i want a thread for Holly Herndon

because her album is terrific so far. don't let this one slip you by if you're a fan of experimental electronics and/or lush post-techno type stuff - album manges to do both without compromise.

A sinker, huh? I guess Movement isn't for everyone. If you were disappointed by the Laurel Halo album you might not like this very much (from what I've heard of the LH album, I like it well enough). But there are loads of ideas crammed into this one. If you're not listening on headphones, don't bother BTW.

The first track is pretty much 8 minutes of experimental noise effects with some interesting panning arrangements. Fair enough, but then 'Fade' comes in, and well, I'm not sure how to describe it really, but here's a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frmJKaPT5U8

The next track is back in experimental territory. Gasping breath samples are pitched and layered into outlandish chord shapes. A weird exercise, but interesting nonetheless

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J4JwVewpwY

Haven't quite scratched the surface of the rest of the album, but yeah, I like it so far - just enough chocolate boxing for my tastes.

For some reason I never listened to this album and, fortunately, iTunes radio played me 'Fade'. Now I'm very much enjoying it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHujh3yA3BE

love this

Is that 'Chorus'? Helluvva song & vid!

whoa, 'Home' is stunning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_3mCDJ_iWc

It's great but I got really bored halfway thru

definitely could be half as long, but it really hits my pleasure centers for sounds & texture

yeah, that's amazing

and i think i dig "chorus" even more, great stuff......

Love 'Home'. As NickB pointed out, there are some similarities b/w what Herndon is doing and Katie Gately's music, don't know if any of you thread loiterers have listened to her stuff? (Do. Really, do.)

Also ahnnu's World Music

This recent style is great for sounds and texture but, for me, it has yet to really cohere into a works that I want to return to

I guess I would also lump the last couple d/p/i releases into this "incredibly compelling but largely unlistenable" genre

oh hell yes.
katie gately's "last day" is great, thanks for the tip.

This reminds me of a modern take of Claire Hamill when she did that Voices record.
In a really good way, great track, probably prefer 'Chorus' but both stunning.

Feels like it could go either way with repeated listens though

katie gately's "last day" is great, thanks for the tip.

yeah, lots of similarities to that song in partic in the treatment of the vocals and that whole crunchy destructivist sound

need to make time and watch this whole video at some point

http://call.hollyherndon.com/

Just thought 'oh good, someone started a thread on holly herndon' and it was me :-)

Also ahnnu's World Music

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Thursday, September 18, 2014 12:44 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This album rules

also, thanks for the katie gatley tip emil.y, i'm digging it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XmHQkFo_co

this was a good listen

I guess I would also lump the last couple d/p/i releases into this "incredibly compelling but largely unlistenable" genre

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Thursday, September 18, 2014 12:49 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol the latest d/p/i thing, MN.ROY, overcomes this dumb label I typed out and is prob my fav thing I've heard in a while

more hh:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybzSWlpgJOA

new album on 4AD in may:
http://4ad.com/news/10/3/2015/hollyherndontoreleaseplatforminmayinterferencevideopremieres

on the cover of the latest issue of the wire.

saw her live show + live interview last year, she is cool

http://4ad.com/news/10/3/2015/hollyherndontoreleaseplatforminmayinterferencevideopremieres

I want a thread for 4AD URLs.

this shit bangs

lmao at how "Lonely At The Top" is straight-up ASMR

First listen through and I dig this a whole lot more than Movement. The previously released tracks are all highlights but Morning Sun and especially An Exit (w/ Amnesia Scanner!!) are excellent too.

wow I just discovered "Chorus" and I am really loving this a lot

the record "Platform" leaked

there is a track on it that is literally ASMR

oh wait someone else noted that before i did lmao

and it's totally unlistenable!

unless you have ASMR I guess

what is amr? i found the whole album an uncompelling drag tbh

*asmr

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_sensory_meridian_response

has a dedicated ilx thread - ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?action=showall&boardid=40&threadid=96481

i kinda love the holly herndon ASMR track??

there are a few great moments on the rest of the album but overall idk

The heck is this ASMR track? Makes me feel irrationally embarrassed.

