- record one or more sounds
- have extensive knowledge about filters, mixing, mastering
Without the latter, even if you're amazing musician/singer and you have decent gear and a nice interace and good ideas, you still need to sit down and mix the thing so that it sounds good in the car/airpods/phone/laptop.
> Plenty of in-the-box musicians and producers are making top quality songs with not much more than their Macbook.
I'll bet you money that if one of their songs has repeat status in your music player, that song is likely not the first song they've ever recorded.
They had to build mechanical skills first. AI-generated music skips that.
mechanical skills are EARNED, and are a lot of fun to exercise when functioning.
*before anyone suggests "ableism" I refer you to Django Reinhardt, the drummer from Def Leppard, and anyone who has overcome physical disabilities to express themselves upon the musical instrument of their choice.
And is the difference between the hypothetical bedroom-produced version of the same Radiohead album and the actual album actually that noticeable?
I work in film/video, and you definitely can produce something that would have cost millions of dollars 10 years ago by yourself, with minimal costs. I struggle to compare the scale of engineering needed to make albums versus movies.
Create enough hours in the day to do the work.
No amount of skill or knowledge will get me over the hump that it takes hundreds, maybe thousands, of person hours to produce a Radiohead album.
Ok computer took two months of mixing, and some time for the mastering. 80% of the rest were live takes. What's the AI supposed to do?
Imagine I’m a schmuck who can croon into a microphone. It’s just me. I have a dayjob because this is a hobby.
“Just a quick 2 months of work” is a total nonstarter. I’ll just keep crooning in the shower
“Just 2 months, it’s not a lot” is like telling someone “Oh cleaning the house is easy, just ask your maid”
If you want to record a couple jazz songs for kicks you can very easily and satisfactorily do this today, for very little money (just higher up this thread people have recommended great tools) and it will be higher quality that what was playing on the radio in the 90s. And I'd argue that if you were as good a crooner as Radiohead are -eh- experimental musicians, I'm sure you'd find the time to make an album that would make yourself rich.
Sorry I'm a little ranty - gonna get a drink I guess
You don't need two months of mixing for your crooner album. You can mix it yourself on the weekend and be 80% there.
Like the guy that did Tubular Bells keep re-recording it because it's not good enough for him - but I'm fine with the version he first produced. AI isn't going to change anything here.
OKC is one of the best Albums of all time imo. But it’s also one of the most popular ones in my own list. So not like all the other works of art for music I come across requiring such intense amt of human labor put in. The capital wouldn’t be there. Capital means capitalism. Which isn’t democratic.
Thousands of man-hours is the five members of the band, plus their producer, plus an audio-engineer working 40 hrs/wk.
There are 43 business days in 2 months, or just under 3 days per track. 3 days to do a bunch of technical work to balance the recordings juuust right, and then balance those recordings between each other to make it worthy of being called a Radiohead album. Personally, 3 days per track actually doesn't sound like enough time for that since you mix it, and then have to listen to that particular mix until you get bored, and then come back to it after, listen to it again some more, figure out how you feel about that mix, and then repeat.
Of course, you can half-ass it and throw the tracks into Ableton, spend 20 minutes and call it a day, but you didn't used to get to be Radiohead with that kind of effort. ML algos on the horizon seem like they'll be able to do just that.
ATM, LLM's of reasonable sophistication for such tasks are not running on your laptop, and at the point they do, something else will be getting all the limelight, and it won't be within your reach.
As a lifelong musician and composer and producer, it's just automating things away that I don't want automated away. Producing music is about making decisions.
You act as if Radiohead just inserted money and out came pro music, but really you appear to be wishing to skip any hard work and appear to be asking for instant gratification. Well, I can tell you, as someone who could readily train AI in music, that you only cheat yourself by cutting corners. Knowledge is power to do what you actually really deeply want to. Handing off the minute decisions that add up to making a masterpiece = cheating oneself of being a creator.
Through ~2001: Pre-broadband - early web, dot-coms. Everyone got email. If they were more adventurous, they made a home page, got on IRC or Usenet. This era inherited the "US college student with campus internet access" dynamic that dominated the earliest years of the Internet. "The Internet is for porn" etc. There's a lot of overlap between this era and the next one because broadband added so many capabilities that it was like two sibling versions of internet, akin to 8-bit vs 16-bit personal computing.
2001-2008: Web forums, instant messengers, early Web 2.0. A much broader set of people came online and were courted by the new platforms. This was both a broadening and an erasure of any prior history or culture - the "toxic gamer" archetype, the start of influencer trends in various categories(photos, fitness, tech products...), etc. But commerce and community was broadly mediated through "your own web site" rather than platforms.
2008-2020: Post-iPhone smartphones, dominance of centralized internet platforms and algorithmic news feeds. Now the Internet's culture really was accessed by "everyone" and this became clear by around 2012 as more and more social media-driven movements swept through the world. Status-seeking behavior online became very conspicuous, with a ton of activity, styles of messaging, etc molded to juice algorithmic KPIs.
2020 marks the line where we went to full Internet dependence. And... it's also roughly when ordinary people started expressing more agency over how their news feeds should work, and when the really rapid generative AI breakthroughs started. So all at once the blind status seeking of the smartphone era is breaking down, and the new challenges involve finding appropriate sources of truth and filters in an ocean of spam content.
Before generative AI, you would've had people copying your style, but that took effort and there was ethics involved, many artists wouldn't like to outright copy someone because it's lame (it is).
Now though, there is zero cost to copying someones style and it can be done in a more faceless way.
I don't think there is much inventive anymore to make something original and post it online. Maybe just play live only?
The catch here is that you need to do something new and original to attract a following that way. Training a computer to generate a Drake song (or imitate McCartney's voice) doesn't empower new artists like AI evangelists think it does. If UMG can pay someone else to copy Drake's flow and release a new Drake track for 1/10 the cost, that isn't "democratizing" artistry, it's extricating the artist from the art altogether. If you do want the support of a label for your own work, you need to meet the right people. AI-generated music doesn't change that.
The only "gates" these people want to get by are ones put up by practicing music enough to make something novel. AI might be useful as a tool to assist actual musicians in their processes, but in my experience the musicians that create interesting music do so because they have a strong vision, not because they're exceptionally technically proficient.