I think most of what you’ve written here only really applies if you listen to music without knowing anything about the musician.

That seems pretty uncommon to me, for most people. The most popular musicians in the world are basically celebrity characters, with the music as a key ingredient, not the only one. Do Taylor Swift fans or Kanye fans or [musician] fans just listen to the music and not follow the person? Pretty unlikely IMO.

I also think it’s an entirely false equivalence to say using electronic instruments are like AI music tools. Very different things – an electric guitar doesn’t play music by itself. It’s still a tool at the end of the day.

> That seems pretty uncommon to me, for most people. The most popular musicians in the world are basically celebrity characters, with the music as a key ingredient, not the only one. Do Taylor Swift fans or Kanye fans or [musician] fans just listen to the music and not follow the person? Pretty unlikely IMO.

Yes, and AI music generation (like auto-tune before it) enables people to choose their celebrities from a wider pool than "the type of dork who practices guitar for 10000 hours".

Frankly, this is also how I mostly listen to music - I set a song or two I like, then I let auto-discovery keep adding to the list.

If I happen to like it, I hit thumbs up/like. Otherwise I ignore it.

I sometimes go through and browse musicians, mainly to see if they have other songs I might like, but generally speaking... it's not high on my list of priorities. Then again, I don't give a shit about the "pop" aspect of music at all. It's mainly background noise I put on while doing something else.

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As an aside:

> I also think it’s an entirely false equivalence to say using electronic instruments are like AI music tools. Very different things – an electric guitar doesn’t play music by itself. It’s still a tool at the end of the day.

I think this is where it gets weird, and I think you're pretty solidly incorrect here. Samplers and grooveboxes absolutely play music by themselves. I think there's also a weird world where things like "Girl Talk" are somewhat spiritual successors to AI music...

Ex - I definitely love girl talk, and I'm not in any way implying that those albums don't take skill and taste, but he's literally just playing samples of other artists. If that's real music (and I'd argue strongly that it IS real music) then I think I struggle to rule out AI generated songs that are edited by someone (and if you've used this tooling, it still requires lots of editing).

> Very different things – an electric guitar doesn’t play music by itself.

And a model does not play good music by itself. Only slop if your contribution is nil. Models are more like pianos than parrots.