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music as a commodity?

littlebeast

littlebeast

i feel… motivated
Joined
Jan 26, 2008
Location
CA historical landmark #399
Moto(s)
the red witch + the green goblin
Name
hey you
not a new question, or so i’ve found.

a little background (okay, maybe more than a little). sort of a confluence of recent events / disturbances. mostly around ‘optimizing’. AI in particular - ‘have you run that through GPT CHAT? you know, tell it you want what you said to be ‘more compelling’. no. and fuck you.

so how does this relate to music? been exploring. at first, finding interesting shit. so i listen more. until it gets to the point that there’s a monotonous and predictable sameness to it all. like it’s been run through that ‘more compelling’ filter more than one too many times. what the hell? why? per one musician ‘i know my demographic’. excuse me? does ‘demographic’ = ‘customer’? is your focus music or marketing? of course is does, and of course it is.

had a friend over recently, playlist going on the speakers as per usual, and they asked ‘don’t you listen to anything from this decade?’ was gonna say ‘no’. but on second thought, lemme run that by GPT CHAT, and ask for that to be reworded into a more compelling answer. :rolleyes
 
i’ve been pleasantly surprised by some of the music i have heard lately. i’m seeing larussell tomorrow. he’s very bay area and right now.

i have had to make a conscious effort to find music outside my usual comfort zone.

a lot of newer stuff is formulaic garbage for sure. when you find the stuff that isn’t? aaaah. 😄
 
Music? Sure, plenty around. Glad to have it. Anything is better than to have the TV droning 24/7.

But is it art?

With my money I bought my first album in 1964 but had to play it on dad's stereo. He declared that I hadn't bought music, just noise.

Comes now 2024 and AI is fingering chords while I am turning into my father. Spent a lifetime learning how to listen to music and now have to decide what is and what isn't 'art' (strictly for myself).

If it waddles and quacks, it's a duck. Alrighty then, what pours out of my speakers, that doesn't insult my ears, is art. I am thus prepared for the coming new era of self-aware artificial intelligence sliding into the music arena.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame doors are wide open aren't they? Keith Richards might be an ancient rocker but the hall ain't seen nothing if an A.I. inductee can't die. Imagine being unable to live long enough to hear a favorite artist's last album.
 
In the modern era, where there are record labels and producers, there is an expectation that musicians will create music that sells. Before that, musicians typically relied on a patron of some kind to earn a living. In all of these cases, in order to live, the creative process was a commercial endeavor to one degree or another. Musical progress did occur, but incrementally, with new music having a strong stylistic resemblance to what had come before.

Music theory codifies these stylistic elements, establishing rules. The rules aren’t necessarily meant to be followed, but if a composer observes them, the resulting composition will tend to fit in with the stylistic expectations of the genre or period. As much as these elements can be studied and classified, street musicians have always had an intuitive sense for what sounds good and what doesn’t. This sense is mainly based on what they had heard before. The mind recognizes the common practices of the day and the listener tends to become uncomfortable when listening to music that is too new and different.

20th century composition included an experimental music movement, where composers fundamentally were exploring the question, “What is music?” In other words, how far afield can I go from common practices before we generally would not consider the resulting noise music or art? With pieces like 4:33 of Silence, it turned out you could go pretty far out there. While nobody is putting that piece on their playlist, stuff like that did serve to stretch boundaries faster than they had been stretched before.

A lot of the music many of us grew up to was guitar based. The layout and tuning of the guitar makes some melodies and chord voicing convenient and other melodies pretty inconvenient. When music was being created by a few guys jamming, the results usually were partly bounded by what was relatively easy to play on the guitar and bass. Combine that with our tendency to remain in familiar territory and a lot of music began to sound interchangeable.

YouTube and Instagram have made it possible for artists who want to do their own thing to write a song, put it out there and see if anyone else likes it. This seems to be where a lot of innovation is occurring now, as these musicians can find an audience that isn’t being gate kept by a producer or label. One such band is Polyphia, whose style has evolved during the time they have been together, but is now often composed using DAWs and other tools where the musician can create melodies that aren’t convenient to play. Their guitarists, who are virtuosic players, then put in the time to learn the parts, interpret them and play them. They have created a distinct style and sound by doing this.

Other bands are finding ways to do the same and there is plenty of new material being produced by processes like this. At the same time, there are a lot of other musicians who are still jamming and composing music out of the fragments that emerge from the jams. A lot of the time, these inspires musical phrases are inspired by something the musicians have heard before, leading to interchangeable songs.

This came up in an AI thread recently, where the claim was that AI isn’t creative because it derives new (musical) output from what has come before. From where I sit, that describes the creative process as humans usually apply it today.
 