Which one is the ASMR track? I listened to about 2/3 of Platform on Spotify yesterday and just got a major nostalgia buzz. 2002 laptop music redux. It was pretty though. Will probably end up buying.

this is obviously doing well because they just sent out a warning to people who pre-ordered that shipping might take a while.

Worked at the shop on Saturday and listened to this 3 times. Sounds really good on a nice system -- this is probably my favorite record of the year so far. I didn't get any ASMR reactions from it, but our speakers are in the back of the store.

This album is BANANAS.

I think I might get ASMR reactions! "Lonely at the Top" made me feel... off

it's kinda terrible imo, the only track i skip on the record.

Morning Sun is so gorgeous, and achieves a weird trick of sounding both claustrophobic and cavernous at the same time. Her sound design is amazing.

Yep, but crucially it's in the service of some great tunes - I wouldn't be interested it if it was just a dry exercise in sound art. ASMR track is kinda lol mostly o_O, it was amusing for a while but I've started skipping it now.

Intro to the last track is... destabilising. Prob not a good idea to try to fall asleep to this album.

I have no idea if it's technically AMSR, but some music (especially pure vocal harmony music, with lots of reverb, certain speeds of very choppy tremolo) does regularly provoke physical sensations - kind of shivery fingers running down my shoulders/back, but not in an unpleasant way at all.

The thing is, the supposed AMSR track on this album provokes absolutely no reaction in me at all. (I, too, have started skipping it.) Morning Sun, however, has those qualities so exactly that it's actually quite distracting to listen to it on headphones at work.

This album is absolutely phenomenal. As Roz says, the sound design is astonishing, on top of it being really intriguing and compelling music.

the words on that "lonely at the top" one, with their unreserved praise, also provoke a reaction of weird, pleasurable discomfort

really digging 'morning sun' + 'locker leak' off this
obvs 'chorus' is still classic

liking this one much more than "movement" so far

I'm late to the party but this is great!

the sound palette seems pretty limited.. How many times can you use the 'atonal percussion rustle/avalanche' sample before it gets old? the quality of the percussion is nice, but the overload of pitched vocal samples gives it a disposable, later OPN-like quality. feels very 'of the late 2000s'. vocal clutter is way over the top. i could listen to quarantine by laurel halo all day, but the use of vocals on this is grating as shit. i miss chicks on speed produced by the mego guys.

"disposable" is just fine by me; i'm associating this with vaporwave

I'm hearing early '80s Laurie Anderson in her Herndon's sound

i really like the spoken track - i find it funny and kind of theatrical at the same time. it reminds me a bit of some interactive theatre things i've seen.

Any London ilxors going to the show?

how did this leave me cold at first? it suddenly CLICKED a few weeks ago and i haven't been able to stop listening

some of the gorgeous textures remind me of orchestra of bubbles!

It actually reminds me a bit of of the gentler bits of Confield, just the textural crunch of all those granular bits of micro-sound, but with heaps of sugar throughout.

confield flakes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzP9IwznNuQ

Which one is the ASMR track? I listened to about 2/3 of Platform on Spotify yesterday and just got a major nostalgia buzz. 2002 laptop music redux. It was pretty though. Will probably end up buying.

― Jeff W, Tuesday, 19 May 2015 19:17 (4 months ago)

the clarity of the soundfield on this is so different to anything from that period, even the very best and best engineered of it like autechre

Some of her stuff reminds me of some Tortoise -- which, coincidentally, also has a member named Herndon.

Astonishing gig last night in London - she had a couple of other people onstage with her, a vocalist/dancer whose vocals were being chopped up into a million pieces in real time. Also a dude behind a laptop whose sole job appeared to be to type messages at the audience (best one = "FUCK THERESA MAY"). It was all clearly live (and texturally quite different from the album) but I had no idea how most of it was being done.

