Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Radio Station

August 28, 2022 1:04 PM

Robin Sloan noticed something odd going on with his spotify radio and made a playlist.
posted by forbiddencabinet (25 comments total)

I was wondering when AI-generated music was going to hit the streaming services. It's conceptually much simpler than AI-generated art, but requires a little more care on the training side. And I would absolutely not put it past Spotify to be doing this themselves; they don't have to pay for their own music; if they can stream you AI-generated stuff it's all just profit.

Anyway, I got my answer.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:22 PM on August 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

This Reply All episode feels tangentially related: "This week, a Super Tech Support: a listener’s Spotify Wrapped is dominated by a mysterious artist she’s never heard of and swears she’s never listened to. And the songs she supposedly played are even weirder. Emmanuel investigates."
posted by BlahLaLa at 1:27 PM on August 28, 2022 [4 favorites]

I’d eat at Burger Slob
posted by Going To Maine at 1:33 PM on August 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I could easily see this being part of an auto-generated music trend. It wouldn't even need a sophisticated system to take a simple and widely-used chord progression such as the I–V–vi–IV used in that playlist, specify a limited range of values for instrumentation and beat parameters, and let fly.

Why they're consistently almost a quarter-tone out of tune, though, is beyond me.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:36 PM on August 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

And they could've at least bothered to vary the key...
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:40 PM on August 28, 2022

Spotify has already been building playlists with fake artists in them to keep more of the royalties. Doubting that Spotify could be behind this because they would've paid more attention to the names and cover art feels like it misses the point of why Spotify might do something like this in the first place, which is to make more money with as little effort as possible.
posted by chrominance at 1:44 PM on August 28, 2022 [10 favorites]

"Silvana" does stand out as noticeably different, but as far as I could be bothered to check, all the songs were released in 2022, so I don't know if it's an earlier or later iteration of the basic formula, or if there's more variety in the output than the rest of the songs suggest.
posted by Kattullus at 1:50 PM on August 28, 2022

+1 to chrominance, I immediately thought the same thing: Spotify is the participant with a clear reason to keep royalties inside the system by taking up airtime with robot-generated music (“Spotify Basics”?). It wouldn’t be worth the effort to make it good while experimenting to decide if it needs to actually be good.
posted by migurski at 2:25 PM on August 28, 2022

I feel like there's a great SF story lurking in here to be written, linking the historical stories of classical composers Variations on a Theme to the AI collective intelligence(s) developing artistic aesthetics, critiquing each others music and manipulating the algorithms of platforms like Spotify in dramatic and possibly petty artistic temperment like they would if vying for the attention of patrons or a court's preference.

(Please? Someone?)
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 2:51 PM on August 28, 2022 [7 favorites]

Jokes on you, because the story will be ai generated. And likely.revolve around a horse sized squirrel.
posted by Keith Talent at 3:05 PM on August 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

I was listening to Earth Radio the other day and Human Music came on.
posted by Ickster at 4:04 PM on August 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

According to the top comment at Hacker News, this is a form of money laundering. "People will set up fake Spotify artist accounts with stolen identities and bank accounts, pay a musician for songs that pass as music, and then bot millions of streams on them."

I want to believe that this cannot possibly be true, but every time I hear "it's worse than you think..." about something on the the internet, it turns out to be true, so, yeah.
posted by /\/\/\/ at 4:09 PM on August 28, 2022 [20 favorites]

That explanation, while fun, is the opposite of Occam's Razor.

Crazy to think the CW a decade ago was Uber would soon replace all their humans with AI when it was the jukebox all along.
posted by gwint at 5:36 PM on August 28, 2022

Funny, just yesterday I watched the episode of Answer In Progress where Sabrina attempts to program an AI to imitate the "lo-fi music to study to" trend.
posted by sibilatorix at 6:05 PM on August 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

The author goes on about how the algorithm knows the similarity between the tracks, but they don't seem aware of the "people who like X also like Y" rule, which is probably what generated the playlist of 100% consistent junk in the first place.

