Preaching caution on AI despair
Solutions are out there
A longtime, well-respected self-releasing artist client of ours wrote me this week:
Subj: Did you see this?
I am ready to throw in the towel!!
(That was the whole email.)
The article details Spotify’s efforts to rival Suno, Udio, and other AI-music platforms, both in letting users generate “new” AI works and, more crucially, in letting users generate “derivatives” of existing music, i.e. AI-generated covers or remixes.
I, and a growing chorus of voices (no pun intended), share this artist’s concerns. Artisanal music makers and appreciators such as ourselves obviously have lots of reasons to be nervous when big tech embraces piracy at scale.
That said, I did and must caution against despair when it comes to generative AI in music, for a few reasons.
Despair probably won’t help you…
I don’t want to suggest anyone’s despair is not wholly justified, warranted, and healthy to express, nor do I want to put what is clearly a societal/collective problem at the feet of individuals, as is too often the case in these situations (intentionally or not).
That said - for me at least, despair never leads to positive outcomes. Allowing myself to fall into it (as does sometimes happen) only compounds the problem.
For me the way to feel better is to keep calm, look for solutions that are within my control, and work on them while keeping in mind that neither my worst fears nor my wildest dreams are likely to be what the future holds.
Artists and (real) music companies can’t snap AI out of existence, but what can we control?
… and solutions are out there.
Last week, a newer client of ours published this article (republished here with permission):
It’s one of the most encouraging and inspiring things I’ve read in a long time, and not just because we get name checked at the top.
To sum up, they tried all the normal ways of promoting their first release (videos, singles, socials, etc) and after a disappointing few months, decided to start giving away the stems, beats, and everything else that went into making the record in a single free “producer pack,” something they’d had lots of experience with prior to starting the label.
They put it up, and at first nothing happened.
Then the download notifications started coming in.
A few the first day.
A couple hundred the next week.
Then we started getting hundreds of downloads every day.
Within days, producers were tagging the artist in remixes and flooding his DMs.
Soon they’d hit their revenue targets, and they’re now selling that same pack for $199 (or less if you join their membership, another very interesting innovation).
This might seem like a miracle, and in some ways it is. Trying to recreate what they did isn’t likely to produce the same results, but that’s not the point. The point is you don’t really know what might work, and you never will if you don’t try.
AI Might Help The Industry Evolve In Positive Ways Too
There are some interesting takeaways at the bottom of that story that I encourage you to check out, but one is both hard to swallow and imho points the way towards a better future for artists and music companies, AI or not:
I thought streaming and social media would be our main driver, but it turns out I was wrong… Streams should probably not be the main goal.
We’re already in our slop era. It’s extremely hard to break through on algorithmically driven platforms, yet people still love music, artists, and buying things from or related to them.
If anything, AI helping flooding the zone with slop might help push actual artists in a similar direction to what happened with Sounds by 24, something we’ve long preached and attempt to enable at Infinite Catalog as a viable path: artists and the people/companies they work with should not limit themselves to “just” releasing finished records.
Keep the deals simple (profit share), and talk with your artists about the potential for helping with additional things like publishing admin, merch, live shows, or wherever you have additional interests or talent.
Make these opt-ins instead of land grabs, keep good track of the accounting (using Infinite Catalog or otherwise, you can do this in spreadsheets people), be bravely communicative about how it’s going, and keep looking for solutions. You never know what might happen.