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AI Bots Pick The Hits of Tomorrow
Wolverine Inspector writes "The Music Industry uses a product called HSS (Hit Song Science) made by Spain's Polyphonic HMI. According to The Guardian "while no one's talking about it, it seems that the whole record industry is already using AI to choose hits. From unsigned acts dreaming in their garage, to multinationals such as Sony and Universal, everyone is clandestinely using a new and controversial technology to gain an edge on their competitors."
Even though it costs about $5,200 US/$6,500, many artists are starting to buy it to help them write succesfull songs."
That's just great.
Remember how video card manufacturers were tweaking their drivers to perform well in benchmarks? "Musicians", and I use that term loosely, will be tweaking their songs to score a "hit" on this service. Right, but it will be harder than ever to produce something out of the mainstream when a record exec will look only at the score on HSS and potential effect on the bottom line. Art for art's sake is virtually a thing of the past. Prepare for more of the same on the FM dial! (thank goodness for etunes.com)
Trolling is a art,
Remember the good old days when the listeners picked the hits?
Next up: bots that generate pop music.
many artists are starting to buy it to help them write succesfull songs."
Comercially successful != good
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"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
This announcement from the producers of this record contains important information for radio program directors, and is not for broadcast.
The first cut on this record has been cross-format-focused for airplay success. As you well know, a record must break on radio in order to actually provide a living for the artists involved. Up until now, you've had to make these record-breaking decisions on your own, relying only on perplexing intangibilities like taste and intuition. But now, there's a better way.
The cut that follows is the product of newly-developed compositional techniques, based on state-of-the-art marketing analysis technology. This cut has been analytically designed to break on radio. And it will, sooner or later.
For the station that breaks it first, the benefits are obvious. You lead the pack. Yes, no matter what share of this crazy market you do business in, no other release is going to satisfy your corporation's current idea of good radio like this one. On this cut, we're working together, on the same wavelength, in scientific harmony.
But remember, this cut is constructed for multi-market-breaking NOW. Don't waste valuable research with needless delay. We've done the hard work of insuring your success; the final step is up to you.
SPECIAL DESIGNER SONG FOLLOWS IN 5.. 4.. 3.. 2.. 1.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
So basically, the AI is using the J. Evans Pritchard method for determining greatness in poetry (which is can be widely considered as a spoken form of music) to determine the overall greatness of modern music.
Just great. Where the hell is the barbaric YAWP when you need one.
The bunch of numb nut fuck wads wonder why people don't buy full albums or why sales are down. look at artists like david bowie, who continues to sell. RIAA needs to be killed and the record execs all need to die or get out of the business.
Producing something for a desired effect like that is not art, it's a manufacturing process if you make it this automatic. Any monkey can produce such regurgitated music, so why should I pay them, I can buy the software myself and make such music. There is a way to make use of this kind of principle without automating and dehumanizing it, for example, Neil Sedaka wrote Oh, Carol by studying the number 1 hits in a number of countries around the world for weeks and then he drew on that to come to some conclusions which helped him shape his creative output.
This automated way described in the article takes away that creative role from the artist by providing the output as well. Why do you need such monkey artists? If you really want that kind of music just set up a system that automatically generates songs which would be free to download to the first 2,000 people who would be required to rank the song and then at the end of each week make the top ranked song available for sale to everyone else.
The major moral, legal and philosophical foundation of copyright law is that an 'artist' utilises his/her creative abilities to create a unique and original piece. Copyright law exists to protect this effort and create incentive. If artists are NOT using their creative abilities and are instead waiting for a piece of software to tell them what statistically will be popular...then I think there is a argument for rethinking giving 'artists' life + 50 years protection.
Or we could all just get an iPod and put the music on it we like. Down with radio!
Once you have your characteristics you can build a three dimensional vector out of a song.
Don't you mean an n-dimensional vector? Wouldn't it be only three dimensional if they're only measuring three characteristics?
Mechanik
Art is just another word for entertainment.
I wouldn't call sports "art". (nor would I call it "entertainment" but I digress)
Trolling is a art,
Actually, no.
If too many A&R guys just use this software, then the interesting new music won't get signed. If there are decent A&R guys working and they pick up the new good stuff, release it and it becomes big enough to appear on the radar, then it is classed as a "hit", and becomes a new data point on graph.
This already happens, though - witness the sheer number of blatently manufactured skatepunk bands that came out once a few of them had some chart success. Same for the Limp Bizkit crowd and hundreds of Norah Jones replicants.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Music is art. It is not objective. It is not rational. It is not definable. It is not quantifiable.
I'd like to see proof of that, because I've a sneaking suspicion that it might not be so. For "good art", you're talking about the preferences of human beings. Those preferences are shaped by fixed forces - factors that have been selected for over the last 100 000 years or so, and the preferences are expressed in a definiable physical system, the brain. "unquantifiable" and "not definable" as opposed to "has not been quantified" and "to complex for us to define at present" are strong terms, and there's no proof that it is like that.
