I have a hypothesis that AI music and other arts will not take off.
My reasoning is that the fact that it was made by another human is really important.
Not only because you might think a piece of music is lame because it was made by AI vs a human.
But also because all the things that bring you back to a piece of art is wrapped up in the person that made it.
People who are immense fans of the Beatles, Taylor Swift or Kanye West illustrate this point.
You keep coming back because you liked this person's music before, and so you can't wait to preorder their music in the future.
Same goes for books, paintings and really all other art I can think of.
An artist develops a following that snowballs into their music being broadly consumed.
There are "AI music artists" that have been around for a decade. Miquela is the one I know about. But in that timespan, hundreds of human artists have developed followings and cultural sway that far outweigh what Miquela has done.
It seems more and more that AI is simply another tool for humans to use. Rather than a replacement altogether of humans.
> My reasoning is that the fact that it was made by another human is really important.
This presupposes that people are still able to tell the difference between computer-generated and human-generated music, which, in my opinion (as a trained musician and former producer), is no longer the case for the majority of people.
Music and musicians undoubtedly also fulfill an "idol function." But the industry has long since provided an answer to this, for example with highly successful, artificially optimized boy or girl groups. With "Milli Vanilli," they took it to the extreme by having the "musicians" no longer sing themselves, but were chosen solely for their effect on the audience. This also works with computer-generated music, only much cheaper.
The song doesn't get passed to friends. The artist themselves is the transmission mechanism.
> With "Milli Vanilli," they took it to the extreme by having the "musicians" no longer sing themselves
This simply proves my point, not detracts from it.
You can try to make an AI into an actual human (see Miquela) but the fakeness of that is simply insurmountable. Miquela hasn't had breakout success.
There's something very condescending in the elite culture of the past 10 years (it's starting to go away) that thinks you can get successful by being fake. It assumes the masses are stupid.
My wive just discovered the "ambient house p-funk" style on Suno (https://suno.com/style/ambient%20house%20p-funk) and listens to it all day, not caring a single second who played it and whether the author is human. And if you look at the developments on Spotify you can well see that most people fetch music by mood or playlist and rarely care about who composed, produced or played the music, even if the meta data are available; music has become an anonymous commodity. I also spend several hours just pressing the random selection button, curious and stunned about whatever track this system generates. I don't miss the human aspect at all: it just sounds human.
It's not that the music itself is bad. I've listened to AI music while coding for example.
But for a piece of art to "take off". It needs to go beyond you. Not only do you need to tell your friends about it, but they need to tell their friends about it, and so on.
And oftentimes during the transmission process you don't even remember the name of the song, but you remember the name of the artist. Skrillex for example.
Humans care about what other humans do. We couldn't care less about what robots do.
The music market is likely goint to converge to the following two extreme segments: A) audiences who are mostly interested in idols and lifestyles, where music is merely a means to an end, and B) audiences which are mostly interested in the music itself (either as main act or in the background). For the A) audience, music is actually secondary and more of a supporting function. For the B) audience, the musicians or composers are secondary (i.e. mostly relevant as a source reference for getting more music). Since serivces like Suno have reached an excellent quality level for most genres, it opens rationalization potential for both groups of audiences. The production companies who focus on the A) audience can massively reduce their production costs (i.e. instead of a "ghost composer" and behind-the-scenes musicians they just use generated music); the only obstacle for them to overcome are today's copyright laws which don't protect computer generated music (which I personally still prefer to state-imposed monopolies enabled by patent or copyright law). The audience B) instead has access to an inexhaustible supply of new music that interests them, without having to wait for new releases.
Whether people will still learn an instrument or become musicians is a question that is difficult to answer today. The decline of this profession actually began with the invention of recording technology and has steadily increased since then. It is now almost impossible to make a living from it, and that was already the case before Suno and co. Services such as Spotify have taken anonymization and commodification to the extreme. Nevertheless, people still learn instruments and make music. It may well be that the creative possibilities offered by services such as Suno will even inspire people to make more music again.
Well, maybe you happen to be one of the lucky 0.1% musicians or composers who earn enough from music to make a decent living (i.e. not having one or more day jobs).
My reasoning is that the fact that it was made by another human is really important.
Not only because you might think a piece of music is lame because it was made by AI vs a human.
But also because all the things that bring you back to a piece of art is wrapped up in the person that made it.
People who are immense fans of the Beatles, Taylor Swift or Kanye West illustrate this point.
You keep coming back because you liked this person's music before, and so you can't wait to preorder their music in the future.
Same goes for books, paintings and really all other art I can think of.
An artist develops a following that snowballs into their music being broadly consumed.
There are "AI music artists" that have been around for a decade. Miquela is the one I know about. But in that timespan, hundreds of human artists have developed followings and cultural sway that far outweigh what Miquela has done.
It seems more and more that AI is simply another tool for humans to use. Rather than a replacement altogether of humans.