What effect will AI have on investment in music tech

I've just spent the last 24hours playing with Udio.com and I have to say I'm blown away. It's mind-blowingly good, not perfect obviously, but crazy good still.

There's been lots of talk about the ethics of large data models and how they scrape the internet. Also there's been conjecture on how this will affect professional musicians who's bread and butter is often the kind of short duration bits of music used all over the web.

Having played with it's my unfortunate conclusion that the genie is out of the bottle and that those short pieces are now gone as a revenue stream. This does not really effect me directly. I'm a music dabbler, happy noodling to myself on modular and Bitwig. It also opened up the Idea of creating textures or beats and manipulating them in the DAW to great effect and copyright free.

Then I realised a lot of the bigger music tech companies have shareholders and I wondered how the markets would affect these companies stability.

I think the boutique makers will be ok but there's going to be a shake up.

What are your thoughts on the future of music production?

in Bitwigby Covidious

43%

1mo

FoodAccurate5414

1mo

I think that with anything in technology it still ends up at the human level, because that’s how humans are. You need to speak to each other. You need to agree or disagree. Negotiate etc.

I saw it in the early 2000’s with algorithmic trading, guys where saying we are all out of jobs we never going to out trade these algos well? One could argue that the markets have more participants then ever. More hedge funds than ever etc.

I realised that there is only one thing that robots/ai etc can’t do that humans can. That is to be accountable and to be held accountable.

For some reason it’s a massive part of humanity. We live and breathe justice and someone always has to take the fall. Can’t imagine people saying “but it wasn’t us, it was xgy-98 v1.2.1. It was that things fault not ours.

BongoSpank

1mo

Brand / artist IDENTITY will become even more important. There is already a deluge of fake artists being AI generated to capitalize on whatever is trending, look/sound like other artists, etc. Add to that the whole dead internet trend of auto-generated content cannibalizing itself, and standing out as a real person who is relatable becomes more important than ever.

There will be less and less point to jumping on bandwagons to create yet another K-Pop, mumble-rap, or whatever lookalike since AI can do it quicker and cheaper. Whether or not it can do it "better" may become financially irrelevant. In the land of clones, the man with personality is king. (phrase gets too muddled and loses its roots trying to gender neutralize it.)

That AI works at least as a marketing gimmick for plugins is already a proven concept. Ultimately, though, economics is at least half about demand... what consumers want. Personally, half the plugins I WANT to be invented likely require something like AI, so it's not like there's some massive disconnect there necessarily.

I'd love to quickly and easily clone MY OWN voice for backgrounds so I'm not wasting a day on bits most people will never be able to tell the difference. That's just a sensible product. Ditto for all the frequency unmasking or other types of products that can probably be made better with newer tech. If these products work well and without artifacts, then why WOULDN'T users want them?

If I were investing right now in development, that's certainly where I'd be looking. If I were looking to back an artist, I'd be looking for someone who loves social media and has a commanding digital presence to stand out from the attack of the clones.

gheeman87

1mo

Wow...thats ..whats the point of getting DAWS lol

Covidious

1mo

I hope because we love creating but I get your point!

gheeman87

1mo

this AI stuff is funny, u can create some fun stufff. I wonder also if one can just take out songs parts, separate vocals and other things from it, it would be cool

pringlescanfullofcum

1mo

pretty easily, yeah. there are multiple models for stem separation, and in some cases, they produce results with less bleed than the original multitrack recordings.

gheeman87

1mo

Yes, we can sue separation software, but it would be nice if its straight there in audio

LysanderStorm

1mo

I think it'll bring the same gradual shift and adaption like in other industries - maybe a bit quicker, but not fundamentally different. Building tools, products, userbases, etc. all still takes time. And even though the whole industry will start dabbling around with it, it usually still takes a long time until shifts happen (this has nothing to do with the music industry, but is more general a thing of industry as opposed to doing something for a hobby - people have contracts, colleagues with whom they like working, processes in place, etc., and that all doesn't disappear over night).

In a longer term, musicians will live from live music even more than now, and those that cannot will either use AI as a tool to speed up / improve the music they produce, or shift to doing something else (again, this is not specific to the music industry).

For DAWs, I could imagine a large share of their user base is already now hobbyists, so not too much will change. I won't stop making music because of AI, that's for sure (but I also don't make too much money of it except from the occasional live gig).

ZMech

1mo

I think canva is kind of an equivalent. It made it very easy for small businesses to put together some basic promo material themselves instead of hiring a designer. But, graphic design and visual arts haven't gone away.

I think AI music will be good for things like making a basic jingle, but probably not the next hit single.

tony10000

1mo

AI is fine for copying popular artists/genres. That is what a lot of producers are doing anyway. But it will not be able to emulate true innovation and creativity.

godisthat

1mo

I think one big Thing will BE Just Putting Songs into your Programm getting the Same Instrument with Midi File of the Song. Crystal clear. Being able to modify stuff easily and creativily. Big Cloud AI with thousand of references and Instruments.

unkn0wncall3r

1mo

People still go to the theater, to see a show and enjoy old school stage acting, even though they could have the same story presented in a movie or go to the cinema and watch a movie full of crazy special effects or an animation movie.

OUMUAMUAMUAMUAMUAMUA

1mo

🙄

Minibatteries

1mo

Even if the entire pro industry dies overnight due to AI (which i have my strong doubts about that happening) then I still don't see music technology being at much risk, regular people won't stop wanting to create their own music and creating via AI prompts versus sitting down with a daw are completely different experiences. Using a daw to create music is an expression of creativity, can basically be a meditation ritual. Inserting a prompt into an AI tool is not even comparable in terms of the experience or what benefits the 'creator' gets from the act of creation.

The invention of digital audio didn't stop people from playing the guitar.

Covidious

1mo

I agree that if you are a musical person you'll always want to create something yourself. I think we live at a time of the greatest democratisation of music tech ever but I'm not sure all this choice will carry on if there's very little professional industry to drive innovation. This may be a good thing. Too many choices can be swamping.

Minibatteries

1mo

I disagree that catering towards the professional industry has been the main driver innovation in the last 10 years of music technology development. We've been able to do practically everything in terms of digital manipulation of sound for a long time now, it's been mostly UX choices that have moved the industry forward and that is more driven by designing for the amateur market. Amateurs can't afford to hire mixers, mastering engineers and producers and so the trend has been plugins filling that gap to do the same things that those roles did with traditional tools but more fool-proof parametrisation and UX.

headtrauma

1mo

I'm already starting to see that people who would are maybe not quite invested in becoming a producer already are taking pause when it comes to trying to learn to produce. Now they can quickly make some songs that sound better than what they could do if they put years of effort in. They can start to DJ original songs right now, without years of work. Most of us learned to produce because it was literally the only way that we could make original music, now there is an alternative that is a hell of a lot easier.

I feel like this is going to maybe not affect people who are already in the game and enjoy doing it, but it will affect how many people try to get into the game, and most mass market products rely much more on the masses of people who might buy that Ableton Push and maybe never really use it that much, but hold onto it and mess with it every once in a while.

There's already AI that can vastly improve the quality of a recording using AI (Adobe Podcast studio I think one is called) and it will get better over time. Why invest in $1000 mic when you can record something with your phone and run it through an AI to get something studio quality?