Make Better Music. Please.
It seems I can’t move on past AI Music, because as it should be doing, it’s constantly changing and having more impact. First, here’s an update on my AI Music creator of choice, Suno Music. No sooner than I posted my wrap-up installment last month, the website updated a new feature that allows the user to upload original audio up to 60 seconds in length. Although that doesn’t seem like much, Suno can take that original audio sample and create a new song that matches the style, instrumentation, and recording techniques. Although the original audio can be vocal or instrumental, I’ve discovered that instrumental works best for me. Instrumental, by the way, means no vocals. Therefore, I took an original instrumental song I composed 40 years ago called Brass and Blue and chopped it up into 30-second fragments. From there, I generated new, original songs based on those short fragments, and I was pleased with the results. As always, some things were awful, but most of the creations were not too bad.
In addition, I joined an online support group for Suno and had a marvelous opportunity to interact with one of the site’s programmers name “Peff.” (other than that, I have no idea what his real name is). From Peff, I learned some very valuable tricks and tips, including how to strengthen my prompts (instructions to the music creator) and how to express approval or disapproval so that edits on a song will be more to my liking. Peff also assured me that it would be a mistake to think of the prompts as coded programming. He said they are “suggestions,” nothing more, and the AI may choose to follow them or not when creating a song. For example, I told Suno that I wanted a children’s choir with sleigh bells to sing a song I was creating and editing, but I never got either one. I never got sleigh bells or any kind of bells, and the vocals were always adult male or adult female solo vocals. I’m still working on that one.
However, the purpose of this post revolves around a growing discussion of the “immorality” of AI Music, and I am compelled to drag you all in with me.
An article on Bloomberg last week described a lawsuit against Suno AI brought by Universal Music Group, Warner, and Sony for using copyrighted songs to train their AI models. The lawsuit basically states that it is illegal to study a song’s compositional elements and learn from them to create future songs.
Yes, I realized exactly how stupid and ridiculous that sounded as soon as I typed it.
If the premise of this suit has legal merit, then every Music Appreciation and Music Theory course I teach is in jeopardy. There is no physical way to learn how to write songs without studying, you know, SONGS. The 20th Century composer Arnold Schoenberg believed that a pure composer should be self-taught in order to avoid absorbing influences from other composers, but even he believed that the only way to learn composition was to study compositions. Universal, Warner, and Sony have long and sometimes embarrassing histories of suing people who they believed stole their copyrighted material, but even as suit-happy as they are, they’ve never brought a lawsuit against a human for studying their songs and learning how to compose from them. The heart of this lawsuit could be more accurately translated as, “Your music sounds too much like ours, and we can’t have that.”
So, what’s the difference here? Why are they suddenly so afraid of AI when they weren’t previously afraid of little Trevor down the street? The answer is MONEY. It has nothing to do with artistic integrity or pedagogical continuity - it’s all about money. If the AI models are successful and people can just create their own songs for free to sound exactly like what they want, then how are Universal, Warner, and Sony going to make any profit? The lawsuit doesn’t say, “Stop learning how to write songs.” Instead, it says, “Stop cutting into our profits.” As far as I’m concerned, they’ve already thrown in the towel and surrendered with the filing of this suit. Instead of giving up, they should invest more time and effort into figuring out how to either make money off AI music, or just write better songs. No matter what their concern might be, they’d better start figuring it out, soon. AI is not going to self-impose a moratorium to allow the slow-pokes time to catch up.
Therefore, here’s the point of this entire post:
If the recording industry believes that AI is making exact duplicates of its music, then the quality of the recording industry is in the toilet, and they’re admitting it.
Let me say that again:
If the recording industry believes that AI is making exact duplicates of its music, then the quality of the recording industry is in the toilet, and they’re admitting it.
At absolute best, I consider myself to be an average songwriter. However, no matter how good AI music is, I've never seen anything it could do that I couldn't do better. I can always take any AI song and throw in some compositional techniques to improve it. So, if AI music is as good or better than what's on the Billboard Hot 100, then AI ain't the problem.
Paul McCartney’s brilliant song Penny Lane has 7 chord changes (if I’m counting correctly). Although all the chord changes are abrupt, they are totally functional, using a pivot chord that is common to both keys, which is a compositional technique going back hundreds of years. In other words, Paul knew exactly what he was doing. There’s really no practical reason for changing keys that much in a song, other than Paul could do it, and he enjoyed doing it. There is no AI system anywhere that can come close to duplicating such a complicated and irrational achievement.
Therefore, if the recording industry wants to distance itself from AI and not suffer monetarily from its advance, then they need to write, record, and produce BETTER MUSIC. That’s the answer.
Almost a year ago, there was a big story/controversy about a singer/songwriter named Oliver Anthony and an original song of his called Rich Men North of Richmond. The song was independently composed, recorded, produced, and released, and it blew up the internet. Without being released on radio, the song went to #1 on Billboard, Apple, Spotify, and others. As you would expect, major record company executives started throwing money at Oliver Anthony to entice him to sign with them, and so far, he’s flatly turned down every one of them.
He’s not stupid. He totally understands that by signing with them, he would become rich beyond relief. However, he’s not making music for the purpose of becoming rich. That was never his goal. He’s making music because he just wanted to make music, and I hold his integrity in the highest regard. He also understands that if he signs with them and takes their money, then his days of doing things his way are over.
Good for you, Oliver Anthony.
In the late 1930’s and 1940’s, big band swing jazz was the most popular form of music in America, mostly because it was great for dancing. Therefore, the easiest thing to do would be to form a big band and just copy everyone else. However, that would have been a recipe for obscurity, because why would anyone listen to a copy of Count Basie when they could just listen to Count Basie? That was the thinking of consumers at the time, and big bands “made it big” by somehow sounding different from everyone else. Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Chick Webb, Les Brown, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, etc., were all different and unique. You knew it was Benny Goodman the instant you heard it, even if it was a song you’d never heard before. Rock ‘n Roll of the 50’s was the same way. So was the British Invasion and American Soul of the 60’s, and the immensely vast landscape of pop music in the 70’s, where seemingly every single artist sounded different from every other single artist. Again, the rule was as follows: if you sound like anyone else, you have no future. In order to be distinguished, you had to have your own sound.
Values have certainly changed a lot in pop music, and they have no one but themselves to blame for the mess they’re in. The recording industry decided they wanted everyone to sound exactly alike, and they got what they wished for. I consider myself decently current on pop music, but I stand no chance at naming the artist of a new song, because they seriously sound ALL ALIKE, and that’s the whole point. That’s what they’re going for in the first place. And man, I have to admit a perverse pleasure at watching it bite them in the butt.
Make better music. Please.