Last week, Music Business Worldwide reported that music streaming service Deezer had 50,000 fully AI generated music tracks uploaded to it every day. 1 But it gets worse.
“According to the platform, up to 70% of plays for fully AI-generated tracks have been detected as fraudulent, with Deezer filtering these streams out of royalty payments. Although fully AI-generated music currently accounts for only around 0.5% of all streams on Deezer, the company maintains that fraudulent activity remains the primary motivation behind these uploads. The platform says it removes all 100% AI-generated tracks from algorithmic recommendations and excludes them from editorial playlists to minimize their impact on the royalty pool.” 2
And
“The surge comes as Deezer unveils the results of what it calls a first-of-its-kind survey conducted by Ipsos across eight countries with 9,000 participants, exploring global attitudes toward AI-generated music. The survey’s most striking finding: 97% of respondents couldn’t distinguish between fully AI-generated tracks and human-made music in a blind listening test. More than half (52%) felt uncomfortable with their inability to tell the difference.” 3
Welcome to the world of “AI Slop,” where the AI product overwhelms human product just by sheer numbers of units. It’s sort of the tech equivalent of Gresham’s Law. No one has the time to listen to 50,000 new “songs” every day. It’s a Sisyphean task with a similar reward. Eventually the “slop” overwhelms everything.
A little more than a year ago, I opined that the real purpose of AI generated creative works was to put creative artists out of business. 4 Given the above scenario, where thousands of AI songs are generated instantly, which are indistinguishable from songs created by human beings, and are then uploaded to a streaming service where AI bots cause phony “plays” to grab onto a slice of the royalty pool, your future as a human in the music business is pretty bleak.
And are any of the AI songs any good? What will happen to the art of songwriting the longer this goes on? It’s probably already dying, if recent experience indicates.
Recently, I got an inexplicable hankering for a Big Mac. So off I trotted to McDonald’s. While waiting for my order, my ears perked up to a song on the sound system, one that I had not heard for a very long time.
It was “Clean Up Woman” by Betty Wright. It hit #6 on the Billboard Charts, way back when in 1971. That’s right, 54 years ago. I wondered what possessed the programmer to dig up a song that old? I kept listening.
Next up was “Takin’ It To The Streets” by the Doobie Brothers, which hit #13 in 1976. Progress of sorts, but still in the 1970’s.
Next up, “West End Girls” by the Pet Shop Boys. This electro ditty hit #1 in 1986.
Next up, “Crocodile Rock” by Elton John, which hit #1 back in 1972.
As I left with my food, I mused that I had not heard one song from this century.
What gives? No Beyoncé? No Ariana Grande? No Ed Sheeran? Not even one Taylor Swift song? C’mon!
Wouldn’t a few choruses of “Shake It Off” make you want to Super Size your Happy Meal?
The more I thought about it, this was a trend I should have seen coming.
Recently, I was picking up my order from the sub shop, and Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues” (“Make me wanna holler – throw up both my hands”), is playing. The 20-something black kid is singing along. When I tease him about singing a song that was a hit 30 years before he was born, he smiles and says “Hey, man, a classic is a classic.”
Just last month, my wife and I were in Amsterdam. We ducked into a pub, at random, just to get out of the rain. What was on the sound system? “Rock Your Baby” by George McCrae. It was a #1 hit, back in 1974. And the bartender was singing along. Complicating matters, the bartender was not Dutch – he was from Chile.
And recently at an improv comedy show here at NSU, there was a band playing in between the improv “games.” What did they play? “YYZ” by Rush (1981) and “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath (1970).
Now it would be easy to put on my old guy cranky pants and snarl “you see, today’s music sucks! Back in MY DAY….” But something’s going on here. I didn’t choose any of these song selections. Yet, from McDonald’s to Amsterdam to NSU, people are reaching back – WAY BACK – in time for their musical selections, many recorded decades before they were born.
So, what’s going on here?
Real musicians, playing real songs written by real people, perhaps?
But circling back to the top – 50,000 songs a day. Are any of them possibly going to be good? If there are, how will we know?
I guess the same way we have always sifted through popular culture – by word of mouth.
But that’s a lot of “slop” to slog through.