This Feels Different

Technology has disrupted and altered the music business many times in the past. It’s not a New Thing, by any stretch of the imagination. The invention of the printing press was a radical change for music. The player piano came along and suddenly there was a need for a method payment to songwriters, which became known as “mechanical royalties.” (We still call royalties paid for record sale “mechanicals” even though there has been nothing mechanical about digital recordings for decades.) Radio came along and was an absolute boon to musicians. Sound for film put movie theater organists out of work, but created a huge movie soundtrack industry. Cassette tapes were surely going to destroy the music industry. they didn’t. Then it was CDs. Again – nope.

The MP3 and Napster together nearly brought the record industry to its knees, exposing the arrogance and the short-sightedness of record company executives. Years later, those executives knuckled under to the various streaming services, negotiating absurdly weak deals with Spotify and their ilk. Yet music survived. Bowed but unbroken.

I fear AI may be different.

A disturbing statistic was released recently: 28% of music being delivered to streaming services is now fully AI-generated. The global music platform Deezer is receiving 30,000 tracks – EVERY DAY. Even if we suppose all that music is completely horrible and not worth the effort to bother listening to it, the sheer clutter of all that music makes the already near-impossible task of real musicians trying to be heard feel positively Sisyphian. (Sisyphus-esque?)

When I entered the music business in the last days of the 1970s (I was young…very young.), I had visions of making Real Money. I had a Number One hit on Christian Radio by 1984, recorded by the hottest artist in the genre. And that’s when I learned Christian Radio paid only a tiny fraction of what Pop and Country Radio paid in royalties. As in 5-10%. The ratio of record sales was somewhat similar, as well. So, no Real Money. But I stayed with that genre of music, not because I’m some sort of righteous music missionary, but because an honest writer writes about what he or she knows and cares about. So, I wrote about Jesus, and continued to do so even after I discovered it didn’t pay nearly as well as writing about drinking, and cheating, and girls named Billie Jean.

A few years ago, I released a solo CD of some off-center songs (see “Sounds Crazy”) and it eventually landed on the streaming sites. Then a couple of months ago, I released a few collections of my choral music into the streaming world, so people could listen on whatever service they might subscribe to. I knew there would be little compensation. But… (and now I return to the theme of this Blog)

How am I, or any niche recording artist, supposed to cut through the noise at the streaming services when there are thousands of records being added DAILY. Worse – nearly a third of those recordings are being generated by AI!

Computers have no inner compulsion to create. Computers only “create” when a human instructs them to do so, and they “create” by mimicking what they have scraped off the Internet. (For the record, that is not creating.) Humans do have a need to create. We were made to create. So, why in the name of all that’s holy, are people using computers to make music, when there are plenty of creative people doing that work? The answer is simple: for money.

There is still money to be made in music – especially if you don’t have to pay royalties to humans for writing it. Greedy, ethics-free SOBs, who know how to program AI, and who to “teach” their computers to “compose” by scraping (AKA – stealing) copyrighted music off the Internet, can produce finished records in seconds that sound remarkably like whatever has been recorded. And apparently, people will listen. Or perhaps should I say, people will “click.”

Look – I write what I write because I wanna write it, and I write it when I wanna write it. Barring some amazing Hallmark-like Christmas Miracle story, I know I’m not gonna get rich from writing what I write. It’s an uphill struggle just to get folks to listen. (And now we’re back to Sisyphus.) But for crying out loud, should I (or any musician, for that matter) have to compete with a computer that is scraping our music off the Internet to learn how to mimic what we do? In the end, this will result in only one of a very few things:

1. POSSIBLE RESULT ONE: Listeners will get wise and revolt. They will suddenly care about quality and originality. In the Pop world, more music will sound like, you know… music… and less like… well – whatever it is they’re playing now. (And you kids get off my lawn!)
   In church, the gatekeepers (Where did they go?) will educate themselves on how a well-written song is constructed, the difference between a song suitable for a soloist or a congregation, and maybe check out the theology of the latest P&W “hits” a little more closely.
   For the record, I’m not betting on this result. I hope I’m wrong.
2. POSSIBLE RESULT TWO: The average listener grows numb to the sameness of AI music. They decide it’s “good enough.” (Oh, how I hate that phrase.) Record companies begin to fold. Music publishing becomes an archaic business, consigned to caretaking the “standards” of the past. Hits will be created by computer programmers who know nothing about music other than what generates clicks. Real musicians, both pop and classical, will still play – but only for themselves and a handful of music lovers. If they’re lucky they’ll find a wealthy benefactor.
   Church music will become an endless stream of AI-generated P&W songs. So – almost no difference there.

As for right now, anybody daring to write and/or record songs faces the fact that computers are kicking out thousands of songs every day – no talent, inspiration, or effort required. Frankly – those are the elements that make any creative endeavor worthwhile – proving that AI-generated art of any kind is not creative – but merely apish mimicry. This offends me. What’s more, it angers me. Because these same computer nerds could be spending their time working on something truly useful – like teaching computers how to mow my lawn, tune my car (at night in my garage while I’m sleeping), or automatically lock my refrigerator from 8pm till 6am every day (whether I like it or not).

But no – they wanna think they are songwriters. As if pushing this rock up that hill wasn’t hard enough already.