This is actually an insightful comment. People defending strong copyrights think they are protecting the little guy, but in fact they are defending the few winner-takes-all creatives.

Banning AI music may only protect the very same people. Perhaps AI music will mostly hurt mass-market, ad-fueled artists while leaving the little guy who toils away in live bar and night club shows untouched. It could paradoxically increase the value of human connection in music consumption.

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dahart 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> People defending strong copyrights think they are protecting the little guy, but in fact they are defending the few winner-takes-all creatives.

Copyrights do both, they protect all creatives, it’s not one or the other.

> Banning AI music many only protect the same people

How so? AI threatens publishers and copyrights holders the most. Don’t confuse big music with big tech, they’re not the same people. Maybe browse the list of AI lawsuits related to copyrights and note how many publishers there are https://ailawsuittracker.com/copyright/

Breaking the copyright system is very unlikely to leave independent artists unscathed, I believe AI is already doing significant damage to independent artists. Breaking big publishing system won’t help either, given the number of independent artists striving to break out and go big and land a publishing contract.

	▲	glimshe 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You could be right and my statement is speculative/provocative. But I'm far from sure that AI Music would hurt that many small musicians. Please keep in mind that we've seen this story before... Record albums (CDs, cassettes etc), Electronic music and even MIDI were at one point seen as a threat to small musicians but the market only grew as a result. Is AI a bigger threat to musicians than, let's say, Spotify? That commoditized music to a degree we had never seen before. It would be fair to ask "does the world need ANY music to ever be made again?". To me, the answer is a clear YES, but the amount of music available on Spotify is so mind-boggling (I heard a "1 million new tracks a year" figure somewhere) that it already appears to be impossible for a professional musician to survive. Yet, they do. So there's something off in the assumption that AI will wipe out small musicians.

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tgv 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It could paradoxically increase the value of human connection in music consumption.

My prediction/fear is that it will remove incentives to make music "manually", and thus lead to a decline in all aspects of the music industry, starting at spending, and then continue to teachers to instrument makers to artists. And that will make music a very elitist hobby, and stifle further development. We'll get stuck in LLM variations over All I want for Last Christmas.

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pwillia7 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd like to know more

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rbwkap an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Complete bullshit. Any musician can register for copyright payouts and all musicians involved in a production get something.

Instead, of course the money should go to Silicon Valley mafiosi and middlemen!

	▲	glimshe 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Copyright payouts (especially from streaming) are a small fraction, often negligible, of the livelihood of a professional musician. Keep in mind that in a world with free models, anyone could create AI music without silicon valley's involvement. My assumption is that "bad" music would be replaced by AI, while "good" music would not because AI simply wouldn't be able to deliver the goods. Now, if AI could literally replace every musician, that would obviously be bad. But I don't think that banning it would solve the problem. If society as a whole is so against AI music that banning it is politically popular, it's because they don't like AI music to begin with - nothing to fear, then.