+1324232234545345 to any notion of seeing her live; IMO she wiped the floor with everyone else who played Big Ears last year, and the live-data-manipulation stuff was a major part of that

yeah that was an excellent gig (and jam city supporting was brilliant too, and again v different to the record)

cool talk w/DJ Rupture: http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21582-lullabies-for-the-broken-brain/

did you mean to link this? https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/loop-holly-herndon-and-jace-clayton/

ha yes, wrong tab. ty.

her process breakdown is good too (haven't gotten through the whole thing yet): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6baj34lxF4g

Discovering Platform now. Sick, and reminds me a little of sometime ilxor Lynskey

on the cover of the latest issue of the wire.

― stirmonster, Wednesday, March 11, 2015 8:49 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this was v cool imo

http://i67.tinypic.com/wb28lc.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc9OjL6Mjqo

That is excellent.

and terrifying.

dream combo

Intrigued by the idea of working with AI but not really impressed by the actual track.

I have a feeling that sentiment will characterize most reactions to the seemingly inevitable onslaught of music that will “use” “AI” in the next years

new single is pretty massive

https://youtu.be/r4sROgbaeOs

huge. video is nuts in the best possible way.

I don't like the songwriting at all but that's a cool timbre she's hit upon there.

^^^^this is my opinion of every holly herndon song ever p much

*hides in Rockist Corner with pomenitul and other sticks-in-the-mud who still believe in old-fashioned nonsense like songwriting while the A E S T H E T I C crowd storm the cultural pantheon*

I'm a shameless aesthete but to these ears it comes off as an interminable string of platitudinous highs.

we're all aesthetes - there's a whole specific thing. you have to space the capitals

I thought that was a vapourware meme, though – does HH qualify? I must know!

*wave, sorry.

It sounds amazing. It doesn't exactly make me want to listen to it again or use it in a dj set (although maybe for the right moment?), but still. It's just vocals, drums, and stabs, right?

Sounds like something Kanye will probably sample this year.

awesome
a welcome return

Save me I'm trending

— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) March 11, 2019

(Theresa May saved her after an hour or so by jumping on a plane to Strasbourg)

One of my happiest gig-going memories is of the time when Holly had hooked her laptop to the projector and slowly and very purposefully typed 'FUCK THERESA MAY' over the visuals in lurid pink.

Also this song is incredible, it's like a School of Seven Bells song batting around in a metal box.

herndon can write a song imo

anyway this fucking rules

Herndon might be the only person in any discipline doing anything worthwhile with AI

anyway besides sounding incredible this is clearly A Song with hooks and stuff and not just some installation piece

It's a song, for sure, I'm just not sold on her way with melody. Faux-bliss imho.

One excellent reason to use AI in your art is that it guarantees press/interest

There are way more traditional songwriting chops in Holly Herndon tracks than in half of the stuff imago listens to so I've got no fucking idea what he's talking about (also HH != vape so strike 2).

This bangs.

The only thing that kept me from truly diving headfirst into Holly Herndon when I first became aware of her was the videos, which I was unmoved by, but this video is AMAZING-- same director as the stuff I wasn't so keen on, the song rules as always

My mistake, the video that rubbed me wrong was a different director whups

She really should have done the soundtrack to the live action Ghost in the Shell. I hear a lot of Kenji Kawai here.

oh this is very cool, i've never really been able to get into her work before but this has pushed into pop-enough territory for me to love it

uhhhhhhhhh this is so good

i don't mean that there's no songwriting, i mean that the songwriting completely fails to engage me and there are no hooks or melodies that do anything for me even if the sound design is quite cool. this is a defensible position surely

*hides in Rockist Corner with pomenitul and other sticks-in-the-mud who still believe in old-fashioned nonsense like songwriting while the A E S T H E T I C crowd storm the cultural pantheon*

That's not "I don't like it", that's "it doesn't exist".

there are no hooks or melodies that do anything for me

See, usually you stop before adding the "that do anything for me" part, which is what I find annoying. I don't mind when you don't like things that I like, I just mind when you critique things as if you have a trained musicologist's eye and have found something objectively lacking in it. Personally I find her hooks and melodies v engaging and often properly moving, but there you go.

