I have a very pragmatic view on music: all I care about is whether it sounds good or not. That’s it. That’s literally it. And from that standpoint the advent of AI music has been a major net positive for me.
You can choose to ignore that and come tell me about the ethics of using AI or how you care about the story behind the song and so on and that’s all fine but just note that you’re no longer addressing what I’m actually saying here.
I’m also not claiming it’s great - only that it’s good. I’ve yet to discover an AI song that I go back to like I do with many human-made songs but if I want to put on a playlist playing in the background then one consisting of entirely AI-made music reliably provides me well above average track after another whereas with organic music I need to sift through a ton of absolute crap to stumble upon the occasional good track that still rarely exceeds what AI is able to output. I can go on YouTube and put on a 2 hour playlist of Jazz House or similar and I don’t get the urge to skip a single track.
Currently I feel like where AI still trips is lyrics - they still are only plausible sounding nonsense once you actually start paying attention to it but especially for instrumental music it has far exceeded the level of a good average human artist.
Few examples of what I’m refering to: with vocals and without.
I listen a lot to deep house and similar kinds of music. Sometimes artists make tracks that are easily 10+ minutes long. And DJs create mixes that are hours long. Each track and mix is like a story, it has a beginning, middle and end and takes me on a journey. I feel like I’m on vacation and the DJ is my tour guide. Tickling my brain with different rhythms and instruments, here is this one, now it’s gone, here is another one, now it’s gone, here is the first one again and in comes the second one. I feel the layers of the track inside of me, letting me feel like floating in the ocean, till the drop comes and the DJ pulls me into the deep water, taking me on a ride. Till I pop out the other end and we calm down again, slowly sliding into the end of the song.
That’s what music is to me, emotion, experience. It’s one soul telling a story to another soul, using our limited communication methods. I’ve heard people who are into for example classical music describe the same thing.
But I also feel like there is a huge difference between actually listening to and enjoying music for music sake and having something on in the background while doing some construction work, or having a casual pool party/bbq or something like that. In those cases it’s usually just some random pop slop and to be fair with today’s pop music I would not be able to tell you if it’s AI generated (except for obvious tells like nonsense lyrics, but when I’m doing other stuff I might not even hear the lyrics fully). That said, I still think AI music is really really bad, I just feel modern pop music is bad as well (with notable exception obv and personal opinion is a thing, no shade on pop enjoyers)