At #barcamplondon at the weekend, there was a session on AI music. I didn’t go, but a couple of friends who did mentioned it to me at lunch.

It seemed from the descriptions I heard that it was about the ease with which generative AI tools can make music that sounds like other music. The use case seemed to be “say you like Chopin’s Nocturnes. If you fancy something that sounds a lot like that, but are a bit bored with the canonical works, and Spotify’s recommendations don’t hit the spot for you, this tool could make you a playlist of stuff that satisfies that need.”

I choose those Nocturnes as an example because I’ve recently found that a) they’re really good for calming my otherwise feverish brain when overstimulated and b) that I do indeed find myself wishing there were a few more than however many opi actually exist and yeah Spotify hasn’t shown me anything yet that fits the bill. Debussy? No thanks.

Back to the AI. So I nodded along with this and asked questions in the way that you do at a barcamp. And thought, “that’s something shit that I hope never happens”. And then, yesterday, while perusing the Tube of You, I saw a recommendation for “Vintage Music For a Rainy Autumn Day” from a channel called “Vintage Relaxing”. I’m not going to link to their videos directly so that you can choose whether you want to give them any more view minutes, but as far as I can tell, they’re hour-long playlists of otherwise unidentified bits of music in a 1930s/40s generic big band style. I further surmise that these are machine generated – ie they are musical slop (“low-quality media—including writing and images—made using generative artificial intelligence technology”).

And, of course, because I did listen to some of this, there was more of the same, but different, in my recommendations this morning.

It’s 3 hours long.

So much to think about here:

Some people (I’ve met them, believe me!) have always argued that spam is in the eye of the beholder (what an image!) ie that one person’s spam is another person’s nutritious pork-based product. And, by extension, this is slop if you don’t like it, but jolly old-time music fun if you do. I don’t buy this. There is a line and I think this stuff crosses it.

I’m not in the “all AI bad because theft (past, present or future) from creators” camp. But I do think there’s probably a horrible easter egg surprise in this for people making music on the web – not least the prospect of getting copyright strikes on YouTube (and ultimately everywhere your music is available) because someone like this posted a shit-ton of generic stuff that you end up sounding like, but they got there first. When I saw this argument presented first, I was a bit “yeah I can see that with cinematic ambient stuff that all sounds the same to my geriatric ears anyway” but now I’m not so sure. It’s likely already there for your own best-beloved genre and you just haven’t seen it yet.

The “for you” style of algorithm is out of control. A little curiosity gets interpreted as eager attention. On the user side, we’re going to need *another* set of new filters to say “not that’s *not* for me, thank you” and while we’re waiting, I think the filter will be at the app/platform level (ie “I’m just not looking at Instagram reels for now”). But because it so fiercely and effectively leverages under-priced attention it isn’t going to go anywhere soon.

I’m really trying not to be a purist about the music itself – my daddy taught me to be open-minded in my listening while knowing your own preferences. But it is also shit. It’s dressed up muzak that goes nowhere, real-life bubble-gum for the ears whose main purpose is to rack up viewing hours from low cost content creation and thereby extract highly profitable advertising revenue from your ongoing attention.

It’s also just weird. If you do decide to listen carefully, you’ll ear the audio equivalents of how badly generative ai portrays fingers. Is that a guitar solo or piano? Is that trumpet or alto sax? It’s none of them, it’s an approximation of a bunch of sounds that is similar to something that was once organic. It has less soul than a replicant.