Study reveals 97 per cent of music listeners don’t have a clue what they’re listening to
As millions around the world scrambled to post their Spotify Wrapped results to their friends, very few were aware that their top 100 playlist had been infiltrated.
COMMENT
As millions around the world scrambled to post their Spotify Wrapped results to their mates, very few were aware that their top 100 playlist had been infiltrated by a bleak new dystopia.
No, I’m not talking about Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter. We’re talking about a much more disturbing version of an industry plant that threatens to burn the house down.
We all knew AI music was bashing down the door, but we all tried convince ourselves that we’d be the special ones who could tell the difference.
Unfortunately, a new study conducted by Ipsos and anti-AI streaming platform Deezer has revealed 97 per cent of listeners are unable to distinguish AI-generated tracks from human-made songs.
More than half of the 9,000 surveyed listeners said they felt uncomfortable discovering they couldn’t tell the difference, while 71 per cent were surprised by just how convincing AI audio has become.
The most concerning figure, however, points to a very bleak future indeed. Just 52 per cent of respondents believed AI-generated music should not appear in the main charts.
Quite a few people appear to believe that all that matters is that music makes them feel good and that it’s cheap. That is exactly the culture major industry executives want to flourish as they scramble towards an AI future.
But if you speak to actual musicians, the ones who dedicate personal fortunes to the game, they will almost always tell you AI is a disaster for the industry — one that has faced ongoing pressure for decades, with streaming platforms paying a pittance even to moderately successful acts.
At approximately 0.005 cents per stream, everyone already knew the game was rigged. But still, the garage rockers and bedroom producers persisted in the hope their art would eventually resonate with a group of like-minded dreamers.
Now everyone just has to sit down and watch as the industry makes its next inevitable step to squeeze humanity out of the arts to turn a quick buck.
The commodification of music and art is nothing new, but now the powerbrokers have taken it to new extremes and have effectively told anyone up-and-coming that their passion is a joke.
Why pay a stinky little band that needs to eat, fuel their van, buy guitar strings and hire studio time when machines have zero overhead costs? Or unions.
Go check your Spotify Wrapped
AI music is no longer fringe.
The study clearly shows that there are millions out there bopping to a song that was made by a robot, and they haven’t got the faintest clue.
A 100 per cent fake “country artist” called Breaking Rust scored a #1 Hit on Billboard’s country chart in November. Fake pop artists like Xania Monet have also done a very convincing job at mimicking flavour-of-the-month music to great success.
At the time of writing, Breaking Rust has 2.6 million monthly listeners.
That is more than double the monthly audience of artists like Jack White or Paul Kelly, musicians who have dedicated their entire lives to growing their audience and craft.
All eclipsed by a quick click of a button, prompted with the streaming platforms’ algorithms in mind so they can extract what meagre money real artists could have been paid, all without having to play a single gig and earn exposure like a proper musician.
The problem is unfortunately inescapable.
But there are things you can do if you actually care about human music enduring.
If you let major streaming platforms curate playlists for you based on your taste, like the “Daily Mix”, then you are opening up an opportunity to be fed AI-slop that has been created to please the algorithm.
Australia’s social media ban might have done a bit in getting kids off their phones and back in the garage playing instruments, but I doubt we’re encouraging the next generation of Silverchairs with this bulls**t.
Never mind the droves of elder journeymen who never “made it” but still make a modest living through songwriting and playing their local circuits.
If a majority of listeners do their best to be intentional about selecting music, it will go a long way in resisting the tide.
Going to actual shows and buying vinyl and tees direct from the band is even better.
This philosophy is pushed by Aussie psych-rock titans King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, who recently took their 27-album discography off Spotify in a rage at the direction the streamer was headed.
But it wasn’t long before an AI impersonator called “King Lizard Wizard” emerged, publishing AI songs with identical titles to the Melbourne six-piece. They weren’t identical copies, but it was clear someone had tried to make a quick buck off their monolithic career in the span of an afternoon toying with Sora.
Frontman Stu Mackenzie said it all in one short sentence this week.
“Seriously wtf – we are truly doomed,” he told TheMusic.
One of the biggest problems with AI “artists” like Breaking Rust and Xania Monet is that they are trained on existing music made by real people.
It is fundamentally impossible for an AI to bring anything new to the table because it will always be feeding off what has come before.
It doesn’t take a genius to see where it ends up as more and more AI music gets pumped into the system and future AI models start learning off of that instead.
A famous internet meme summed it all up in 2022 when ChatGPT launched and immediately started creating digital art.
“I thought AI would be doing my laundry so I could spend my days painting, not the other way around,” the anonymous internet philosopher wrote.
Anybody who doesn’t physically retch at the idea of generative AI pumping out music is simply one who doesn’t understand the first thing about art or creativity.
Unfortunately, these are the folks who have been capitalising on the digital music era for decades, and have slowly but effectively turned countless artists’ life’s work into another barcoded product for consumption.
That philosophy is largely why things online are now referred to as “units” or “content”. At the end of the day, the ones who stand to make the most money off of clicks or views aren’t made any richer by allowing the “content” a personality.
That would just mean they’d have to give it rights.
Thoughts? alexander.blair@news.com.au
Originally published as Study reveals 97 per cent of music listeners don’t have a clue what they’re listening to
