quigatolah wrote: ↑Wed May 03, 2023 1:10 pm "Music industry" and "artist" became mutually exclusive terms long ago.
Unless you have lots of time to search for the needle in the haystack,
you will find little art coming from the music industry.
While you will find plenty of competent performers in the music industry
they are put to work producing more of "what sells".
The movie industry is in the same state.
Yes, I agree with this. I mean, there is no doubt some good stuff out there but as you say it is a needle in a haystack and impossible to find unless you are totally immersed in the culture, which I'm not. The thing is that now having an album doesn't mean a lot. You can say you have an album on spotify, but what you are really saying is "I have a web page". Having an album on spotify is no different to having a blog page. There must be literally hundreds of thousands of unknown artists on spotify who will never be heard by the populace.
When i think of the incredible strides that were made in music between about 1940 and 1980 and then I look at the progress made in the past 20+ years, it's clear to me that the music industry has totally lost the plot. From a mainstream point of view, it's just a constant regurgitation of a few themes: the hip hopper blabbing away about depressing crap (really, who wants to listen to verbal diarohea about some guy's personal life?); the warbling diva trying to cram dozens of notes into one syllable while moaning about men; sampled hooks and riffs from old songs used to form the basis of new ones; and the one stock remaining chord sequence (I, V, vi, IV) which constitues the harmonic background for everything else that doesn't fit into those other categories. It is a pitiful state of musical inbreeding and deprivation, presided over by a music industry that is more cynical and dollar driven than at any other time in history.
Now, the way I see it, it can go two ways from here on: this lack of musical invention I'm talking about will make redundant all these so-called artists because AI will be able to replicate so easily what they do; or it will drive artists and labels to be more creative and inventive to try and get on top of it. In one world we will have AI created art for the masses, and in the other a return to some semblance of sanity and quality. Who knows which will prevail.
In regards to the original post, I was thinking about some related issues today. I was trying to decide whether recreating a high quality version of a vocal (say, one of John's demos) from a low quality original is "fakery". If it is using all the components of John's voice and nothing else, is it still a fake? Or is it restoration? You could argue that if the finished product is indistinguishable from the real thing, it can be called genuine. However, I'm sure many of you will strongly disagree. Me, I'm on the fence about it.
In terms of fakes, the trouble here will come not from the people making the mixes but from bootleggers and anyone else trying to make a profit. The guys who buy these cds instead of downloading are unlikely to be clued up about all the latest fan mixes, so they are ideal targets. However, in the world of fans exchanging things online I feel this is extremely unlikely to be a problem. To create a fake that is convincing requires an incredible amount of effort. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, it was pointed out to me that some of the vocal models for George and Ringo were trained on a few hundred cycles. Yet the vocal model of Paul which has produced the most acclaimed and convincing mixes like I Don't Know was trained on a quarter of a million cycles. That is a hell of a lot of computer time. I just can't see someone going to so much trouble to fool a bunch of internet nerds like us. What would it achieve? There would be no point in exerting such a massive amount of effort just to play a joke. That doesn't mean that someone else won't take such a mix and try to sell it, but there's not a lot of places where you can do that i would think. The cds can only be sold in Japan and anyone trying to sell a "new" McCartney album on ebay would quickly get banned. So aside from a few old time collectors getting burned, i don't think this is going to be any problem. Everyone here who does mixing including myself clearly label and tag their stuff so it won't get mixed up with the regular canon. All my stuff for example has a tag "Demixed by Lord Reith".
At any rate, we are witnessing the birth of a new era right now. It's not just about fake mixes, it's not just about kids using ChatGPT to write essays, and it's not just about crooks using sovits to impersonate your brother on the phone. It's about a revolution in machine learning and AI which will change the world completely at many levels. When quantum computers become usuable and accessible within the next decade some time, machine learning will become exponentially more accurate and that will have even scarier consequences. In the near future our governments and businesses may rule over us with a degree of control which is scarcely imaginable.
