And do what you can to do what AI music makers wouldn't think to do - differentiate with photos of yourselves, the process, the wilds, etc. You've done all the hard work writing and recording the music, so you might as well embellish its place in the world, and the places it's about.
> Why do I want to make music?
I picked a basic DJ controller and a midi controller bundled with Ableton. I'm a novice, but I love listening to music and dissecting what makes a good performance. I crave that feeling of getting chills when I find something new that moves me in new ways. This set was a pretty recent example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfF8jzBVWvM
That being said, the world is increasingly crowded with "good enough" music.
I resolved early on that I was never going to make a money doing this, which simplified things greatly. There's a primal part of our brain that craves adoration. I do wish for others to adore my music. Even if it's a handful of people. I do wish to perform publicly one day, even if it's at a park for passersby.
Mostly I just want something to move my brain in different ways. I want to create something beautiful.
As I enter my mid-50s this is how I feel about the music I listen to. I have decades and decades of music I love for a variety of reasons. I don’t have time for “discovery” anymore. If I get introduced to a new band by someone I know or algorithmically, that’s great but I’m not going to spend hours trying to find the next great thing when I have so much I enjoy already.
That's EXACTLY how I used to feel about creativity. I was an art major who didn't make it, and I found that expressing myself via my hobbies was good for the soul.
Then I almost died and completely lost interest in making art!
Facing my own mortality, I realized that the time I invest into my wife, kids and family will have a larger positive contribution on the world, I think.
I know that sounds like a Hallmark Card.
At the same time, I've often wondered what my life would look like if I appreciated my family MORE and my hobbies LESS when I was younger.
Nothing wrong with prioritizing family over art, that's pretty rad! But occasionally you can still do art, just don't be to serious about it. All my paintings are objectively rubbish, but heck I like them and didn't put a huge amount of time into them.
That's basically where I landed. The idea being that making art is something I should do if I'm just trying to relax. Once the hobby starts looking like a second job, I know it's too much.
Throughout my teens and young adulthood I immersed myself really deep into drawing and writing. But as my own life has started to form around me, I got a partner who I might have kids with, friends I care about. Ive slowly come to your pov too, and Im wishing I spent less time doing art in the past
I want to be clear. I am 100% on-board with AI being absolutely shit.
Buuuut, this has always been the case. Before it was scammers taking images from the web and undercutting you with prints, now it's scammers stealing your artistic style.
It sucks, but it's not a brand new problem. What makes it particularly bad now is that there's a much larger flood of it.
At least not yet Im sure robots will and also an AI microphone with AI built in will be created so everyone sings amazingly.....
Overall AI is stealing humanity from us all, we are allowing it and it is only to the benefit of a few rich pie holes.
It’s comforting to think this is just an incremental change in the battle for capital-focused hyper-efficiency, but it’s absolutely not. This isn’t even the steady decline manufacturing saw over decades… it’s is like what happened to paste-up men or telephone operators but over an incomparably large swath of the creative world.
I certainly don't buy it, and IIRC only 15% of the broader workforce use genAI for their jobs. Offices are having to force people to use it, and even then people don't like it. Programming is an outlier in this regard because, it turns out, most of what we've been doing is solving the same tasks over and over again in different domains (which is what A Pattern Language was designed to solve). Most other work is not like this.
For the arts, and for most media, what humans have been craving for about a decade now is authenticity. They want a real person they can connect to, an artist whose work makes them feel seen. The artists who have recognized this with a good command of media have been growing sustainably and there's a big industry in this now. There is a certain proportion of people who like the slop, sure. But the actual fact of the matter is that the younger generations, 20 - 30yros, can smell slop from a mile away, and adding slop to advertising, to your media, to your art, actually makes it sell worse. Exactly because it is inauthentic. Talk to literally anyone in advertising whose company tried AI ads. You see an uptick among 50-60 year olds, and a massive, massive downturn among 16 - 30 yros.
From a media executive standpoint, most of the media properties that are inauthentic have been failing massively, with a handful of them able to turn a quick buck before they fail. Execs are verrrry slowly learning the fact that media produced for a very quick ROI and for the branding and marketing potential tend to fizzle out quickly, whereas passion projects are sustainable income, a well you can keep going back to. Whether or not they value that well as much as independent creatives do... ehhhh.