For hits as opposed to art, even better, you're not trying to predict the actions of a single human being, merely those of most a large crowd of them.
I listened to punk rock for decades. In the 80s songs by the bands All and 7 Seconds would never have been recognized by any system as being hits. But fast-forward a decade and suddenly artists like Blink 182 and Greenday ARE having hits using the same formula.
So such a system, when fed a lot of 80s hits as training data, and a new punk song as input, will conclude that it has no hit potential. But put in hits of the 90s, and it should match. That's basically "sounds like what already sells", which is so simple that even a record company exec can do it.
Basically, this system will stagnate the music industry as it will lock it into a very narrow form of music and it will not be allowed to grow. People will get even more bored which will lead to decreases sales.
Chart music already = narrow and boring, existing styles. I suspect that this has already been happening for a while, and explains why new musical styles have to gaina an "undergrownd" fanbase before they "go mainstream". This software would lock this trend in even more (you get what you ask for), assuming that everyone used it. If not, small labels stand to make the occasional killing when a breakthrough happens (e.g. sub pop).
It would help sales in the short term, but hinder them in the long term. I'm actually for it. Anything that helps hasten the complete irrelevance of the mass-market lowest-common denominator music charts must be good. Maybe I'm too old, but they don't affect me any more at all. We've got better new toys like MP3, inernet radio, cds from amazon, podcasts, etc.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
But why do we really like the music that we like?
Becuase we're told to. The fiasco that is Ashlee Simpson verifies this: she came from nowhere, is obviously bad to even the most undiscerning listener, but all of a sudden she's everywhere because she got signed up for the "Star Treatment Package", $19.95.
They push crap like this down our throats because they think they have a "product" and don't care enough to think about it too hard; then they blame poor sales on pirates. Thank God for internet radio. Those bastards are going to sell out to irrelevance if they aren't very careful.
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Does this remind anyone of the Monty Python skit where they use mathematicians to create the world's funniest joke, and use it to get Nazis to die laughing?
Actually, it reminds me of some of Bradbury's more gloomy predictions of the sanitization of the culture that was happening then and is continuing to occur.
How long until books are written the same way, or at least evaluated by the same kind of tool? I suppose the news media will have it happen to them first: "Sorry, Dan, that story about political hanky-panky rated a 4.5 on our offensive-o-meter, way above the threshold of 3. Put some kittens in it and maybe we can get it to a 2.5."
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Sorry, but I subscribe to the "music's in your blood" theory of being a musician. You've gotta have the passion and the drive to get it out, as well as the desire to explore your creativity. At least that's the way I think.
When people pay several thousand dollars to have a computer tell them what kinda of music they should be making, they're no longer musicians in my book. At this point, they become money grubbing attention whores, incapable of original thought or expresion.
While the real musicians are out honing their craft, and improving themselves, these "plastic musicians" are out trying to find a shortcut to easy street via techniques as this.
The only bright spot for real musicians these days is the fact that as the Net and other technologies become more prevelant, there's many more options for the average listener (the one's who think that if it's not on the radio, then it's not real music). In fact I think that the growing success of podcasting, and shoutcasting is a direct result of people finally getting fed up with the crap that radio forces upon us! Once people realize that they too can easily "dial in" something other than the next Jessica Simpson lipsync'd hit, then this industry will slowly die away.
As proof of this, scan Shoutcast sometime, or hook up with some podcast feeds. You'll soon notice that there's hardly any cookie-cutter pop music being played on them.
If I were a musician, I'd tweak just one song to become a radio hit... and count on people buying my record so they can hear the music I really wanted to make.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
All your points are well-taken and insightful:
Nevertheless,
Many people think that bars are horrible places to be in. If you don't like alcohol that much, hate loud, constant, unequalized sound and dark, smelly places, and don't have a lot of money...bars totally suck. People need to develop tiny amplifiers that are the size of paperback books with great sound along with inexpensive but expressive musical instruments and play in coffeeshops and fast-food places late in the evening when they are not busy.
- Instruments can be bought cheaply now on eBay and Craigslist. Music can be learned from the internet and music educational software.
- Basically the global music corporations Do have the legal resources to prove that they 'own' every melody ever written and every story ever told. That's why it's becoming increasing important to develop culture outside of the corporate framework and to continue to build (through file-sharing and 100 gigabyte hard disk swapping) vast individual private libraries of 'pirated' material in order to keep the public domain (which is everything that has been broadcast on a public media like radio and TV) available for ourselves and for future generations.
You seem to have developed your own little universe where an "artist" is somehow above the common musician because of some hair-splitting difference in "intent". In order to help you deflate this pretensious tomfoolery, I'm now going to reveal a great secret imparted to me by my 10th grade English instructor.
All great literature was composed for one purpose:
To make money.
So drop the coffee house tone, already. Most of the musicians that "produce a piece of work intended to convey emotion and inspire" in a garage somewhere suck just as much as most of the ones hand-picked by record executives for the size of their breasts. Actually, more, because the hand-picked ones can usually comprehend at least common time.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~