Three songs generated by artificial intelligence topped music charts this week, reaching the highest spots on Spotify and Billboard charts.
Walk My Walk and Livin’ on Borrowed Time by the outfit Breaking Rust topped Spotify’s “Viral 50” songs in the US, which documents the “most viral tracks right now” on a daily basis, according to the streaming service. A Dutch song, We Say No, No, No to an Asylum Center, an anti-migrant anthem by JW “Broken Veteran” that protests against the creation of new asylum centers, took the top position in Spotify’s global version of the viral chart around the same time. Breaking Rust also appeared in the top five on the global chart.
These three songs are part of a flood of AI-generated music that has come to saturate streaming platforms. A study published on Wednesday by the streaming app Deezer estimates that 50,000 AI-generated songs are uploaded to the platform every day – 34% of all the music submitted.
So are you an art fan who thinks 4’33" is a work of genius? Or one of the ones who thinks it’s garbage? I’m almost tempted to go for visual art where these controversies are more common; musicians are actually pretty chill about it most of the time. (And I’ll avoid the derogatory term if we’re discussing whether it’s good, as opposed to just if someone in particular is doing it)
Scientists come to consensus, and update that consensus in sync as new discoveries are made. Art fans do not. There’s also anthropology showing the existence of non-Western systems of music completely different from and alien to our own, divergences between systems within Western music history, and a long history of new kinds of music associated with minorities being deemed “wrong”. Meanwhile, other people have known beauty is subjective continuously since Plato.
All that adds up to gatekeeping art being done for essentially the same reasons people gatekeep anything.