The music industry's A.I. experiments

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/inside-the-music-industrys-high-stakes-ai-experiments

by mitchbob • 2 years ago

43 59 2 years ago

newyorker.com

mitchbob• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/Qeide

aussieguy1234• 2 years ago

Yes, this will benefit record companies.

But it will also benefit indie artists, who'll be able to create record label quality tunes with much less effort, just like Stable Diffusion makes it possible for anyone to be an "artist".

"In April of 2023, an anonymous producer called ghostwriter used A.I. voice replications of Drake and the Weeknd to create a deepfake duet called “Heart on My Sleeve.”

lynx23• 2 years ago

who'll be able to create record label quality tunes with much less effort, just like Stable Diffusion

I have to ask. Was that cynical sarcasm or did you actually mean what you wrote?

Because "record label quality" can go both ways...

MotherFunker• 2 years ago

But it will also benefit indie artists, who'll be able to create record label quality tunes with much less effort, just like Stable Diffusion makes it possible for anyone to be an "artist".

I don't think this is such a glowing endorsement of why people make music and produce music. I think AI will do amazing things to improve what we have and speed up the most frustrating parts of production (noise removal, time alignment, retuning, writing harmony parts to existing melody lines. Simply look at companies like iZotope (like RX or Neutron), Hush Pro etc - I know it sounds a little 'faster horses' but I really think AI needs to remove the 'hard' part and not the 'necessary part' of being a musician/artist/audio engineer.

The 'black box' effect of AI that simply 'writes a song' feels less useful and less impactful, that's not what being an 'artist' should be about.

I have a sneaking suspicion that major record labels are likely looking at AI for more boring and partially sinister means like DRM tagging/finger-printing, more advanced content-ID etc, heck maybe even virtual artists that they can spin up in-house so they don't have to pay anyone: the perfect 360 artist, geeze.

omar_alt2• 2 years ago

heck maybe even virtual artists that they can spin up in-house so they don't have to pay anyone: the perfect 360 artist, geeze.

Spotify would love to direct the listener just to in house AI music that does not pay royalties to the big labels ;)

earthnail6• 2 years ago

But it will also benefit indie artists

Definitely not. Music is a market with too much supply relative to the demand. We have too many indie artists that don't make a living; lowering the barrier of entry will create even more indie artists and further worsen the supply/demand imbalance.

thro1• 2 years ago

No thanks, not enough dimensions. Music about what, when ? Not original - or missing emotional edge ? Check what Jarret had to play about april, think Svensson, with Brüninghaus resonating in your head - no need for artificial 'help'. Some old paintings have more depth and behind than nowadays movies (not minding fake news ilustrations).

AI for muzak ? - this may work.

Notatheist• 2 years ago

An article so self-indulgent you find yourself longing for AI written ones.

Grainge sports an impressive pair of aural appendages that move up and down the sides of his head when he’s talking.

I mean come on. 13 paragraphs of this before AI is even mentioned.

The part where UMG's CEO is complaining about how "legitimate artists" deserve more revenue from streams was interesting. He's not actually complaining about AI here but about amateur artists getting as much money from streams as "legitimate artists". "Legitimate" meaning fame and a direct tie to UMG, as if those are the measures of a musician's worth.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

AURAL APPENDAGES, four letters: EARS.

Is that right?

defrost• 2 years ago

SCOT or BELL can also work, especially in a cryptic.

    a thing that is added or attached to something larger or more important.

    "they treat Scotland as a mere appendage of England"

and they never shut up about it.

I guess this is a comment about context.

omar_alt2• 2 years ago

I was going to say it read like a puff piece about a corporation that makes most of its money from legacy back catalog

Animats• 2 years ago

Look for desperate, heavily funded lobbying efforts to create new expansions of copyright, or something like it.

LLM-based music generators do what musicians do - listen to a lot of stuff and then generate their own music. Most popular music isn't that original. It's mostly about branding.

freedomben4• 2 years ago

Yep, between photographers, graphic artists, and musicians I've already seen a massive number of people clamoring for expanded copyright. The wildest thing is, just a couple years ago these people were some of the most vocal against the copyright system, especially those hit by take downs on youtube and other sites.

visarga• 2 years ago

Creatives forget the tools AI companies will develop for attribution will be applied on their own works as well, and unwanted attributions might pop up. We don't like to admit how much our own creativity is just derivative from a place we forgotten about. But when they make the attribution microscope, it won't be just AIs getting scrutinized.

