There's a craving for a deeper connection but that's usually the smaller part of our everyday consumption.
If you are a little bit of a critical listener you listen to those songs because you connect to them somehow, that's the power of music, it's a language for emotions that you don't need to know how the artists look like, or their backgrounds, to feel what they try to convey. Having the context/background might help to intellectualise a piece of music but the feeling comes from the art itself.
AI music is pure entertainment, not art.
What will be worthy is imperfect human-created art. We already went through this decades ago with expensive hand made vs cheap machine made stuff, this is just another iteration.
I am not saying it will be great to be an artist, just like in the past few famous live in limelight and most will struggle to stay afloat.
It's no different than using Photoshop.
Unless you only consider art done with oil and on a canvas to be the "real thing."
And sometimes not knowing is better like the example with Rammstein and row zero were some manager woman was asking other woman if they want to meet their rockstars.
Btw. on a good electronic music set, knowing the arist is probably more a quality sign than a personal aspect. Knowing that i like what arist xy does, means i might like to keep an eye on future work because i like the style of it.
Nonetheless, i do also think that fandom and doing real tours will still be the unique things for bands. There should always be a market for human content.
AI music will disrupt this market.
Spotify for example will try to produce their own AI music (like they already do with regular music). The Christmas playlist will then mainly contain their music. That saves a lot of money for the.
But have also had the non-surprising "Hedonistic Fatigue" that comes with excess access to something originally valued. I have now been able to generate 4 and 5 digit numbers of pictures of awesome colourful steam locomotives and epic dungeon vistas, but now find myself fatigued by "what on earth am I going to use 5000 dungeon pictures for?", coupled with the dread of being forced to CHOOSE from 5000 options. And I learn the known principle, that when you can choose from 4 options, you are happy you picked the best of 4, but when you can pick from 5000 options, you are left feeling inadequate with "I almost certainly was not able to pick the best of those 5000 options, and trying to do so would exhaust me". So suddenly, picking something from your menu of options, feels dreadful and fatiguing.. (I get the same feeling sometimes, when trying to pick a movie to watch out of 16.000 options).
So yeah, no doubt the AI sketch/refinement tool will be merged into our creative process, but for the time being, I feel a second generation of alienation-estrangement with my "available options".
I've been thinking about it the same as you but something that I think we're missing here is what can the person who can already make 5k pictures by hand do with this kind of tool?
It makes me think of the later albums that Frank Zappa produced with a Synclavier. That guy went hog-wild on that thing and banged out some unbelievable albums.
What would he have been able to do with AI generated music technology if it was the Synclavier of his time? What are the Frank Zappas of our time going to do with AI?
And then if it was restricted to a few parties, they still have to compete with human artists, they can't just charge whatever.
Yeah, the last two live mega tours (Taylor Swift and Beyoncé) have a tad more personality than the average artist, but the usual stuff that you would hear on the radio might as well be AI generated and live-performed by animatronics and a significant chunk of the audience wouldn't care or even notice.
I mean people watch Love Island on TV for chrisssssakes. Humans can definitely be mindless consumers, where the sugar salt and fat in fast-food is the same as false drama, outrage, sex and violence in media. We all got buttons and they're so easy to push. Just look how popular TT is versus the type of content on there; mostly short-lived mindless stuff.