Wow, this is good

I'm getting links to this from all channels in my little bubbleworld, I can't believe the video has only 20k views?!?? Anyway this track is amazing.

heart in my mouth by the end of this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvNqNgHAEys

Immediately thought of the intro to this when I heard it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7USaAO0vEOE

I thought of this (4 mins in):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De3cWcjZ0Q0&t=240

epic song

was coming here to post "Frontier," really gorgeous tune. can't stop listening to it.

gotta say, it was really lovely knowing Holly and Mat during their time in the Bay Area— they are genuinely wonderful, warm, and funny people. that they're both making such bonkers-good stuff is just icing on the cake. (same goes for EMA and few other folks from that period of my life).

I've been thinking about the whole choral feel of these new tracks, even if Holly's is the only voice on the record, and this is fascinating:

It's cool that people are getting Bulgarian vibes from Frontier :) What is crazy about these kind of polyphonic vocalisations is that they appear in geographically distinct areas all over the world.

— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) May 7, 2019

Basically this record is going to be incredible.

Yeah I can't remember the last time I was this excited about a new album release. Syro, I guess - but I have the feeling this album will be better.

Drums could be better... there’s something about the way they sound it makes me think of a tacky “cirque du soleil”/broadway kind of soundtrack - horns on “eternal” also give me those vibes - but love what she does with the vocals and how primal it feels at times. Reminds me of Fever Ray’s s/t of all things.

As usual, the song sounds like it's going to be the best thing ever, then doesn't quite go where it could. This one sounds particularly cool though so it probably gets away with it

album's out

SWIM is pretty great

Sounds kind of messy on first listen. Lots of ideas, not sure they go anywhere particularly interesting.

SWIM is the song that heralds us into post-Evangelion new consciousness

This sounded pretty incredible on first listen

Roomful of teethish in places

love that video for Frontier

this album ranges from 'extremely compelling' to 'kind of interesting i guess but doesnt really work and i never want to listen to it again'

really digging SWIM

The album is definitely stronger than Platform. I always skip the sound art pieces on that ('wet bar wax', etc), the ones here are mostly more palatable.

Got tickets for her Barbican show in October, bravely hoping i'll be allowed a night off from our 3 year old and 3 month old.

^ Holly reblogged some IG stories of her recent live shows in which I became entirely fixated on fact that there was a child in the audience -- and I confidently say that as audience members surrounding gave the kid and her dad like a 3ft radius

Surprised how bright and clear the album is, it's gorgeous. And it bumps.

Would have loved to have seen her show here the other night but it was up against Downtown Boys, who I already had tickets for. Next time.

Loving this album. I wasn't taken in by the individual tracks released (and maybe just wasn't in the right mood for them), but listening to it as a piece, I just kind of want to live in it. So many incredible, beautiful moments.

Nice Tape Op interview: https://tapeop.com/interviews/132/holly-herndon/

I wonder if Spawn could be realtime if she had, like, a rack of Mac Pros to throw at the problem. If so ... c'mon Holly, just head to Kickstarter! We got you!

Can we talk about how insanely awesome the Barbican show was? Full choir onstage dancing around in a creepy Midsommar fashion, apoclayptic/utopian projections onscreen, Holly dancing around and singing with the choir, vocals being manipulated in real time (which was amazing when she was singing solo). Also during Frontier there were singers located throughout the audience, suddenly getting up with spotlights on them to join in.

