The Real Danger of AI

Why Suno is changing music forever

This blind item from a gossip site is the real reason musicians should be terrified of AI music.

This one named singer/A list producer/songwriter doesn't want to work with real artists any longer. He says he makes more money and has way fewer hassles just creating AI artists.

I would guess this A-list producer is most likely Timbaland, who is the vanguard of professional music producers embracing Suno. Although “one-named singer” would tend to point at Pharrell. But whoever he may be, he’s absolutely not wrong, because for all that people blather on and on about “AI slop” and how AI-generated music is “lifeless” and “lacks soul”, they have absolutely no idea how much of an absolute near-impossibility it is to get human musicians to do anything at all, much less get them to actually record anything even halfway-decent.

Remember, the so-called “artists” don’t even do much anymore. It’s the producers who write and record most of the professional music published by the record industry. Rick Beato openly talks about how studio musicians quite regularly stand in for the instrumentalists from the various bands, who have about as much to do with writing and recording “their” music as you or I do.

So if the producers are embracing AI already, rest assured that it is not only here to stay, it will replace human musicians everywhere but the stage. But don’t worry, you’ll be able to watch good-looking young men and women faking it and pretending to play their instruments, thereby providing all the life and soul that you think makes the music worth listening to.

The average music listener has no idea how hard it is to get a guitarist to produce a catchy riff, or to get a drummer to even show up in the first place. So for the average producer, the ability to quickly and easily turn his idea into something like this, in this case, a high-energy pop-rock song called ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER, without having to depend upon anyone else is going be of tremendous appeal, no matter how much success he has had with actual human musicians.

Now, next is a mix that is closer to the original version. It’s still not the final one, as there are a few infelicities that are bothering me, but it’s an extension of the original song using the 4.5 engine since neither 3.5 nor 4.0 extensions work reliably. I tried remastering with 4.5+, but that tended to thicken the guitars and over-polish the mix rather like the previous version, which is a 4.5+ cover of the original that tends to lose a little of the falsetto backing vocals and the song’s natural edge.

It would be interesting to know which version people here prefer. Perhaps in a future post, I’ll start from the original version and trace the steps from that to the finished product.

But regardless, the ability to rapidly produce so many varying options and then further adjust them is exactly what every producer, from complete amateur to Billboard-charting professional, very much wants. And that’s why Suno is such a magnificent game-changer.