It strikes me that the hyperventilation about AI and music – see fake Drakes, illegal “scraping” of artists’ work to “train” the machines, AI-generated music forming a major portion of Sp*tify’s repertoire etc. etc. – is almost all coming from the pop scene. And I’m not talking about the underground/indie/art/pop scene; I’m talking about the massive, global, 3-conglomerates-controlling-70%-of-the-world’s-music pop scene. And the many, many people and entities desirous of a piece of that juicy-looking pie, and thus attempting to jump on the, ahem, bandwagon.
Well, don’t get mad, but maybe your style is too easy to copy, cuz. Maybe the decades-old attempt to capture the largest market share by appealing to as many listeners as possible had grown into a kind of “algorithm” all on its own, something that an artificial intelligence can pretty quickly get the hang of, before AI became a going concern. Maybe – bear with me – what you’re putting into the world is kind of basic. High levels of technical prowess, production values that boggle the mind, distribution and marketing machines honed to a razor’s edge. And, well, not a lot of substance.
The thing is, the down side of basing everything on pattern recognition and familiarity (besides making it pretty easy to fake) is that it’s a dead end. Your options grow ever fewer, and things start sounding more and more the same. Fortunately, there is still a world of music out there that no one has ever heard before, music that is unique, mind-altering, creative – and best of all: not really commodifiable. People get tired of the same thing after a while. They go looking for something new. And when they do, we’ll be here.