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The Pet Shop Boys had this problem from the git. Created music in the studio, never intended to be on-stage performers. Anything they did 'live' wasn't/isn't. Beatles were there before them. They could create music in the studio they could not easily perform live. Now we have computers.

The guitar was distorted by rock musicians. Funny enough, originally achieved by turning amps to 11.

In my mind, A.I. created music is just another step in the process. I posed this question to a number of people in the field,

"Music has sped along in my lifetime. After speed punk, life as we know it end, like some episode of Twilight Zone.?"

A.I. can reach that level of speed. Look out!
 
littlebeast said:
...had a friend over recently, playlist going on the speakers as per usual, and they asked ‘don’t you listen to anything from this decade?’
Click to expand...
As I was reading this sentence my playlist was playing something that I love from 1956. ;)

Just this last week I added another 150 songs from the 1980's to try to appreciate some "newer" music. The Time/Life music is a good place to start if you want some of the best stuff from a particular decade. I have stuff going clear back to 1945 just to appreciate other time periods. I can't listen to very much of that old stuff in one session, though.
 
As a high school band nerd, music is wonderful and the soundtrack to my life. All genres.

When I think of my favorite songs and listen to them, it puts a smile on my face.
 
nah
 
Has music been commiditized? Well, no and yes. Has music that is designed for a broad/mass appeal been commiditized? Sure. It wasn't AI that did this. The number of writers of really big, popular songs is surprisingly small. AI makes it a lot easier to create these results, Heck, anyone can do it now without even using a DAW.

From an objective standpoint you can analyze music complexity and popular music has gotten increasingly simple; to the point that reproducing today's popular song tropes is simply what is being done in a broad sense. It's being done by songwriters and by AI. As someone who creates music this doesn't bother me in the slightest. People like what they like. That's fantastic.

But great music is out there. Great rock music is out there, great jazz is out there, great new age is out there, great experimental music is out there. Great music of any genre that interests you is out there and the ability to publish it has never been easier. The difficulty (at least for me) is in finding it. I have a couple of performers/bands right now I'm really passionate about. But finding more that interest me is difficult. I find the matching algorithms from music streaming services to be REALLY bad.

I also want to say that while pop music song structure and complexity has gotten ridiculously simple, pop music production techniques have gotten mind-blowingly good. There are songs I'll listen to that are popular and the musical elements are so simple I can't enjoy it. It's like the musical equivalent of boiled rice. But the production is amazing. The studio engineer and the mix engineer in me is flabbergasted by how good the reproduction is. That same utterly boring song I can't stand to listen to from a music standpoint is full of interesting tidbits from a mix and song arranging standpoint.

If you limit yourself to the rock/pop genre and create objective metrics around musical complexity (e.g. chord progressions, chord voicings, key modulations and the setup for these modulations, key signatures, time signatures and time signature changes, melody lines, lyrical vocabulary choices, imagery, metaphorical content, etc.) you'll find that things peaked in the 70s for popular rock music. That's why rock music of that era is somewhat lionized. The simplistic nature of rock music from the 50's and 60's had matured into a far more diverse and expressive musical construct in the 70s (there was still a lot of simple, crap then, too).

Now? Heck, just turn the crank and create another sound-alike result. To the younger crowd it's new to them and that's exciting.
 
^^^ awesome feedback. my dude plays guitar (has a large, and wide ranging collection), not professionally, but is super into music theory and listens to a lot of analysis (recordings, performances, etc.). what got me thinking, was things that i hear him spending long hours trying to perfect, are easily perfected digitally. so naturally, ‘what’s the point?’ occurred to me. like, why strive to be that good, when an even better result can be manufactured without any human intervention? it’s almost gotten to the point where i appreciate raw and flawed more than flawless. he is particularly fond of old blues (the music and the musicians) - something i didn’t originally gravitate toward. but now i do. it used to annoy me when he’d point out the errors in old recordings and live performances. but now? raw and flawed seems much more authentic to me. music to me is emotional. and it annoys the shit out of me to imagine a non-human entity manipulating my emotions. pardon me for going there, but it’s kinda like BoB (battery operated boyfriend) versus the real thing. yeah, it may get you off every time, but the satisfaction is several orders of magnitude higher with the real thing. can’t even imagine getting to the point where i couldn’t tell the difference. metaphorically speaking, of course.
 
littlebeast said:
^^^ awesome feedback. my dude plays guitar (has a large, and wide ranging collection), not professionally, but is super into music theory and listens to a lot of analysis (recordings, performances, etc.). what got me thinking, was things that i hear him spending long hours trying to perfect, are easily perfected digitally. so naturally, ‘what’s the point?’ occurred to me. like, why strive to be that good, when an even better result can be manufactured without any human intervention? it’s almost gotten to the point where i appreciate raw and flawed more than flawless. he is particularly fond of old blues (the music and the musicians) - something i didn’t originally gravitate toward. but now i do. it used to annoy me when he’d point out the errors in old recordings and live performances. but now? raw and flawed seems much more authentic to me. music to me is emotional. and it annoys the shit out of me to imagine a non-human entity manipulating my emotions. pardon me for going there, but it’s kinda like BoB (battery operated boyfriend) versus the real thing. yeah, it may get you off every time, but the satisfaction is several orders of magnitude higher with the real thing. can’t even imagine getting to the point where i couldn’t tell the difference. metaphorically speaking, of course.
Click to expand...
What artificial enhancements, autotune, etc skip over is just the emotion of musical participation.

