry. There are artists that may be fairly unremarkable musicians, but generate a lot of press coverage. Unless the world of Questionable Content becomes real, I can’t see any Star headlines of AIs beating up paparazzi.

>I am old enough to remember when people were afraid that Muzak would take over.

In the 1980s musicians unions wanted to kill the Fairlight CMI synthesizer and it's progeny

https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1985/7/29/a-source-of-di...

That was revolutionary, at the time. I remember when the guitarist for our band got a Korg sampler. It was amazing.

I would argue that a lot of this "stock music" is just a continuation of elevator music which has been around for a very long time. There's musicians (often very good ones) who essentially made their whole career doing this music, look up James Last for example.

Exactly. In fact, there was a Romanian electronic musician that I used to like, and his catalog suddenly disappeared.

When I contacted him, to find out what happened, he informed me that all his music was now only available through a stock agency.

Can't blame him, but I was a bit sad.

It's called library music. It's much used in ads, trailers, and corporate productions. Ad agencies sometimes also commission music.

Ad use pays incredibly well, because unlike streaming you get a non-trivial fee every time it airs on TV/radio/cinema.

Some musicians make very successful careers doing this.

Always seemed like the modern analogue to the older practice of artists only being able to make a living if they could secure patronage. The days of (semi) direct payment for physical copies of recorded media are starting to seem like an aberration rather than the rule.

> I think AI music has a following now because it's interesting and novel, and that gives it a story, but once it's mainstream, that story is boring

I'd have agreed 10 years ago, but I swear every time someone drives past with their stereo bumping, it's "robot music" (as I smart-assedly refer to heavily quantized/autotuned vocals). I guess it will probably still die out eventually, but that fad has been a lot longer-lived than I'd expected.

I don't think we need "objectively best" here—merely "subjectively best". And because each person could have their own AI DJ trained on an arbitrarily rich set of preferences and experiences from their one-person audience, we should expect that AI DJ to be subjectively the best for their respective human.

Obviously, this overlooks the shared experience element of music, but that's not so relevant in the case of online music we consume solo.

Maybe we call them dopamine melodies instead of music to underscore the effect rather than the art. The fact that most synthetic music today is hot garbage doesn’t convince me that we couldn’t connect with it in a meaningful way in the future. After all, things like GPT3 are more like talking to a hive of humans than a single alien.

I'm convinced tons of this stuff already exists as things like youtube channels of 'Best Chill Piano Ambient'. I think it's become impossible to tell neural-net generated stuff from the output of humans trying hard to define a functional genre, especially one that's effectively 'background' rather than didactic or challenging.

Parent meant best in the sense of Billboard Hot 100.

Saying people will not be interested in AI music is like saying people will not be interested in movies with CGI.

That's not even a close comparison. Humans make CGI, it's still directed and created by humans. The real comparison would be seeing if people would accept that movies aren't written and directed by humans anymore.

Music outside of pop gains popularity through grass roots popularity contests essentially. Then in Top 40 people care way more about the personalities than the music, you could probably sneak some AI music in there but you would still need the singer to sing.

Music is very often a cult of personality thing, even outside of pop. In those arenas authenticity is really important, someone not even making their music would be outed pretty quick.

Some examples of what I mean: People go to clubs to hear DJs play, because they perceive the DJ to be generating the atmosphere. You couldn't get people to pay a cover charge to see that DJ's mix play without them present, even though it's technically very easy and would be exactly the same music.

Similarly, you can't get people to go to a concert of a recording of a band, that would be lame. People want the band.

Yes, a lot of people don't get this. Pop is as much about fashion and branding as sound, and an AI would need a virtual personality to get anywhere with that.

Which will likely happen within 10 years or so. Hatsune Miku is already a thing, and a few upgrades from now she'll probably appear to be running her own post-TikTok account.

J- and K-pop boy/girl bands are already run like this. The individual artists are more or less interchangeable and can be dropped at any time if they lose their looks or appeal. They don't get much/any creative freedom, and the performances are all externally choreographed.

It wouldn't take much to create a virtual version. Give it some virtual sass and you have a tame monster.

It actually wouldn't be the same music. DJs typically adapt their set to how the crowd reacts.

See e.g. https://www.digitaldjtips.com/2011/05/dj-getting-people-to-d...

William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) features a Jamaican space tug where the "righteous dub" played within is automatically generated by remixing a vast library of existing music. I was fascinated by the concept when I first read about it as a budding DJ, and it's kind of exciting to see it come to fruition, even if the single tune this particular AI seems to play is pretty insipid.

Just started reading Neuromancer. Glad to know this.

Ah man, now you can see what the past ~37 years of sci-fi films and video games have been making little nods and allusions to all this time :)

This sounds like an application I want to play with. Given a playlist, generate an endless tune based on remixes of all the tracks.

That is something that would be of interest to those working with splitting audio into 'stems', drums, bass, voice, music. Algorithm DJay can do a version of that 'on the fly'. Serato Studio is a kind of remix 'on the fly', but there are many others. Both have automix settings that work very well, especially if you line up similarly grouped tracks.