I am definitely in on the theory that this is an attempt to manipulate streaming services for profit. First, the person re-edits their little :47 project into a bunch of mp3s, and aggregates them as different artists. (No AI needed, since each take requires scarcely more than :47 to produce. Turn off an instrument, lazily improvise a new MIDI track, export.)

In part, this is done so that they can repetitively play their own tracks while tricking Spotify into thinking that they are browsing a diversity of artists. In doing so they wear a "people who like X also like Y" groove in the database, which generated that mix of the same thing over and over.
posted by anhedonic at 6:45 PM on August 28, 2022 [3 favorites]

(Also, AI music generation services like AIVA already exist, and they will churn out generic backing music for your next project. A decent AI wouldn't be this repetitive! I kind of feel like Robin under-emphasizes how shitty this "song cloud" really is, in order to bask in the mystery of it.)
posted by anhedonic at 7:01 PM on August 28, 2022

"During this period, Muzak began recording their own "orchestra" – actually a number of orchestras in studios around the country, sometimes in other countries as well – composed of top local studio musicians. This allowed them to control all aspects of the music for insertion into specific slots in the Stimulus Progression programs"

Clearly a case of history repeating itself.
posted by clavdivs at 7:48 PM on August 28, 2022 [1 favorite]

Lily Tomlin had a wonderful joke - "Whenever I think about the invention of Muzak, I get scared about what that guy will invent next."

The length of the pieces is also a key - apparently you don't get paid unless the listening time is at least 45 seconds.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 8:14 PM on August 28, 2022 [6 favorites]

The author mentions it sounds vaguely like Too Many Zooz. I love me some deep baritone sax rips from Leo but if you heard these mysterious tracks and want more I'd point you towards Anna Meredith instead, maybe check out the Eighth Grade soundtrack which is a mix of original tracks and songs from her first EP Varmints
posted by JauntyFedora at 12:30 AM on August 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

Maybe it’s been mentioned and I missed it, but could these not simply be library music samples?
posted by fregoli at 6:35 AM on August 29, 2022

All popular music looks & sounds like AI generated to me right now I don't know how anyone knows the difference. I was looking at tracks to add to a video of my cat & I think I just assumed it was all AI.
posted by bleep at 8:07 AM on August 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

We're not exactly experiencing a renaissance of creative, genre-defining, soul baring artistes right now, Beyoncé excluded.
posted by bleep at 8:10 AM on August 29, 2022

We're not exactly experiencing a renaissance of creative, genre-defining, soul baring artistes right now

I dunno. There seems to be an incredible amount of genre-breaking and genre-defining music being made and recorded right now. It's just a) almost impossible to find it; b) very hard to give it proper time and consideration because there's always something else. Something like 60,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify *every day*.

I hear something great and new almost every single day on my college radio. I usually feel overwhelmed by the firehose of good new music. (Commercial radio, on the other hand, still packages the same old same old in very lazy fashion.)
posted by mrgrimm at 9:08 AM on August 29, 2022 [4 favorites]

Sorry, I guess this is a derail, but I feel passionately about this - even on heavily commercialized pop media ... there's a lot of interesting stuff going on (including Beyoncé!).

Lizzo won Video for Good at the VMA's last night (VMAs also featured a performance from J Balvin).

Rosalía was on SNL

BlackPink played Coachella (and I think also won a VMA), and J-Hope who took a break from BTS to go solo (with a MAJOR shift in music style) played Lolla - the kpop fandom in the US is a delightful surprise.

Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat are everywhere, and Gaga's still out there.

Harry Styles is super pop and also trying cool things at venues like Madison Square Garden.

Janelle Monae. Period.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 9:24 AM on August 29, 2022 [2 favorites]

There is an uncharitable observation to be made here about which subgenres of music can be plausibly generated by AI. And probably a better observation about how uncritical we can be about algorithm-generated playlists bopping along in the background.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:34 AM on August 29, 2022