We have plenty of content with attribution to train such a system - books, art, scientific papers, media articles, even social network comments, we know author and date. We can index everything by author and search against the index to find influences. We can train "text -> author" and the use it for "new text -> attributions".

But will such a system ultimately enable or block creativity? Even past works stand to be revealed in all their influences. Might be embarrassing. On the other hand generative models will be safe as they can sample around problematic attributions and still complete their tasks. We might end up having to use AI for writing in order to ensure copyright safety. The irony.

"I heard you don't like AI in creative fields so from now on you need to use AI to ensure other creative's ideas are not used by mistake, or risk getting sued."

aatd86• 2 years ago

Coders will have too as well. Coding is an art. Half-seriously though, being able to provide tooling that could fund a given library could be endangered if global llms can just suggest things because they have parsed a wide array of code.

Maybe it is a lost fight and the value has to be found somewhere else though. Anything physical like deployment, hosting, that AI cannot do, at least for the foreseeable future.

bayindirh2• 2 years ago

LLM-based music generators do what musicians do - listen to a lot of stuff and then generate their own music.

I love this analogy, because it looks so benign, while being so off.

Question: How many hours of music an LLM can listen and ingest in an hour?

Answer: Probably 10x more than a human, and will ingest it way better in one go than a human who needs 5-10x concentrated listens to completely understand what's going on at all layers.

So, in practice, an LLM can ingest 50-100x more music in unit time, when compared to a human.

"An LLM is like a musician. Just listens". Indeed, that's true, if I wince really hard, so my head hurts.

BTW, I'm all for respecting copyright, and no, AI training is not fair use, because AI is not a human who consumes reasonable amounts of information and understands and derives it in a unit time.

soulofmischief• 2 years ago

AI training is not fair use, because AI is not a human who consumes reasonable amounts of information and understands and derives it in a unit time.

Please illustrate why "LLMs ingest training data faster than humans and have better recall" has anything to do with fair use.

krapp2• 2 years ago

Someone needs to create a "Godwin's Law" for AI such that for any discussion of LLMs on the web, the chance that someone will equate LLMs to humans equals one.

notahacker4• 2 years ago

No "expansion of copyright" is needed in music, the requirements in the US are already onerous enough for the entirely original human-written and performed Blurred Lines to be deemed a copyright violation for consciously emulating the "feel" of a Marvin Gaye baseline.

The people that need to change this status quo - like it or loathe it - are the people that want to profit from spamming streaming services with zero-effort derivatives of popular music (people that do it for fun or use 'AI' tools for post production or loop-variation will continue to be fine). I have a lot less sympathy with them than the many artists who've lost court cases for 'inspiration', and if they're relying on the whole "models learn just like people" canard they're going to be in a weaker position than usual, because not only is that deemed insufficient for people, but it's unambiguously untrue that machines "listen" like humans do (they're bulk processing files, not experiencing consonance or dissonance in the ear) or that they "perform" as opposed to stochastically transferring elements of style. Even the most cliched blues going has human reasons for note choice and intonation other than "weighted average of other blues with overlapping description"

ben_w3• 2 years ago

Even the most cliched blues going has human reasons for note choice and intonation other than "weighted average of other blues with overlapping description"

From what I've heard about human cognition, we come up with a word-based justification after we decide what to do, it just that the research involved a brain scanner to find this out because it doesn't (usually[0]) feel like this is what's going on on the inside.

So the real reason may well be "weighted average of other blues with overlapping description", followed (not preceded!) by a language model producing some convincing words that can communicate the mental state to other humans.

IMO, the main difference between AI and humans right now, is that humans can do human things with far fewer examples. AI has the speed advantage that lets them read all the words in the world, listen to all the music ever recorder, watch all the videos ever filmed… but are so stupid[1] that they need to, too.

[0] I do sometimes notice this in my own brain: I can have a fully-formed sentence before my inner dialogue tries to (for a lack of a better word for the internal voice) "speak" it — if I then try to skip the inner voice because I've already had the thought and turning into an imagined voice is clearly a waste of time, the part of me which is the inner voice is, for lack of a better word, frustrated.