Yeah, I've not used the "auto" features to that extent, but I've DJ'ed at a few events and festivals just for fun and it's super convenient to have software that has analyzed my music library for BPM and key. I still get to play whatever I want to play, but if I'm drawing a blank or just looking for inspiration, I can sort by all tracks within "n" BPM of the current track and in the same/compatible key.

Then if I really want to play something that wouldn't normally fit with an easy transition, I can always adjust they key or tempo on the fly. There are limits before it starts to sound weird, but that can also be a neat way to mess with a song. Add a riff or a phrase from one song into the current one, but only because I'm able to halve the speed or chop up the time signature to match.

And that's just me as a barely fluent hobbyist. Experienced DJs can do some great stuff. Even a non-"mixing" DJ like a radio DJ can string together songs based on thematic connections, sneaky relations between artist or lyric or even the conditions in the room. Those can be a lot of fun and would be a lot harder to automate than simple beat matching.

I was also very hyped at first when I saw this... But it seems like there are only 14 distinct videos available which are loaded from youtube: https://www.thismusicvideodoesnotexist.com/assets/urls.json

I encourage you to read up on "Doctoring the Tardis" and "The Manual", as well as "I wanna 1-2-1 with you".

These were productions from the artists behind the KLF to expose how formulaic chart hits were. So I would not be surprised if we see AI produce top 40 hits sometime in the future. However, I would be very surprised if AI could replace the vast majority of music that is out there.

How do you know we're not already at that tipping point, if not there than in other forms of influencer 'culture'?

Of course you're right, but I'll tell you what next.

Redefine 'dominate'. All that has happened is we've shown mass media, mass popularity, is better suited to the unreal. Humans need not apply here.

'Mass' anything, then gets less interesting as it is self-evidently a dead-end. And not 'everybody', but significant numbers of people, pursue something else, perhaps things that are unlikeable in an interesting way. The differences will always be less 'addictive' than the 'mass' stuff, but will overperform in other, definable ways.

As someone who has deleted Twitter and Facebook I think I'm correct in this notion that the most addictive, most 'mass' media sources are not 'good' in any normal human sense other than manipulation of that very instinct in all its forms…

I for one welcome our new AI influencer overlords!

There is more to experience than "likability".

If I go to a techno club, I would soooo love to see what an AI can do to make me move my feet more.

But if I listen to some mellow song with lyrics maybe I want to feel the touch of a human artist and his emotions.

I would also love to listen to AI generated music with lyrics, but it would generate different emotions (not worse, just different).

AI generated art will just open another type of experiences, but it will never replace human art.

Computers were DJing in 2005:

https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2005/HPL-2005-88.html

In fact, before that - i saw a talk on this while i was a student, and i finished university in 2003, i think.

The guy who did this work went on to get the computer to do production, but i don't know how that panned out.

When it gets good I do think this will decimate the industry that cranks out generic electronic music for YouTube videos. (Does that count as an industry?) That aspect is not so bad perhaps.

THE FUTURE: Your phone will have an exploratory music feature. You dial in all sorts of weights... genre, tempo, density, melody, etc. You'll crank out a custom instrumental playlist at the tap of a button. This will probably make for great study/work music.

When it eventually overshadows normal instrumental music it's going to be a giant bummer for anyone hoping to make money doing it. Artists are going to have a lot of soul searching to do.

That's not how music works. My bet is we will see crappy music for ads replaced with AI generated stuff, but NFTs etc may actually mean a much more interesting market for real musicians moving forward..

If there is a way to turn this AI into an instrument then people will learn "the AI" the same way they learn "the guitar".

I remember reading 10 or 20 years ago that dj/rap turntables had outsold guitars in the UK for the first time that year. That was my "wow, people don't play music any more" moment...

Considering I like metalcore, bagpipes, Enya, Bruno Mars, Pantera, The Blues Brothers/Chicago blues in general, Daft Punk, Monty Python songs, Loreena McKennitt, Led Zeppelin, Bach, ...

I absolutely doubt that any AI will ever produce something I genuinely like. Maybe some features in isolation, hopefully not multiple genre features in some unholy mish mash...

I just don't see it.

Don't forget that playing a musical instrument or watching crowds move to your beat is an incredible experience that is not going to be enjoyed by artificial systems, at least anytime soon.

Make part of your AI DJ a reinforcement learning agent whose reward function considers the amplitude and coherence of the movement of the crowd.

This agent would enjoy the moving crowds in a much more authentic way than a human DJ would.

I can't find it now, but there was a wearable project (I believe earrings?) which gave quantitative feedback about how a music audience were moving.

I guess the question is if crowd movement is differentiable.

>...watching crowds move to your beat is an incredible experience that is not going to be enjoyed by artificial systems...

Leving aside arguments about qualia, couldn't we just make the "crowd moving" metric part of the objective function?

The public personas of celebrities were always unrealistic and unattainable for ordinary people. Maybe replacing them with explicitly fictional people would lead to a healthier culture.

This is already happening: the top 5 virtual influencers have over 11MM followers in total.

It's not clear this is healthier.

Internet is already dominated by designed-by-committee personalities.

If it's made by AI then it has no inherent value. There was no labour associated with whatever AI produced. Open source AI trained on public models is the ultimate "hold my beer". What's the point of paying for anything when my old GTX 760 could generate it for me?