Taxing the rich is not going to solve any of this. It may help some, but it's nothing like the panacea certain people pretend it is.
If we took all the assets from all the billionaires in the US, that total is something like $6-7 trillion if we pretend there's no asset price decrease in the selling of said assets.
Sounds like a lot, but we're nearly $40 trillion in debt. Taxing the rich heavily won't solve a spending problem.
The federal government specifically, and the admin class in general was a lot smaller during our parents' era.
I've just recently re-discovered the joy of writing my own songs, and playing them with (actual) instruments. It's something I get immense pleasure from, and for once, I'm actually getting some earned traction. In another life, I may have been a musician, and it's something I fantasize about regularly.
With all these AI-generated music tools, the world is about to be flooded with a ton of low-effort, low-quality music. It's going to to absolutely drown out anyone trying to make music honestly, and kill budding musicians in their crib.
I suppose this is the same existential crisis that other professions/skills are also going through now. The feeling of a loss of purpose, or a loss of a fantasy in learning a new skill and switching careers, is pretty devastating.
People also said similar things in the past (I'm a musician as well: guitar, piano and bass) about Synths and Drum machines (and things like GarageBand which can do backing drums and even basslines semi-automatically now).
Some of those things enabled others to create new types of music or express themselves in different ways.
People have said that about robots and computers in the workplace, and indeed, since the 60s, more and more jobs have been automated. And there are less musicians now. Film scores and albums are produced with samples instead of bands or orchestras, reducing demand for session players, leading to less income for musicians, leading to less musicians.
And while automating dangerous jobs is a good thing, generating AI music isn't. It's not as unethical as generating deepfakes, but it's useless, and bad for society.
I feel its already hit the tipping point. I used to listen to mixes on youtube liberally, but I've now had to filter all searches to pre-2023 due to the flood of slop that's appeared. I used to finds loads of great up-coming musicians, but the amount of effort required to do so has increased considerably. I am tired of filtering out the slop.
Find some good independent online radio stations that you like. There are successful ones out there, nts.live and rinse.fm in the UK for example. Obviously they exist in other countries too.
I say independent as most radio is stacked with adverts, but the above two seem successful without needing them.
I find the human curation far more satisfying than an algorithm, and most DJs want to support human artists not bland AI nonsense as they have a stake in the music industry.
SEARCH TIP: As the default search prioritizes newer content, it's quite tedious to find older takes on youtube.. there's a workaround though: web search for site:youtube.com and set a custom date range (ddg: click on "Any time", g: "Tools" on the right side) to sidetrack the big tech attention economy brainrot algorithm.. : D
> It's going to to absolutely drown out anyone trying to make music honestly
The world is saturated with low quality everything already. Has been for a long time, even before AI. If you're genuinely good you'll be able to stand out
The answers to your questions are in the comment you replied to. Part of their love is music is sharing it with others. They also like to fantasize about becoming a full-time musician. Both of those things are less likely if there is 100x the current volume of music from unknowns.
It's not about validation, it's about expression and communicationw with other humans. That's one of the key beauties of art and it's being flooded away with artificial, empty content
Spotify does have a lot of AI generated music, yes. What is the purpose of your comment? Do you believe there is some filtering mechanism that is going to keep AI slop off of these platforms? Is that what we've seen happening with writing and art?
Let me tell you that the world has been flooded with low-effort, low-quality music for decades already. Most of the popular music relying on the same 3 chords, dull lyrics etc. While I'm a fan of music generators like Udio, I'm pretty sure the best music is still going to be created by humans. I also believe that while AI slop is bad, human slop is even worse.
I don't think it's going to drown people out. I think it's going to make recommender systems much less useful, so the people who care will simply return to the older methods of curation, and the people who don't care will get the slop they want.