As a listener I'd rather catch a busker with a beater guitar doing his gig than stream a perfect rondo generated by an AI. Wabi-sabi perhaps, but visceral.

But, gird yourself, in the near future artificial intelligence will become self-aware then all bets will be off. Your BoB might generate an actual emotional need of you. Then what? Metaphorically speaking, of course.
 
Squidly McSmearstain said:
Has music been commiditized? Well, no and yes. Has music that is designed for a broad/mass appeal been commiditized? Sure. It wasn't AI that did this. The number of writers of really big, popular songs is surprisingly small. AI makes it a lot easier to create these results, Heck, anyone can do it now without even using a DAW.

From an objective standpoint you can analyze music complexity and popular music has gotten increasingly simple; to the point that reproducing today's popular song tropes is simply what is being done in a broad sense. It's being done by songwriters and by AI. As someone who creates music this doesn't bother me in the slightest. People like what they like. That's fantastic.

But great music is out there. Great rock music is out there, great jazz is out there, great new age is out there, great experimental music is out there. Great music of any genre that interests you is out there and the ability to publish it has never been easier. The difficulty (at least for me) is in finding it. I have a couple of performers/bands right now I'm really passionate about. But finding more that interest me is difficult. I find the matching algorithms from music streaming services to be REALLY bad.

I also want to say that while pop music song structure and complexity has gotten ridiculously simple, pop music production techniques have gotten mind-blowingly good. There are songs I'll listen to that are popular and the musical elements are so simple I can't enjoy it. It's like the musical equivalent of boiled rice. But the production is amazing. The studio engineer and the mix engineer in me is flabbergasted by how good the reproduction is. That same utterly boring song I can't stand to listen to from a music standpoint is full of interesting tidbits from a mix and song arranging standpoint.

If you limit yourself to the rock/pop genre and create objective metrics around musical complexity (e.g. chord progressions, chord voicings, key modulations and the setup for these modulations, key signatures, time signatures and time signature changes, melody lines, lyrical vocabulary choices, imagery, metaphorical content, etc.) you'll find that things peaked in the 70s for popular rock music. That's why rock music of that era is somewhat lionized. The simplistic nature of rock music from the 50's and 60's had matured into a far more diverse and expressive musical construct in the 70s (there was still a lot of simple, crap then, too).

Now? Heck, just turn the crank and create another sound-alike result. To the younger crowd it's new to them and that's exciting.
Click to expand...

I really appreciated this video on the reductive simplicity and use of repetition of modern pop music.

 
I'm just grateful the bands I mostly listen to still produce, still tour. I hope to catch two of them this year.
 
High five for musical performers and performances where musicians go off the script, or fuck up, forget lyrics and occasionally fall over drunk and destroy shit!!
 
A guitar, bass, and drums, @ The Spirit Room, the bass player is a unknown replacement, for the band.
Played thru to the end of the first set, then turned the bass player loose, last song.
Ever hear Hendrix's version of The Star Spangled Banner? Played on an electric bass?
Surprised everyone, including the band
 
the first minute explains it succinctly but the entire album is probably one of the best examples of musical interpretation of a great previous body of work.

 
augustiron said:
High five for musical performers and performances where musicians go off the script, or fuck up, forget lyrics and occasionally fall over drunk and destroy shit!!
Click to expand...
saw leo kottke live a few months ago. small theater. he was an awesome mess. stopped for a smoke behind the building after the show. he comes wandering past, guitar case in hand. nodded and said ‘hey’. he looked over and nodded. didn’t say anything, just walked to his little beater car, put the guitar in the back seat and drove off. it put a perfect cherry on top of the night.
 
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littlebeast said:
saw leo kottke live a few months ago. small theater. he was an awesome mess. stopped for a smoke behind the building after the show. he comes wandering past, guitar case in hand. nodded and said ‘hey’. he looked over and nodded. didn’t say anything, just walked to his little beater car, put the guitar in the back seat and drove off. it put a perfect cherry on top of the night.
Click to expand...
ah, the nod. Cool.
 
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