Would you identify an AI song if you pressed play on one? Colm Cahalane and Niall explore what's happening in AI and music now, with an example drawn from the Irish music scene in recent months.

Echoing the early Wild Wild West streaming era that we discussed last week with Liz Pelly that gave rise to Spotify's dominance, our chat this week with Colm Cahalane of Irish music Substack blog Fourth Best / Cork label Hausu finds parallels with what's happening with AI and music right now. AI is breaking new ground, and creating new problems and moral issues in doing so.

Colm recently posted a ruminating article on AI on Fourth Best, which talks to an artist called Kawaii Hoe who inadvertently, and relatively innocently duped me into covering their energetic AI-generated hyperpop music on the site - Like I said it's the Wild Wild West.

We talk about this scary new world of not knowing whether an artist is making music entirely with AI or not, and the implications and creative quandary of generated art.

Because you can now make a full music project with AI, does that mean you should? Are AI musicians just really gifted at prompts? Are the outputs music?

As AI music flooded streaming platforms, social media and we cannot put the genie back in the bottle, what’s next? As Liz Pelly’s book shows, Spotify will do what it can to reduce royalty rates so what’s to stop it from replacing real artist’s music with AI-generated music? Isn’t this already happening whether they allow it or not?

  

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