Producer Rick Beato uses AI tools to identify and tear apart an AI generated band, Velvet Sundown, a band that mysteriously pops into Spotify and amasses a million listeners in a month, suggesting that Spotify will soon push AI bands for more listenership.
Maybe kinda unrelated but I highly doubt one would be able to tell an “AI generated” music when the “AI” actually uses a DAW to “play” virtual instruments and use vocaloid. How’s it even different from a shitty human made track then? Pretty hard to draw the line.
Here’s my unmedicated and completely idiotic take.
I’m glad he’s doing these tests, but it’s pretty obvious in this case. The lyrics are very obviously AI generated, first of all. The overuse of certain words (smoke, boots, multiple song titles with the word dust, shakes, whispers, echos) are a strong indicator. Not every song using those is AI generated, obviously. But it’s like they said “see what words an LLM overuses when trying to write songs and put as many of them in a verse as possible”.
Ok, so maybe they just use it as a songwriting tool because they have no lyrics but they’re great musicians and want to put something out. Even without splitting stems most of it currently feels unnatural. But he makes a great point. Just listening without splitting there’s weird reverb. There are strange vocal artifacts. The guitar transients don’t make sense (which is part of why his splitter tool couldn’t split things properly). For a while everything sounded underwater and there are still traces of that. I see they moved past the country voice that was all over the place for a while. There’s a “shimmer” (I wish I had a better word to describe it) that sounds wrong.
It sounds like they took a human track and put every free plug-in they could find on it and dialed it up past the point of good taste. There’s no dynamic range. There’s too much (or just flat out wrong) reverb. There’s digital artifacts. A lot of that doesn’t matter if you’re listening on a Bluetooth speaker because you’ll never hear it. Vehicle systems hype and mask certain frequencies and may not reveal it. But if you listen on any halfway decent system it’s currently pretty obvious.
The real question: will enough people care? I do. Even if they could perfectly replicate session musicians and if they didn’t sing about whispering to your boots and shadows echoing through the dust but were able to really write in the style of my favorite artists I would care. Because the people making new music, trying new things, and pushing boundaries wouldn’t get the funding. So we would eventually end up with homogenized rehashes of what currently exists. If this had happened when all we had was orchestral music we’d all just be listening to AI rearranging that instead of having rap, rock, blues, metal, EDM, country, and all the other genres and their endless subgenres. We’ll never get to moon stank or whatever the next big iteration of music is. And that’s a loss for humanity because art is important.
Of course they are. It’s Spotify.
They pay artists less than other services, they harvest an atrocious amount of user data and platform Joe Rogan.
They won’t blink for a second to use Ai slop to pad the number in favour of not paying real artists to create real music.
You are better off going to any other platform and following real musicians. Discover new indie creators on bandcamp. Forget the big studios and help the artists.
Anyone have some cool indie musicians they like?
I can recommend: “The Excellent Man from Minneapolis”
Spotify is definitely the app that turns ‘we’ll pay you in exposure’ into a business strategy. What is your preferred method of supporting musicians? Do you buy MP3s or CDs online?
Nice recommendation. It’s less upbeat but I’ll toss in The Dears as one of my favs.
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Don’t really know him but he’s recently started showing up in my feed or whatever. Mostly he seems to bob his head and wag his finger to ‘Best of the n0s’ sound clips from what I’ve seen.
What makes him a tool?
Nothing IMO, the man’s analysis of the AI tracks, and his conclusions were pretty well supported. Watched about 90% of the video, and he didn’t seem like an asshole to me at all.
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Nobody is asking you to like Beato but surely you didn’t join go through the effort of finding a niche community like Lemmy just to shit on things like in every other part of the internet.
What is a good non-pretentious music producer to you? How would you feel if a band you liked turned out to be AI generated? What would it mean for someone to be musically inspired by AI generated music? Give me something.
You know, you’re right, I dont want to be just spreading negativity for no reason. I’m removing my comment.
Much love, Stillwater. Save that zesty spirit for when you need it. Keep living up to your name.