Write some generic AI music, have have your small accounts using stolen giftcards bought with dirty money pump the track and watch it climb the charts as other jump on the band wagon.

Et voilà instant layering with no connections.

I'm pretty sure this is exactly how all the music I don't like gets into the charts. :P

Now I just go and look for new albums from bands I know I like. I wish there was a pre-2023 filter for the algorithmic feed.

Band-in-a-Box is a commercial program that has been around since 1990. What it did then was let you specify a chord progression, style, tempo, and instruments and it would make a generate a MIDI track. I think it might have also been able to take a melody and come up with a chord progression for it in a style/genre of your choosing.

The target market was musicians. Instrumentalists used it generate tracks to improvise or solo with for example, and songwriters found it useful to essentially have a full band at their beck and call while composing.

Over the years they added more features, and switched to sounds from recordings of real instruments played by real musicians. They have very good stretching and pitch transposition so you can use these at a range of tempos and keys and they still sound good.

It is still aimed at musicians, and can be overwhelming to others. This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.

It is not something the kind of person who just wants to describe what they want to hear and have a song produced would enjoy. But if an AI could operate it for them, maybe that would work and the result would be something with much better sounding instruments than the AI song makers (and without the risk of including unlicensed copyrighted material).

Some of my music is available om SoundCloud. Most of it is made on an iPhone. https://on.soundcloud.com/lHJN26CwcwtnQzc2CB

But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing. Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood. There's nothing you gain by listening to AI music day-to-day, so what's the argument for it - other than utmost indifference to human creativity?

my music tastes are pretty mainstream, and this just does absolutely nothing for me. it's exactly what i'd expect AI music to sound like - completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it.

i'd be willing to believe that this music was legitimately charting if it had at least some redeeming qualities, but i can't imagine how this could honestly get eleven spots on the iTunes chart without gaming it in some way.

I gradually went from various genres -> mostly nerdcore -> mostly AI nerdcore.

https://www.last.fm/user/testycool/library/tracks?from=2025-...

EDIT: Updated link to the most listened songs in the past 180 days. The songs are not generated by me.

Go on KEXP, find a new band you like, share it with your friends, buy a physical copy, buy a t-shirt, book tickets, like their stuff on socials. Watch the record companies flock to real bands.

For the second time on this thread, start with Angine de Poitrine. Live music is the antidote.

There will be quality real art music created by these systems, but not by those that prompt alone. This is a whole new level of instrument, and the levels of control beneath are there to seriously transform one's thoughts to music, and melody, and that composed symphony of separate elements into a symphony of intended meaning.

Perhaps traditional music and this form of music should be treated separate. The distinction between AI music that is prompt-only and what can be created from a deeper set of controls is immense, and is not distinguished at this time, and may never be with how surface level this entire public assessment of AI music happens to be.

I'd really love to see an actual source on this claim.

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...

It just seems unusual that a lot of people like the same thing. Even the channels on Youtube that I listen to are so prolific (people generate a large amount of music and just stick it in there) that I never go look for a particular track or anything. And there are so many of them that each one only gets a few thousand views.

Surely there's some gained and some lost. But coming from the era of buying an entire album, spending time reading the CD booklets and art, and listening to 10 songs which tell a larger story ---- what's being lost really hits home.

The last 6 years has been no music. I unsubscribed from everything since I felt music was an intrusion in the moment.

I had a quick listen to the "AI singer", and it's soulless, empty, and generic - Which is modern music anyway.

[1]: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...

The audience will out the good patterns, and it's up to the musicians or AI companies to serve better patterns.

I always feel some jealousy when listening to rockstars. Because they get all the action and I get so little. They see the world, are desired by all the beautiful women, earn a ton of money and don't have to work a boring job.

With AI music, I know it is just some lonely GPU in a cold, dark datacenter somewhere. Crunching numbers. Just like I do.

Since the Monkeys we all know, there won't be another Elvis Presley - I advise you to look him up, it is massively impressive, what this guy achieved and what records he holds.

Or put another way: what is music? What ain't artificial in music? Is a drum already artificial? Or an e guitar? Playback? Studio music?

The divide between a band and a song writer?

People trashed techno music in Germany during the early 90th as being "machine music without a soul, totally artificial, a computer is doing everything". Kraftwerk on the other hand, was quite the opposite. It is mind blowing, that they had to construct the hardware they were getting their sound of.