Plus, we all got to sing back to Holly as part of training her AI.

was also there. fckn incredible show, thought aya was really great as well.

pal i was with (who maybe lurks here, hi!) goes to london sacred harp occasionally but hadn't been in a couple of months so missed out on being one of those audience singers

really loved how much all the choral singers were just cutting lose

loose*

because i am so woke i was worried their peasant/traditional headscarves & other gear might be appropriation, lol. but yep, amazing. first song was *massive*, is it on the album (which i haven't listened to enough and can't listen to right now)?

nice, wish I could have seen this!

Saw the projections adapted to the Hexadome when it was presented as part of the Gray Area festival a couple months ago. It was fucking riveting and one of my favorite things shown.

This was one of the shows I most regretted missing out on while I was out of town in May. Very jealous of all of you.

the projections were kind of washed out by stage lighting, but I saw this show at unsound festival last week and it was great

I've seen Herndon before live and something left me a little cold, but I was in the balcony and viewing this one as a complete stage production really made it click.

New tune

pic.twitter.com/BWOh4TMwsP

— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) November 4, 2020

excellent

pic.twitter.com/KYvQl9TiYH

— Holly Herndon (@hollyherndon) February 13, 2021

i have no idea what any of this shit is

https://xlr8r.com/news/web3-weekly-wrap-holly-herndons-holly-fwb-gatekeeper-nft-takeover-of-times-square-and-more/

lol i knew when i clicked on this that she and her cornball charlatan partner would be on some nft shit

I've been pretty disappointed with her embracing of NFTs - in general I've always liked her takes on futurism and the potential of AI etc but the NFT thing is slowly eroding my respect.

her cornball charlatan partner

??

Mat Dryhurst. He's def a tech nerd who has been heavily involved in that side of her music. They do a podcast together (https://interdependence.fm/) that I enjoyed early on, but he's gone all in on web3/NFT stuff, I had to bail.

I still don't have an opinion about NFTs because the whole thing confuses me. So does crypto.

i assure you its bad

I always hear that thing about all the energy that's used to store NFTs and I shut down fully at that point.

Mat Dryhurst. He's def a tech nerd who has been heavily involved in that side of her music. They do a podcast together (https://interdependence.fm/) that I enjoyed early on, but he's gone all in on web3/NFT stuff, I had to bail.
― change display name (Jordan), Tuesday, 9 November 2021

Inevitable. he went on a huge diatribe the other year about piracy, and when someone pulled him up, he was like I grew up in the middle east, I was pirating video games long before they were available to the Western public - hmmm what was someone named Dryhurst('s) family doing in the middle east in the 80s-90s?

gave a lecture at Strelka - for what it's worth. Some kind of philosopher not being able to google their relationship to the russian govt...

This is very good: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-holly-herndon.html

i appreciate that she seems to have one of the most sensible perspectives on how to approach ml stuff as an artist (despite all her other nonsense which thankfully doesn't come through in that interview) but i'm curious if she's actually going to produce any worthwhile art with it - the stuff with the ai model on the last album just wasn't very compelling

All her other nonsense?

curious

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/10/mass-theft-thousands-of-artists-call-for-ai-art-auction-to-be-cancelled

this seems dumb all around

He added: “It is not illegal to use any model to create artwork. I resent that an important debate that should be focused on companies and state policy is being focused on artists grappling with the technology of our time.”

you inserted yourself in the middle of that debate! this is part of the discourse!

I'm not saying this is a mask off moment, but the pontificating and essays and speaking engagements are facile if you personally get challenged and attempt to claim it's not about you

I am confused by what you think he is implying?

As I understand it, he is saying, this is a tool that could be used ethically to create art, and his and Holly’s work was done that way.

