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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."
Is it just me or did the article quote music industry folks as saying the software must work becuase 95% of the hits of the last decade scored highly. The software is a mathmatical model based on the hits of the last century.. so of course it scores them highly.
But in time, these predictions have always proved wrong.
The music industry has proven again and again that "time" no longer matters. Bands like The Stones, Aerosmith, etc, are all a thing of the past. They don't need them. They want acts like Spears, Maroon5, etc who rise to the top of the charts quickly through marketing, consolidation, and payoffs, and who are only there for a short time before the next big thing hits.
Touring, actual music playing, and actual singing are overrated. The HSS printout says so.
Just tweak this, this, and this. Add a synth here, here, and here. We have a hit. Two hits, maybe three, and we can continue to whine that we don't make any money because we spent it all marketing something that died after 3 years.
Like LAUNCHCast before the RIAA leaned on them, and then Yahoo! acquired it and ripped out everything that made it innovative and cool?
You'd rate songs on a scale from 'never play this again' to 10, and the system would select new songs based on what you'd already rated and insert them into your personal "station" rotation.
But the real killer feature was that you could search for other users whose tastes were statistically similar to your own, subscribe to their stations, and learn about new and different music and artists as some of their favorites were added to your rotation. Want to buy a song? Click on it.
Absolutely cool collaborative software. Unfortunately, if you wanted to expend the effort, you could abuse the system to constuct a station that could (gasp!) play a specific song at a specific time for free, and the RIAA wouldn't allow that.
So the only thing that had gotten me to purchase any new music in years was eviscerated, stuffed full of ads, and then sold to Yahoo! as a 'service' with all the collaboration gone. You could pay money to lose the ads. Whee.
Bitter? Me?
A short story by Arthur C. Clarke describes one possible consequence of this sort of thing. The scientist involved builds a computer to study the underlying theory of music, harmonic relations, wave analysis, frequency distribution, etc. and how it interacts with the brain on a physiological level. His search is related to the notion that all existing tunes are crude approximations of the fundamental melody that has eluded composers for centuries (basically a rehash of Plato's theory of ideals applied to music.) The scientist is later found in a permanent catatonic state in his lab (by his tone-deaf assistant) with the Ultimate Melody repeating over and over in an endless loop. Because the overwhelming power of the Ultimate Melody (the ideal form on which all melodies in the universe are patterned after), his mind is completely dominated by it--much the same as when a catchy tune gets stuck in your head for days, only much more powerful. The melody formed a fugue in the pathways of his brain, going round and round forever, obliterating all other thoughts.