But no matter what, techno of the 90th appear to be true craftsmanship in comparison to todays music. Like the 30th Big Bands vs 60th Rock music. I don't imply to say "Everything used to be better." Nothing could be further from the truth. The thing is, some things actually never change except for the medium.

I stopped caring. We are all victim and perpetrator at the same time. You use AI - oh well, cheater I would say.

Women painting their faces - well...

Ever since people went un-natural to be civilized to paraphrase Karl Popper.

I made a cut off regarding literature. I mainly read the classics where no AI was available - but only an editor.

It is tougher than ever but I stopped being judgmental. I try to do, what is expressed with "The bait must appeal to the fish, not the angler." Mundus vult decipi.

We called out WWF for being scripted entertainment while going to the cinema expecting that the hero would actually really die during the first dramatic 5 minutes in the movie - oh well...

Enjoy! If it sounds good, who cares? If someones earns a buck, so what? We pay for Naked Canon etc. just to let lose. :)

https://music.apple.com/no/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...

oh man, I just am so bummed that around 2007 I ditched my 20 year collection of CDs and went digital whaaaaa!

1. Do the survey/focus groups to figure out a hot topic for a song. For instance your exploration shows that 300K girls between 13 and 17 years old were left by their boyfriend, so there is a 300K market for a song about that.

2. Find someone or group who will sing the song. Something your target audience will identify. E.g. "rebellious teenager" (take Britney Spears), "we need a group that will attack larger target" - take Spice Girls - we take one black, one white, one Latino looking (doesn't have to be real Latino, obviously), one polite and nice, one impolite. You get the point.

3. Note: singer/group does not need to know how to sing, they need to move reasonably on the scene, the rest autotune and computers will handle easily.

So, given the process, AI singer is just a little bit different "music" production process, not so much different from the one used up to date except that you don't need autotune anymore.

Luckily there are still people who do music for the sake of doing music and it really stands out as compared to 80% of fodder for listeners that is on YT, radio, Spotify.

However, I also listened to several other artists on the chart[1]. They all, bar a couple, are so low effort that they may also be generated by neural networks, FWIW.

[1]: https://itopchart.com/us/en/top-songs/

The idea is explained by Rick Beato here: https://youtu.be/rGremoYVMPc

I could understand opposing it on an ethical basis. I could even understand it if they claimed that it will dull us out or it just isn't good for the brain, sort of like we can say that tiktok/instagram reels are probably not good for our brains.

But to claim that it has no value? Surely my definition of value is just different, and I'm playing semantics.

The least-funny of clowns has value if they make someone laugh.

The most mind-destroying tiktok/reels have value if they entertain someone for a little while.

I'm not saying these are necessarily good things, but they certainly hold value. And AI art, like memes, like instagram reels, like watching paint dry, has value if consumers enjoy it. It has much more value than watching paint dry because many more people clearly enjoy it (and I don't think their brains will rot because of it).

Personally, I think AI art enables such a low barrier to entry that obviously we have a big problem with mass production of slop. Things that entertain (again, like tiktok/reels), but are probably not a net-positive for society.

However, while I recognize that problem, I know several people who are creating INCREDIBLE art with AI which they would never be able to do. Things that bring tears to my eyes and that are definitely not slop. Even if they are produced in a day, it takes a special mind to conjure up the right things to produce. Faster does not always mean worse (and what even is "good" or "bad" in art??). Tale as old as time.

There is an ethical debate to be had about this art being built on the stolen assets that previous artists, using traditional tools, created. I think it's a serious debate and I don't really know how we'll solve it.

So if I:

1. Ignore the ethical debate around attribution and, as an exercise, assume that there's "fair compensation to everyone involved" (not so sure if this will happen)

2. Assume we do find a system to properly curate content (which I do actually think will happen -- we will find ways of weeding out the best)

Then I absolutely want AI art to succeed. It has enabled so many around me to produce so many incredible things, I can't wait for more chapters in this beautiful history of humanity. Where more people can create more.

"1." is a tough ask. We need to figure it out. "2." I think we'll manage, and I guess even if we don't get "1.", then cat's out of the bag and these tools are too world-changing to keep them from being used. I want to see what these amazing creative geniuses do with them.

I took a break from Suno for many months .. attacking everyones slop including my own but my bandmates like my AI songs. Now at practice (80s & 90s music band) we listen and play along to the AI versions and have thrown in two into our setlist. Thus, for me Ive finally found an inspiring human usage of AI music! No text prompter could ever enjoy playing / performing their music in a band and to an audience and receive live human feedback. That's unless they do what millions other musicians have done .. cultivate their talent/musical interest.