I mean country music can be made by a donkey anyway. Only the old country is good
An ai generated artist is also topping the R&b charts
I’ve been collecting music for a while on my hard drive and AI-generated stuff has been one of my worries. I tend to download a lot of vaporwave from Bandcamp (sometimes full labels at a time) and some of those artists have used AI. I’m sure some unmarked AI slop has sneaked into my collection this way and I don’t know which albums/tracks.
The title sounds promising. I’ll need to circle back.
What’s original about most popular songs. They’re usually lyrically simple with a catchy beat and chorus. Something AI would easily be good at and it could churn out mediocre music easily, and a catchy popular tune wouldn’t be too difficult with interation. Country is no exception.
I don’t wanna defend pop music too much but “catchy” is one of those aspects of music that’s easy to immediately recognize but extremely hard to pull off. In order to be catchy a melody needs to be both wholly familiar feeling but also juuuuuust different enough to surprise our ears.
I’m not saying a generative AI couldn’t ever pull it off if you drained enough lakes to do it, but while it’s very good at producing the “familiar” it’s very very bad at producing anything “surprising”.
Plus you can spam thousands of songs easily, one is bound to be catchy and successful, an outlier on the bell curve.
I’m curious what they will do for live concerts, hire a perfomer or AI all the way with some generated video?
My sister uses AI to gen music all the time and what annoys me most is how actually good it is at making country music.
But I mean… It’s probably more just because that’s a very low bar to pass in modern times because even human-made country music hasn’t been good since the 90s. 🤷♂️
It also isn’t too surprising since a lot of music, especially from certain classical musicians, was written algorithmically, too.
That doesn’t surprise me too much. Have you seen Bo Burnham’s Country Song, or SIX Song Country Mashup. All pop country sounds the same.
I was going to post one of those mashups. Nashville figured out the algorithms to selling music. Pop, country, Christian, all formulaic.
American pop country is musically extremely basic. Technically it’s music, but you’ll have no problems teaching someone that’s never touched music in their life how to do it within a couple days. So it’s no surprise genAI can mimic this genre and other simpler ones like all the kid’s music and nursery rhyme stuff too.
American pop music in general is pretty basic, generic, and devoid of ideas. I mean this was the work of SIX song-writers.
brother pop music has been bullshit for decades.
Maybe I’m old, but I think popular music peaked in the 90s. Everything has sounded the same since then.
Funny enough, they were playing 80s tunes at Dollar General today. Be hard to say you don’t like 80s music as there was plenty of variation.
The problem with this comparison is you’re always holding up the absolute best of a decade against what happens to be on the radio top ten right now. Same goes for people who think music hasn’t been good since the seventies, or sixties, or whatever. It’s one half nostalgia for the stuff that shaped and formed your music tastes, one half survivor bias.
There’s plenty of good, new music out there. Some of it is on the radio, some of it is in the streaming top ten, and some of it is in places where you’ll never find it. And by the same token, if you actually went back in a time machine and listened to the average radio station in the eighties, you’d hear some absolute dog-shit garbage. It wasn’t all Queen.
Problem being, the good stuff is buried under the formulaic stuff. Never said all music has sucked since the 90s, just that mainstream music all sounds the same.
There’s another comment here I came to make where that shows 6 modern country tunes all cut together. It sounds like an ensemble of popular singers, sounds like the same music.
Made another comment here that Nashville has nailed the algorithm on selling music. Back in the day, producers and promoters would throw everything at the wall to see what would stick. Now music is a formula, unless you actively seek otherwise.
[Pop/rock] music has been a formula virtually since its inception. Respectfully, AC/DC put out some bangers but also all their songs kinda sound the same. Thriller was successful because it was written specifically to be the most commercially viable album of all time. Hell even in the '60s the formula was very simply “find out what’s topping the African-American charts and get white artists to copy it”. That’s how we got disco, which became so formulaic by the end that its “downfall” was a Worldwide Cultural Moment. If you think today’s music is bad, go listen to the top 100 disco hits of any random week in 1978… Probably not going to be a particularly great musical experience.
