A lot of AI right now since Udio, Suno and Stable Audio just got into the spotlight by offering anyone to make their own song. Just check the post before this one about What is an artist? And you will find me doing a song in 2 minutes. The interesting fact came the same day when the Swedish music magazine MI made a list of the most important indie companies in Sweden. In the top five of the list, you find Epidemic Sound, Queenstreet Content, Overtone Studios all companies that just do ”fake music”, or music that now AI can do for free.
So Epidemic Sound is selling music to TV production, commercials, and others. It’s a jingle company. It was created since the music industry was a complicated place to clear songs, the idea was to just buy out the songs own them, and sell at a cheap price. A lot of artists just did mediocre fast songs that they got paid one time for selling to Epidemic Sound. Of course, there was a lot of debate about this in the beginning. I guess now, you don’t need them at all. Just go and get your jingle for free on AI you don’t get cheaper than that. And AI is doing it better than the artist who just did a mediocre song to get some payment.
I guess a lot of supervisors are now pretty scared. Not all of them are useless. If you going to use famous songs that should be cleared you need them. That market will still be there, the question is if it will be the same old songs as today or if AI manages to get a worldwide hit. Also, if the supervisor’s work is close to the production they are good at finding the right music for the project. Still, I guess in some cases these will be replaced by some dude that are good at prompting. The ones that probably have to seek other things now are people just working with background and mood music here AI will take over. Overtone Studios that makes different mood playlists. This is not needed at all. Since it’s just mood, just tell AI to keep producing a steady stream of mood music in certain moods, new songs all the time just keeping the mood.
More interesting is companies like Queenstreet which is owned by Max Martin. Here you have some people that make hit music in fast space and get them out on Spotify as fake artists. Or they give out music under different names, just taht the artist has no real picture or can do live shows. The artist is just ”real” on the streaming platforms, they are not touring, just giving out music. You can say this is the rebellion of the studio musicians from the old days. You want to be in the music industry but only work nine to five. Same here though, anyone can do this with AI and probably they have used some AI over the years to be such fast producers of music. The problem is that AI soon be better than real producers and companies that just make music under a name will have a hard time staying relevant.
The interesting part is that all of the top five on the list are just going after Spotify, if you check the numbers against YouTube it’s not even close. Swedish companies have painted themself into the Spotify corner. I guess that many from abroad might have done the same. So, what happens now when Spotify is just going to be flooded with totally ok or even great music? Music that probably though took these companies a day to make is now done in five minutes by anyone. And music only matters if you put it into social exposure, we have totally forgotten that.
Of course, it will start counting real artists much higher. Music itself will be downgraded. Something that is just a couple of pushes of some buttons for free has little value. A live concert as an experience can be worth a lot of money. At the same time when AI gets better than humans at making music as the author and researcher Daniel Johanson predicts in the MI text (and I agree) the fascination of music makers might fade and with that maybe the live concerts might not hold that magic any longer. Still, if a song makes you get some emotions it will work even if it is AI or not and will be stronger in situations with a lot of people.
What is going down is quite many companies thinking that music is just something you mass produce and then put all your hope into streams that are made of bots. Also, in the text Daniel predicts when the crash of this will happen, about two to three years. I might think it can go faster, but the prediction is made on when we got download torrents, back then not all had computers like we do today. These companies might be just gone until next year. In this case, I’m not so sure that Spotify will survive either or any other platform. We are back to get real fans with real artists on real gigs. At least that will survive a bit longer than a year. In the whole future, I’m not so sure, maybe AI can get to that as well.