Granted, one of his partners in founding a local arts nonprofit is something of a self-clowning oven who tried to argue that the wheel needed to be improved, that people complaining about how his org was managing the million dollars they raised for Ghost Ship Relief Aid should just raise their own million dollars and stop complaining, and he was a dick about returning a piece of antique furniture to an ex-gf.

makes me think of the debate about sampling in the 90s... the technology is inherently plagiaristic but people tended to side with the artists who used samples despite how they were ripping off artists who had already been screwed by the record industry the first time around. the difference being AI-generated art (so far) sucks and is mostly irritating

AI could be used ethically, but it would mean creating some kind of ASCAP entity to ensure all contributors to the training corpus got their cut of all its output

Lol … now we have Spotify… talk about artists being screwed

makes me think of the debate about sampling in the 90s... the technology is inherently plagiaristic but people tended to side with the artists who used samples

no, the courts sided with the artists whose work was plagiarized, thus kneecapping sample culture and having (imo) a deleterious impact on music and creativity.

AI could be used ethically, but it would mean creating some kind of ASCAP entity to ensure all contributors to the training corpus got their cut of all its output

i don't think that's the only way for it to be used ethically, but i agree that it would be one of the optimal ways forward. but it's very important that it be a blanket license situation (like we do with cover-songs), not an individual license situation (as with samples, rip).

my take, largely: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-to-do-about-fake-drake-songs

I get what he is saying, but working in that space when it's notably contentious, and his work is only one of many artists in the exhibition, makes it silly. He's in the mix!

Dryhurst told the Guardian that the piece of art being auctioned was part of an exploration of how the “concept” of his wife appeared in publicly available AI models.

So he didn't create the model, he used the tools by prompting them to generate images including his wife, which the tools knew about for... reasons. Which means it also had many other images it trained on. I get what he's going for, using the tools to both create something but also commenting on the fact that her image was already in there. And he's right about where the focus should be, but he stepped directly in the middle of it by creating what other artists consider derivative work and are attempting litigation

and being involved in litigation isn't inherently bad, it's just what's going to happen when you insert yourself between other artists and the correct target of their litigation. as sean mentioned, this is what's happened before

i do think organized opposition to things like this auction is a really stupid waste of human resources - artists should be working on large-scale actions like the ASCAP one you're describing (which would be determined by legislation), not trying to fight a fight over what's "just" re training data. there's every indication that copyright boards/courts are going to rule that training data isn't a copyright violation; if artists have squandered all their energy/cards on that fight, there won't be anything left for the battle to follow.

agreed, I don't think the lawsuits are useful in the way they're going now

no, the courts sided with the artists whose work was plagiarized, thus kneecapping sample culture

the courts did, but the music fans seemed to side with the sampling artists and didn't particularly care about the sampled artists... not sure that's happening with AI-generated art, people don't seem to like or trust it!

i guess i have a different impression of how mainstream culture (in 1995) responded to the sampling debates, and where the majority stood on "sampling is theft"

but i was also haha only 13 at the time!

oh people agreed that sampling was theft, but they also really loved the albums that made heavy use of samples... the vibe as I recall it was that talking about how it screwed the sampled artists made you kind of a buzzkill

It kinda depended tbh … like it wasn’t that cut and dry.

the difference being AI-generated art (so far) sucks and is mostly irritating

I feel like this is the key point. I was pretty young when this whole debate was going on but do recall a lot of chatter about how sampling meant you didn't need talent anymore or how people liked the original better. But Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer both scored massively catchy hits doing it which both outlived the songs they sampled from. And of course there was Paul's Boutique and 3 Feet High and Rising, incredible albums which put a lot of thought into what they were doing, inspiring entire generations. Nothing AI has done so far is even remotely close - what is a "key" piece of AI art that people actually like? What new doors has it actually opened up? What is it inspiring in people other than "ugh, that's creepy"?

I just worry that a blanket license for AI-generated art would be just the loophole a company like Spotify needed to dump money into an AI engine that very effectively created knockoffs of popular songs they would then own. Like, an up and coming artist could try and sue them for infringement, but Spotify has the $$$ to pay lawyers to claim their AI knockoff was covered under the blanket license. Few new artists would have the resources to fight and win that protracted legal battle. Spotify already controls the content distribution, all they need to do is wait for a few more iterations of increased AI ability, create knockoffs of popular songs, and then have their playlist algorithms favor the knockoffs.