[1] Stupid on this particular axis. Intelligence isn't fantastically well defined even in humans, is badly defined cross-species, and doesn't have a singular definition at all for machines, so it is perfectly valid to consider intelligence to be a question of "what can it do?" rather than "how fast does it learn?", for which many current AI (there's no G, so narrow AI that only plays chess is fine) "smarter than humans".

whiddershins• 2 years ago

LLMs don't listen. LLMs don't do anything.

People do things with LLMs. People write and run code that creates LLMs.

These words "train", "learn" are ML terms that attempt to explain a concept using an analogy. The LLM isn't a person.

Speaking of the LLM as if it is a person, has the rights of a person, or should be legally treated as a person, is a category error.

ChatGTP4• 2 years ago

LLMs don't really do anything like a human does.

Whens the last time you saw a human generate a photo realistic image in bits and bytes? Struggle to find the words to express a loss?

I love your comment.

taneq• 2 years ago

What, precisely, is a person?

conradfr• 2 years ago

The article seems to focus on A.I in relation to big artists and pop music (and that one rich CEO) but the first casualties will be the "stock" music market, and then TV shows & movies composers / producers / artists.

It's not totally there yet but it's improving.

Is it already happening in the stock photos world?

the music industry (....) now appears to be more profitable than ever.

Tell that to the music professionals actually producing that music.

Xeyz0r• 2 years ago

Is it already happening in the stock photos world? I think for stock photos it's still early days. But soon when AI technology becomes so widespread that it's accessible to everyone, people will stop using stock photos. Especially if the level of image generation reaches almost perfection. After all with AI you can create anything without spending time searching for stock photos online

krapp2• 2 years ago

Tell that to the music professionals actually producing that music.

I mean, that's how capitalism, and in particular creative industry, has always worked. Value is captured by management, not the people who create it. The celebrities who can afford to negotiate million dollar contracts and retain rights to their work are the exception, not the rule.

scheeseman4863• 2 years ago

You're right that it's not there yet, but it's scarily close.

I used a generative AI music tool to create ~1 minute snippets of fully mixed music. The tool offers 2 fields: Lyrics and a style prompt. From the initial audio you can generate continuations from them, creating different branches and there's some syntax to specify structure too ([chorus], [verse], [outro], (instrumental) etc). The quality of the compositions is quite good, though the choices it makes can be rather random just like any generative AI but that isn't always unwelcome.

From there I picked the best and most interesting bits of audio, split them apart those apart into separate tracks (vocals, guitar, percussion) with another AI. At that point I can bring them into a music sequencer, pull them apart, time stretch, rearrange, anything. You can generate an instrumental with a lead guitar, pull it out and sprinkle it through the entire song. Re-spin vocal deliveries, mix and match them.

This is a draft of something I've been working on: https://voca.ro/15yurCvoA9yR

The main drawback is the quality, it's like a mediocre cassette tape recording much of the time and splitting it up into tracks causes some generation loss.

dadoomer• 2 years ago

What's the name of the tool where you can specify the structure of the song?

ChatGTP4• 2 years ago

I played music from a young age, studied Jazz and honestly, the hope of making a decent career out of music died about 50 years ago with the advent of recordings and high quality audio equipment, once live musicians were no longer required to have music in commercial settings, it was over because the average punter, who knows really nothing about art, couldn't give a shit what they're listening too. The side effect here is that with this change, the incentive for brilliant musicians to exist died too, and so we're left with the seriously diminished music we listen too today.

When is the last time you heard a Stan Getz equivalent?

Maybe there is still some more raping to be done by "the industry", but the whole scene has been raped and pillaged quite devastatingly already.

There honestly seems to be a strong and enduring resurgence in live music popularity, which IMO is exciting, and I think will continue as the quality of commercial music just seems to go down the toilet year on year.

The other issue generative AI will have is the same problem most musicians have, people like familiarity, you can making incredible music and 99% of ears will have no interest in it because it's unrelated to anything they, or they're fiends have listened too while going on that summer road trip in college. Why do people still listen to Vanilla Ice?

