I was a professional musician for about a decade. I graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2004/2005ish, and then graduated from Musician's Institute in 2006/2007ish. after that, I was a studio/session player for some b-list acts while I was starting a thrash metal band. the same year I graduated, we landed a spot on warped tour. a year after that, we negotiated a sync deal with Fox to be on camera during primetime network television while playing our song, on a series that wound up getting syndicated and running for a dozen or so years.
we got those gigs because of the hours and hours and hours of work that we put in to social media marketing, canvasing hollywood with show fliers, and networking, networking, networking. it still took us 3 years to get a record deal after that. and when we did get one? we made way less than when we were DIY.
my point isn't that my opinion is more valid than anyone else here, or that you should take what I say as law. in fact, please, do not do that. form your own opinions. but, I felt it necessary to give context to what I'm about to say, since the comments this will invite, I'm sure, will make arguments that if I had done any of these things, I would not hold the opinions that I do.
I love AI music. Like, a lot. So much that I released 2 full-length records of AI music. And, no, I do not believe it turns what "real" musicians do into fast food. I thought it was the perfect way to escape the bullshit that comes with the music industry. the worst parts of it: the labels.
the only thing that Sony and UMG are now doing, which is what the others just got done doing, is ripping the creativity, fun, and magic out of this app. It's just... man, is it sad to watch happen and literally have no way to help stop it.
v5 and v4.5, in my opinion, are the best models that suno ever released. and I HOPE my music went in to training those models. sincerely. and I don't give a fuck that I didn't get paid.
the logistics of "fairly" compensating someone for contributing to what makes those models is a clusterfuck, in and of itself, and I don't think can be fairly determined by anyone.
Transformers architecture models, and diffusion models, both learn so similarly to how humans learn. we're all just next-token-probability calculators running around, reacting and predicting output tokens based on our training data. I get for some that's a stretch, but, it doesn't change that it's remarkably similar to how our own brains learn.
The thing that makes me mad about all this? Those lawsuits don't do anything except fuck up the ability that some people have to get their creativity out into the world. I'm not talking about the people who "press button get song", because we can all tell those ones apart. Especially with these new models. To get something truly unique, you need to add so much to the composition and structuring, and choices/prompting you give, that I don't think you can call this "low effort" or "cheating" or some of the other words I've seen. Especially can't say things like "it's not art" because that's such a subjective term that NONE of us get to decide how to define.
Plus the cream will always rise to the top. Low effort is low effort is low effort. My songs went through a process, and most other people I know mix theirt real playing in with the generations-- not to mention exporting either the stems individually to remix/recompile them in a DAW, or even the "lazy" method of just importing them to something like audacity so you adjust the EQ, then exporting them once they're cleaned up the best one can-- it's a serious workflow, and it takes a long time. It's not "press button receive song" for anything worthwhile.
Now, there are some people slopping it up and doing just that, and pumping their music into all these distribution channels to get massive amounts of streams and cheat the system for money. Sure. There's going to be cheaters in every game; welcome to humans.
but if you think for one second that giving all this money to UMG/Warner Bros/Sony/etc. is going to somehow protect artistic integrity in music? You're just not operating from a place of understanding how the industry works. I've been in it. On both sides of it, and I'm telling you that this is not good. This whole "releasing art for anyone to listen to or see, except robots because they steal from us" thing is so exhausting to keep hearing. You know who steals all that shit the most? OTHER HUMANS.
It's true!
"Inspired by..." "Based on the true story ___"... "my influences are ____, ____ and ____" --- and somehow that's not the same thing? C'mon, man. I just think those arguments are so disingenuous, because they just seem (to me) like it's the same thing as Metallica suing Napster and their fans.
Just rubs me the wrong way for a bunch of reasons, and the results are that you have people who are devastated over losing the creative outlet they've come to rely on over the past few years, for absolutely NO reason other than to give the major labels even MORE money that they are not passing down to the artists in any meaningful way. How do I know? My royalty checks, for starters. That's how.
It's no secret that the music isn't what made you the money in the industry. Personally? I think the music should be given away for free. Make music to share and spread your message, not to accumulate wealth. That's what merchandise, touring, and putting in the actual work across the venues of the world are for.
... and if you're worried that AI music is taking your cover band's gig at the wedding? (it won't ever), or afraid that they're taking money out of the pockets of major label artists?
I'll preface this last part with the fact that I'm much, much too old to be saying this, but, I'll try it on for size anyways: Well, if you can't create music that someone wants to choose over an AI version? Then, I hate to say it, but that kind of sounds like a skill issue to me.
...nope, not going to do that ever again. Still, my point stands: this is going to only enrich even more greedy record label executives, it will enrich NONE of the artists. This is only pulling creativity outlets away from people-- some who desperately need them, and some who are just casual users, like myself, who simply enjoy having another way to express myself. Having record label execs paws all over it does not give me warm and fuzzies, and I encourage everyone to not take this crap at face value. It's NOT to "protect" or "help" the artists. And I'll maintain that point of view until you show me some paper trail of the new revenue from suno being traceable through their organization, and being then paid out in a meaningful way to the artists.