AI could be used ethically, but it would mean creating some kind of ASCAP entity to ensure all contributors to the training corpus got their cut of all its output

To be fair, Dryhurst & HH have actually made effort to create this in some sense (w/Spawning), so I get his irritation that *he of all people* is getting flack for this. But I'm also a bit sick of them and AI art and the whole thing is a bit silly, even if the larger issues do need to be addressed (but probably won't be).

iirc there are plenty of posts I’ve made where I’ve defending their prior work or appreciated that they’re looking at the generative space critically, but I also roll my eyes at the NFTs and what have you

an AI engine that very effectively created knockoffs of popular songs they would then own.

perhaps I'm naive but I don't think people will actually want to listen to these

people watch youtube videos of other people opening stuff, so I think they probably will... I am each new day surprised by how low the profitable entertainment bar can go

they wouldn't watch videos of AI robots opening stuff though. reaction vids are really famous though and I don't know why. it sucks that search results now include the funny video and then a bunch of people reacting to said funny video

reaction vids are really famous though and I don't know why. it sucks that search results now include the funny video and then a bunch of people reacting to said funny video

Um, you answered your own question, very precisely.

well I was gonna say, they're in the algo because they're popular, but then I remembered to take it one step further

I was 17 in '95 and "sampling is theft" was a rockist position. If you were into dance music you just rolled your eyes at that.

low-fi beats to study to is an entire thing that people just throw on and listen to all day. could definitely see the fake Drake stuff just being background noise in the same way. there's just so much background noise these days, and an even duller Drake-like stream is even more of that -- you're not even going to think "wow, I love this and I've got to turn it up!"

just a low and steady hum in the background, where you figure out which type of hum you want

like how they pipe in white noise to office buildings because its too uncomfortably quiet otherwise, but for music

the future and utility of AI-generated music tools isn't copycat songs made from whole algorithmic cloth; it's having tools that let you "make the drums more like (this)" or "come up with a chord progression like (this)," or just cleaning up audio - like "magic wand" photo editing tools - without requiring the time or technical knowledge to make the changes yourself.

it seems transparently obvious to me that when there are better tools like this, there will be artists who make cool stuff with it

that’s definitely the upside!

I didn’t mean to sound too doomerish, but passive music consumption has shifted from the radio to streaming and there’s going to continue to be a break between commodity work and musicians doing mindful creative work. I just don’t especially like the current shape of things

I agree with that, I have wondered if we're at least gonna reach the end of lo-fi or "bedroom" recordings, seems like we may soon just have a plugin that makes your recordings sound somewhat like polished studio recordings

low-fi beats to study to is an entire thing that people just throw on and listen to all day.

imo this feels like a different thing than how music is usually listened to by anyone who's set foot in a record store but yeah I have wondered if there's gonna be a large chunk of people who only want to engage with music in that way. maybe they're the people who just "don't really like music" normally though

music serves many functions, and there's already a massive industry that exists to serve an audience that craves auditory astroturf

if it's a handful of corporations which start meeting that need, with fewer employees than the music industry currently supports, that's going to be bad for (a) musicians' ability to earn $ from a "day job" and (b) emerging artists who use those jobs to get their chops; but it doesn't seem particularly world-changing in terms of the impacts on art or audience.

I mean, during the peak album sales period (almost all CDs) in the late 90s, the number of people buying a lot of music was really low. The average American bought something like 1 - 2 albums a year, iirc!
The rest of us were offsetting that stat

You'll be able to press a button and get a generically hi-fi studio mix from AI, sure, but you can already press a button and get a lo-fi, tape saturated, wobbly one. Choose your aesthetic.

one thing I've heard a lot was that AI was gonna start writing the background music for grocery stores and restaurants which I always thought misunderstands what that music is for. there's all sorts of designed BGM that's cheap or royalty free to set whatever mood you want. they want people to recognize what it is! I think if you had fake versions of Janet Jackson's "Runaway" or whatever it would just freak everyone out