Every successful counter-cultural movement only lasts a few years before only the esthetic remains. Angry young artists “flame out” or sell out, corpos take over, make a safer formula out of it, and only then does the genre go mainstream.
I’d argue things are actually a lot better now than they were in the Disco era. The fragmentation of culture and slow downfall of linear media means that the formulaic stuff can be much more easily avoided, and it doesn’t reach nearly the same level of cultural saturation like it did when the radio was the main way to listen to music. The top charts are still relevant, but nowhere near what they were 20 years ago. Today anyone can pick up a DAW and be their own producer then self-publish to youtube, so who cares if the labels are led by uninspired fuckheads? They’re not in a position to bottleneck music production or audience reach anymore.
Country, absolutely, has become a generic mess of slop. Or at least, chart country / bro country certainly has. That’s a very specific result of the kind of people who listen to bro country; soulless conservative zombies who will lap up anything that references their preferred cultural touchstones. There’s still amazing country music out there but you definitely have to dig deeper to find it.
But as with everything soulless conservative zombies do, you shouldn’t let it shape your view of the world as a whole. It doesn’t mean that popular music in its entirety, or pop music as a genre, have suddenly become creatively bankrupt. There are artists out there producing incredible tracks. Some of them toil in obscurity, some not only break into the mainstream, but define it.
Saying the good stuff is buried is sort of meaningless, in that its always been true. 90% of anything is crap. That’s exactly the point I was making in my previous comment; it’s easy to look back at the past and find the good stuff because we’ve had time to forget all the trash. The present always arrives unfiltered and undiscovered.
And Queen gave us “Radio Ga Ga”. 🤮 They can’t all be great.
Radio Goo Goo?
My local radio station Kiss FM used to cater to teens. I’m 30 now and they still play mostly the same music they did in 2008. Some new remixes, but – brb gonna check what they’re playing right now. It’s past midnight so this might be unfair but they’re playing Never Forget You - Zara Larson. 2015.
100% fast downhill after the 90s unless you look hard for quality music.
Yes you’re old, there is some really good pop music.
I don’t know how anyone can’t like at least ONE song by The Weeknd.
There has always been bullshit that was popular, but at the same time there were pop artists who made wonderful, interesting music.
May be bullshit but at least it was made by humans
robotized humans
So is it beers, trucks, babes, and America, or “I killed that good for nothing sonofabitch husband and I’d do it again”
I feel like we all know the answer without even reading the article
Almost, it was the man, and his pesky interference with our protagonists freedom. And guns.
People who listen to country music aren’t exactly discerning.
In general and nowadays, absolutely. But there is so much actually great country music, and I say that as someone who stays FAR away from the genre as it is now and strongly dislike what it stands for and most of the people who like it. I even dare to say that some of the greatest songs of all time are country songs, but it’s hard to connect those to what it is now. My immediate reaction to this post was like yours, but it doesn’t take much thinking to realise there’s more to the genre than the stereotypical modern cringe shit.
Country music has been slop long before AI.
Well, it was definitely going to be within modern country where it became successful and accepted.
This just goes to show how bad country has become.
There’s a YouTube channel hosted by a guy that’s been a studio engineer for decades. He can’t tell AI from humans anymore- and it’s not just country.
the last video i watched about this clearly showed the channels blend poorly with ai so is ai production better in the last 3 months or are they doing a manual mix by human hand later?
LOL. As if it was ever good.
Johnny Cash would like a word.
Most people are fucking idiots. Thats why ai and corps will prevail.
the worst moment in my life so far is finally realizing that the dumbest person I personally know is only half as dumb as the fool I have yet to meet.
the recursive properties of this paradoxical knowledge almost killed me.
AI slop is preferred by the common idiot, and country music is enjoyed primarily by the average white idiot. So really these just kind of line up in an unsurprising way.
