The Pop Corporation

People who write about music, overthink music, read books and websites about music, devour music documentaries and go on Wikipedia deep-dives, are not your average music listener. Don’t read that as ‘better’, rather, atypical.

Think about it – there’s people out there who saw the Oasis reunion, but were completely unaware that Liam Gallagher just a fortnight ago, tweeted a racial slur. If you’re not on Twitter, don’t read the music press, and none of your mates do, that was a storm that happened elsewhere while you were thinking about singing to ‘Live Forever’ and having some beers.

Pop music of course, is filled with terminally online people who read the FauxMoi subreddit, keeping their ear to the ground for all the latest gossip and misdemeanours. There’s been a lot of chatter about Sabrina Carpenter’s new album artwork, with Very Online feminists furious about it, and other Very Online people yelling ‘get over yourself!’, but for the most part, it’s people with no notion of all this, and singing to ‘Espresso’ in the car on the way to work.

This isn’t a moral failing on anyone’s part, but rather, music serves a fun purpose and doesn’t absolutely require that everyone does their prior reading before pressing play on some music.

And so, onto the thorny topic of artificial intelligence. It’s an environmental disaster, it’s literally scraping online spaces and using artists’ music to repurpose it. However, if you don’t know that, is it just some novel thing, right?

Have you heard this? It sounds a bit like Fleetwood Mac! I like them! Isn’t it amazing what computers can do now?

That’s the month that’s happened, with the advent of Velvet Sundown – a classic rock thing, designed by AI with some human prompts, who have amassed over a million in streams on Spotify in no time at all. The promo images are AI, the lyrics, the music, the backstory, everything is not real.

And how do you feel about it? Do you require authenticity? Or is it just something going in some ears? Do they have a million listeners, or is it just a bunch of bots and other sneaky programming, leaving the whole thing to eat itself? Who are Spotify paying? Would you rather your money go to a real person, or have you not thought about it?

Some of the handwringing has been ‘consumer affairs’ based, with people concerned that ‘customers’ might not know what they’re getting – but what happens if the listener isn’t really arsed?

This ‘group’ have been described as “a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction”. It continued: “This isn’t a trick – it’s a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.”

“Not quite human. Not quite machine. The Velvet Sundown lives somewhere in between.”

Human prompts, into the software, and a whole lot of think-pieces and concern. Either way, they’ve got more monthly listeners than your mate’s band, and all this press will be driving more clicks to them, even if they are mostly curious people who want to hate on it.

In the Guardian, Roberto Neri who is the chief executive of the Ivors Academy, said: “AI-generated bands like Velvet Sundown that are reaching big audiences without involving human creators raise serious concerns around transparency, authorship and consent.”

There have been calls for things to be labelled with AI, which would be more useful with images that are appearing on social media and fooling society’s slowest walkers with often dodgy political takes, but it seems that by-and-large, the concern about this is as niche an interest as those who read sites like this one.

Will someone care that an independent artist is having their music used to train AI models, when that same person wouldn’t listen to independently released music in the first instance? The Tech Bros who are for the most part, anti-big government, won’t be keep to pressure their political partners to introduce such a thing.

Does your average music fan care if musicians are being exploited, or do we need to see some groups introduced that care on behalf of listeners? Is there anything rock ‘n’ roll about an ethics committee waddling around in the halls of entertainment?

What will probably happen, is that someone with money to throw around will spot enough similarities between something they’ve written, in comparison to an AI song, and then lawyers will get rich working out if they should sue the person who put the prompts in, or the tech companies that enabled it in the first instances.

In cases like this, like everything, it is the lawyers that get rich first.