Me and my Ai #5: A Legitimate Musical Beef

 

 

Me and my Ai #5: A Legitimate Musical Beef

Earlier today a friend sent me a link to a YouTube music file. She knows I like blues and thought I'd enjoy a little aural stimulation. The music itself was fine, but impossible to enjoy.

Because it was Ai-generated.

The guitar sounded good: smooth and slick. But didn’t sound right. Too smooth, too consistent, and those licks … more than a few included identifiable chunks of Stevie Ray Vaughan. Didn’t sound like SRV himself – different tone – but way too familiar.

I searched the musician credited with the performance. Prolific or what! But a picture of the dude? Not one. Videos too, not one with a shot of actual musician playing. Bland scenery and geometrics - probably all Ai-generated too.

The big streaming companies know a lot of us like to have music going on in the background. They know we’re often not paying much attention. So they have Ai generate music for them that ‘sounds like’ the kind of music we’ve asked to listen to. Because when they stream that music, it’s ‘theirs’ and free from obligation to recompense any external music provider. (Though it’s another opportunity for corporate ‘profit shifting’ - arguing that one arm of the company, in a taxation-friendly location, is selling the right to play the music to another part of the company.)

A jazz piano playlist on Spotify did this exactly. It would begin by playing songs I recognised by musicians with familiar names, and I’d leave it on in the background. Over time, it would shift to tunes that occasionally sounded like bits of other tunes, by performers I’d never heard of. Eventually it would grate on my ears. Only now do I realise what was going on.

Of course, the music-generating Ai’s are going to get better – perhaps to the point where my semi-cultured ears no longer discern.

That the streaming companies are doing this makes me sad and angry. The vast majority of musicians are scraping to get by – doing extra work they don’t like, whether that means playing music that leaves them creatively vacant, or peripheral or completely music-unrelated work. And the streaming companies, massive multi-national corporations making massive profits already, are exploiting these creatives. Feeding their best work into the mill, and generating a substitute to on-sell that costs them next to nothing and leaves the original creative bereft.

Tell me please, is there any legal recourse for the world’s musicians? (Or at least for those who’ve released recordings the Ai's have been able to sample.) Could an enterprising legal type act on behalf of musicians everywhere and extract reasonable compensation from the big streamers substituting Ai-generated music for that of the human creatives, given that the substitute is drawn from the well of those human creatives?