Music is a wonderful, creative, artistic pursuit, just don't expect to make too much money out of it, and you'll be in line with reality. I play guitar for my son when he can't sleep, and it's the most rewarding thing I've ever done musically.

1111111011013• 2 years ago

I've been completely blown away by the quality that I'm getting from Suno.ai Not all of it is good of course, maybe only 10%, but that 10% is of a higher quality than anything I could have produced myself.

Example: https://app.suno.ai/song/08f43c50-3173-4a27-a0b0-3e8dfb10bde...

ChatGTP4• 2 years ago

I found it really jarring.

danielbln2• 2 years ago

How about a little datascience rap? https://app.suno.ai/song/fbfe344c-467f-47d2-b1a3-2b70cce651d...

1111111011013• 2 years ago

Obviously, it's not perfect, and right now, for the best results, it would have to be re-recorded with a proper singer and instruments. But for some dude who has barely any experience in making music, I think it's amazing.

Also, I'm not a Christian; I just experimented in that area because I assumed that the quality bar would be lower in a more niche music genre. I made a custom gpt to generate the lyrics and structure and then just prompted it with, 'write me a song about jesus but don't use his name.'

If this is where it is now, where a person with no skills can make a song that wouldn't seem too out of place on a soundtrack for a Hallmark Channel movie, imagine where it's going to be in 5 years?

ClearAndPresent• 2 years ago

Although the actual audio quality seems low on playback (a low bitrate MP3?) the structure and arrangement of the song seem fine.

Yet ... the irony of a song of worship created by an AI surely reverberates through the cosmos like a clap of thunder. Surely?

I'm less interested in the quality of the output and more the motivation of the creator. Was it you? Was it made it good faith? What was its purpose? Was it experimental or intended to inspire?

My interested is genuine and not sardonic.

1111111011013• 2 years ago

I was just messing around really and thought that it might be easier to find an audience with Christian music rather than if I tried targeting a more mainstream genre. Those mega churches need to play something, right?

scheeseman4863• 2 years ago

I've been using suno.ai too, here's the most recent thing I made with it: https://voca.ro/15yurCvoA9yR

The process was a little more involved than just using the raw output of suno.ai, I talked about it elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39188980

mediumsmart• 2 years ago

Great article. I think that music artists are still needed for live concerts. For creating music to listen to, not anymore.

Collecting, searching and paying for music is done, soon.

nadermx• 2 years ago

Why should anyone care what the copyrights industry's gripes with technology are? They have time and time again tried to stop innovation by blocking MP3 players[0], DVRs[1], Stream Recorders[2], and now AI, despite copyright existing being to further the arts and sciences, at least in the US.

[0] https://cyber.harvard.edu/property00/MP3/rio.html

[1] https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/appeals-court-sides-with-d...

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/github-reinstates-yout...

earthnail6• 2 years ago

It's clear the industry can't stop it. The only thing they can do is shape it into sth that benefits it. Think Napster -> Spotify.

Unfortunately, the way they've historically done it is to try and block anyone with force until someone came along who actually figured out a peaceful model for both consumers and producers (again, think Spotify). I don't think the AI game will play out any different.

The cool thing is: it's a great place for startups. Big tech will get sued right away before finding product market fit with an AI product, but small startups can survive until they have enough product market fit to fund the defense for the lawsuits.

freedomben4• 2 years ago

You don't deserve the downvotes.

But I disagree, I think they can stop it, at least for a long while, because of the enormous expense that it takes to train and run these models (at least for now). Nobody operating in legal gray or black territory could afford to do this. If they use the force of law to basically block legitimate uses, it will slow progress to a snail's pace.

Meanwhile they'll use the tech to stay way ahead in the cat and mouse game, so when somebody does generate something they can block it/censor it right away before it's able to spread. That will be good enough for their purposes.

ChatGTP4• 2 years ago

I couldn't get through the start of the article, this guy might be a nice person, but music has gone downhill quite hard in the last 20 years. If this guy is some type of shepherd for the record industry, then I don't have a lot of faith in the future of commercial music.

Maybe the article got better later on but wow, that first 1/3...

coretx• 2 years ago

Funny. A 60+ IPR jihadi trying to copy/claim dated pirate parlance.

The music industry's A.I. experiments

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