I have a very pragmatic view on music: all I care about is whether it sounds good or not. That’s it. That’s literally it. And from that standpoint the advent of AI music has been a major net positive for me.
You can choose to ignore that and come tell me about the ethics of using AI or how you care about the story behind the song and so on and that’s all fine but just note that you’re no longer addressing what I’m actually saying here.
I’m also not claiming it’s great - only that it’s good. I’ve yet to discover an AI song that I go back to like I do with many human-made songs but if I want to put on a playlist playing in the background then one consisting of entirely AI-made music reliably provides me well above average track after another whereas with organic music I need to sift through a ton of absolute crap to stumble upon the occasional good track that still rarely exceeds what AI is able to output. I can go on YouTube and put on a 2 hour playlist of Jazz House or similar and I don’t get the urge to skip a single track.
Currently I feel like where AI still trips is lyrics - they still are only plausible sounding nonsense once you actually start paying attention to it but especially for instrumental music it has far exceeded the level of a good average human artist.
Few examples of what I’m refering to: with vocals and without.
This is also true but it’s a separate point. If someone was able to come up with a tool that could find all that music for me to listen to then I’d be all for it but currently the only way to discover that is what I stated above: sift through a mountain of junk to find the few gems hidden in between. Sometimes I just want to listen to good music instead of just remaining perpetually on the hunt for it.
Have your tried listening to the radio? There are millions of radio stations on the internet, and hundreds around you locally with FM radio. They curate music so they find the gems for you
I have and I stopped for a reason. Well over 90% of what I hear there I’m not into. I don’t think I have a single human-curated playlist on my music library as I’ve yet to discover one that’s worth listening through in its entirety. This AI can do far better. And like I said: this isn’t for finding gems but only to have something to put on when I just want to listen to good music.
Someone pointed me to FIP (Radio France) recently, and it’s been great.
Lmao. Do you like rock iHeart radio. How about some hip hop iHeart radio. No maybe a little country iHeart radio
I cherish the hunt. Sometimes something I’ll pick up and listen to for three minutes to test, I’ll find it to be unlistenable nonsense, and then I come back to it again and again.
Anyway, that’s how I have both of Angine de Poitrine’s albums on vinyl now.
The hunt! YES! It makes finding something great even better!
Also, I’ve found that most music that sticks with me, that I keep coming back to again and again, I will have an almost kneejerk dislike of. But like you said, there’s something there that plants a seed in your brain, and calls you back to explore it deeper.
There’s websites like Music Map where you can put in a band you like and it’ll show bands that are similar in sound. It uses positioning and links to show similarities.
It’s not perfect but I’ve found a lot of bands that I didn’t know existed that sound great that I’d never heard of.
Just another tool in the box for you.
The thing is that there are very few bands that I like. I like individual tracks from multiple bands but rarely I stumble upon one that has more than one good song. If I randomly pick 1000 songs from my playlists there’s probably well over 900 individual artists there.
YouTube does a half decent job at recommending me music I like - much better than Spotify at least, but even then it constantly reguires me to get up and go change a track which is exactly the thing I don’t want to do when I put up music playing in the background while doing something else.
what are the bands that you like?
I already mentioned it here.
That is true. I found a solid to find people on last.fm that were very adjacent to my eclectic taste and see what they hear what I don’t. Having scrobbled every song I heard in the last decade, the algorithm is pretty efficient.
Bandcamp works fine too for that. “XYZ bought new music”, then I go check what they bought and often buy it too.
But I never listen to music “in the background”. I either listen or I don’t. So maybe I grew more picky with every passing decade 😁