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Is the Music Business Too Afraid of Big, Bad AI?
For all the alarm bells sounding about AI replacing human creativity in music, is it really just a modern equivalent of a ringtone?
Ringtones, which are usually fully licensed by copyright owners, were a lucrative business — Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” apparently still holds the sales record, more than 5 million sold at a retail price of $2.99 a pop — but, with rare exceptions, they became annoying a long time ago. For many years, bad singers have been made to sound almost good in the studio with the wonder of autotune, and at many major concerts, vocalists are singing along with prerecorded backing tracks of themselves; some lip-synch so well, and live-sound technicians are able to modulate the volume so strategically, that it takes well-trained eyes and ears to detect it. Fictional, AI-created pop stars already exist, and it’s probably just a matter of time before biopics or alternate-history stories come to virtual life: Someone conceivably could feed every recording of John Lennon’s voice into AI and emerge with a convincing approximation of what a series of post-1980 albums might have sounded like; an avatar could go on tour, accompanied by live musicians, just like hologram concerts.
Or read this on Variety