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The reason why music is getting worse

Earlier this month, a North Carolina man was charged with generating songs using an artificial-intelligence system and configuring bots to stream them automatically, thus racking up some $10 million in illegal royalties.

Though that amount no doubt star­tles many of us, in this age when legit­i­mate musi­cians pub­licly lament the pit­tance they earn through stream­ing plat­forms, such a case prob­a­bly comes as no sur­prise to Rick Beato. Blues­men elec­tri­fy­ing their gui­tars; Frank Sina­tra singing into micro­phones sen­si­tive enough to pick up his nuances; the Bea­t­les cre­at­ing com­plex, often strange minia­ture sound worlds in the stu­dio; rap­pers telling their sto­ries over looped frag­ments of dis­co records: all of it was made pos­si­ble by feats of engi­neer­ing. The ease of cre­ation has caused “an over­sat­u­ra­tion of music, mak­ing it hard­er to find real­ly excep­tion­al things.” This is tak­en to an extreme by the only-just-begin­ning avalanche of AI-gen­er­at­ed songs (and the storm of law­suits it has drawn).

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