For programming, there's not much to stop people from using the stuff because barely any higher-up supports "building bridges safely". What executives want from programming is a quick ROI, they don't even care if customers complain. So what I forsee for programmers is that the field is going to be gradually flooded with people using genAI. This will drive the cost of our labour downwards, while people are expected to give 10x or 20x the output that they did 5 years ago "because AI makes them fast". This turns every job into a rush job which makes the software system as a whole much less stable. I forsee a number of Horizon IT level problems in the next 10 years. But by then, programming will be much more on the level of a truck job where you have to piss in a bottle and keep driving, or a sales call job where your manager will pull you up if you're 5% under par. Just remember, everyone jumping on the AI train did this to our field.
But, it's not inevitable. It's only inevitable if we all keep shouting that the AI bros have won, from the rooftops. That's the hype keeping this bubble alive. The entire AI bubble currently rests on marketing, and the first step in bursting that bubble is to simply not believe the lies that you are being sold.
I'm a little off being thirty years old. I've played musical instruments of my own accord since I was 3 years old learning violin in an orchestra. I did folk music through my teens. I know about 5+ instruments and I've gigged at pubs, fields, parks, events, and a wedding. I have never touched genAI for music, and I really do not need to. I've listened to the output of genAI for music. It's samey, repetitive, and bland. "Slop" is a very good descriptor. Frankly I can't see a single reason why I would want to destroy my entire creative process and have it output by a black box. Why would I contract someone else to play my own music, let alone a machine?! Baffling. Most of the people around my own age are getting super into vinyl and cassettes and records because they like the fact that you can hold something in your hands. Because they like connecting to an artist. AI slop does not give them that, cannot give them that, and artists who think that the AI slop is better than them are a) obviously not very good in the first place, b) foregoing their own personal development as an artist in service of chasing trends. Trend chasers have never lasted long in creative work, and honestly, they're selecting themselves out of the pool. They're selecting for an audience who no more likes their work than the work of any other sloptist. You can't see me but I'm giving a biiiiig fucking shrug right now, like the jurassic park guy. Nobody cares about sloptists, sloppers, soupies. They don't care about the art, they only care about the profit, and people can smell that a mile off.
"You need to learn that the product of your writing is yourself. You are the artwork. The time you spend writing will change you, it will make your better at expressing yourself. You'll have a wonderful time, but you'll also grow as a person, you'll become more empathetic. The product of your writing is you. You are the artwork." - Brandon Sanderton
https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx9ldrFvp0RO1HNyPg8Xafh0NYlC2...
But it's almost certainly not AI's fault if your mortgage is not paid, your cancer not treated or you can't pay birthday presents for your kids. Music was already extremely "cheap", and success has very little with how much or little work you put into it (extremely unlikely either way).
Let's fund art, but this business model you want to do it by is hardly worth saving.
This is exactly what all the successful ones do. No AI can go on television and sing songs about how great Hitler was.
And I’m speaking more broadly than music— it’s much worse in other fields. Most commercial art does not involve being an entertainer.
It's the same with authoring books. Almost nobody makes any significant money off of them. It's so paltry I don't really understand why authors are so concerned about copyright infringement.
People steal my copyrighted stuff all the time. I long ago stopped caring about it. But I do very much like Github as it protects me from others accusing me of stealing their code.
If you want to make money, you'll need a plan that does not require copyright protection.
People want to see her performing...her music. She would not make nearly as much money by going up on stage and sitting quietly for a few hours.
It's also worth nothing that she literally re-recorded several of her albums due to someone else getting the rights to them instead of selling them to her, and the proportion of streams and sales they got compared to the original versions was so high that it effectively forced the person who had bought them from the previous owner to sell them to her in the end anyways.
I don't necessarily disagree with the larger point you're trying to make, but saying that she doesn't make her money from selling her music doesn't really seem accurate.
There have been many stories on HN over the years on rock bands making a pittance from record sales and having to tour to make any decent money.
So many people can probably reach her level of music but have the charisma of a door nail.
Good album, by the way.
During the pandemic, a friend and I decided to make a record together. We labored over it for almost two years and finally “released it” on bandcamp to very little fanfare.
A few friends and family had nice things to say, and one random stranger reached out with positive feedback.
I get a monthly stream report from bandcamp, and it almost always says zero.
I am so pleased with this project and have such great memories of making the album that I had two lathe cut vinyl copies made (one for me, and one for my friend).
I put a big part of myself into the project and was able to convey ideas and feelings that I couldn’t express effectively via other methods.
I listen to the recording about once a year. It’s a part of me now, and I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it.
To me, this is the purpose of the creative journey. Knowing yourself better, and enjoying all of the steps involved in arriving at what is always a surprising destination.
If someone else feels something as a result of your work, that’s a nice bonus, but not something I focus on at all.