The music industry is circling a defined term as its defensive answer to generative AI music. “Human-made” becomes the premium category and “machine-made” or some variation of that becomes the commodity, meaning the monetary value of a song may very soon be measured based on its origin, rather than its effect on the listener’s psyche.
will.i.am has been calling this era a renaissance for a few years, except his renaissance is that of a machine-assisted human, not that of the awakening of the human spirit, calling AI-assisted music the new renaissance and the Leonardo da Vinci era for hypercreatives. He believes that a machine is going to write amazing versions of Boom Boom Pow. I think he’s right about that, but I think the industry as a whole has a long-standing blind spot. This is not just an opportunity for a renaissance of creativity, it’s an opportunity for a renaissance of the soul. That is where deeply moving art comes from, isn’t it?
will.i.am just released a song called Sick Ass Foo’s. As charged by the compass, with zero contextual awareness outside of the lyrics themselves, it comes in as Degraded, satisfying four ego and status tenets, carried by the hook. Let me ask, what good is it to be human-forward, human-led and human-made if what you are making is not generally healthy for the human psyche?
While everyone’s pushing human-made, I’m pushing made-for-human. The word “renaissance” started out describing what the machines were about to unleash, genius, but instead they unleashed slop, so it’s been rerouted to describe anything a person happens to touch. A renaissance with room for Sick Ass Foo’s isn’t a renaissance at all, but rather an industrial-scale economic defense plan.
Over time, Will had me convinced that he was a frontrunner in the “battle” to keep humanity human because of songs like Where is the Love, Union, They Don’t Want Music and a handful of other BEP songs that would rank Elevated on the Rising Compass. Admittedly, I also came to realize that BEP helped pave the way for Degraded and Corrupted music in the mainstream. From what I have heard over the last decade, the higher-tiered songs have evaporated from his production line. The handful of Elevated songs were the anomaly which I naively mistook for the throughline. Most people block out the higher tiers, I block out the lower. (Read about the Rising Compass here.)
The argument and conversation around writing songs has switched from “is this worth writing/producing” to “is this written/produced by a human.” Everyone’s treating this as a defense of art when it’s actually a demotion of art into algorithmic fodder, as opposed to the enlightening, uplifting, mind-expanding manifestation of god energy that art is. The argument is instead now about economics and industry, not taste or values.
Scarcity = Value, not Values
The idea is: as AI floods the market, human work becomes scarce (or just harder to find), and that scarcity equates to economic value. Not metaphysical value, mind you, but capitalistic, monetary value. That’s economics in practice, but that logic runs identically for degraded or corrupted music. Music that is toxic for the soul is still toxic even if it’s handmade.
You can hand-make a garment out of cheap polyester and sell it on Etsy as human made, or you can mass produce it and sell it in Target. It’s still made of the same material. Both products are equally toxic to the human skin. You’re wearing plastic no matter what. Same for toxic handmade music.
Looking more critically at scarcity economics in the music industry, scarcity economics won’t distribute evenly if human-made becomes the premium category anyway. The people who cash in will be the ones who already have a catalog, a name and marketing channels. An unknown person creating fundamentally the same music as will.i.am has very little to gain from the scarcity economics, as the other hurdles of the music business compound on top.
On the Word Renaissance
Historically, The Renaissance was a time of renewed interest in the arts (and science but we don’t cover science here.) The art of The Renaissance was awe inspiring, wondrous, innovative and uplifting. It fed the soul. Can we call this time period a renaissance when most of the music coming from humans is net neutral or toxic for the soul? I think not.
Renaissance applied honestly would protect and promote people with a vision, voice and purpose beyond economic stature, popularity and ego validation. The version of a renaissance being sold right now is not that of artistic integrity, it is the perpetuation of another catalog being acquired by the dark mineral siblings: BlackRock and Blackstone.
The Renaissance that we need is a Renaissance of not “human made” but “made for human.” Where is the Love shares an idea that requires consciousness of the burdens of the world to land on. Sick Ass Foo’s is a status flex. Sick Ass Foo’s was made for the ego. Where’s the love for songs made for the human?