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Text/ Huang Yuntao

I have a friend who does strategic analysis in the financial industry. He has a dream, which is to find a beautiful voice and sing songs for which he has written the lyrics.

He never thought that one day this dream would come true in an extremely boring way.

Recently, Doubao, a subsidiary of ByteDance, launched a music generation function. By setting the music style (folk, pop, rock, jazz, hip-hop, etc.), it can quickly generate a song of about one minute. The lyrics can be written by yourself or generated by AI, and the length should not exceed 200 words.

Once again, the voice of worry has emerged: musicians are doomed! After graphic designers, translators, and novelists, the next people to be backstabbed by AI are musicians.

This worry is obviously unnecessary.

Although not every piece of music is sold, in modern society, music is mainly produced and consumed as a commodity.

How do people consume music? Let me tell you two stories.

In 2006, one week after American socialite Paris Hilton released her first solo album "Paris", the famous British street artist Banksy remade the album cover in the form of collage, spoofing 500 fake albums. In these fake albums, not only other music was mixed in, but also fake song titles given by Banksy.

After completing all this, Banksy ran into several record stores in the UK and quietly displayed the counterfeit CDs on the shelves. Since the record cover and barcode remained intact, the record store staff failed to notice it, so all 500 records were sold out.

No customer who bought the fake CD complained or asked for a refund, and no record store sued Banksy. Fans responded enthusiastically after learning the inside story, and one of the CDs was even sold at an auction for a high price. Even the socialite herself did not feel offended. Hilton responded: Banksy's behavior is cool, I also want to buy a fake album.

In his book "Pop Music and Capitalism", Japanese scholar Yoshitaka Mori commented on Banksy's performance art as making the most of digital technology, Paris Hilton's fame, and the distribution network and sales capabilities of record stores.

British playwright Oscar Wilde once said: Everything in the world is about sex, except sex itself, and sex is only about power.

Paris Hilton, who likes to wear low-cut suspender skirts and make sexy "bubble sounds", was the traffic queen before smartphones became popular. She was regarded as the representative of stupid rich girls in the United States and was also the target of paparazzi in the past 20 years. At this point in the story, I would like to quote Oscar Wilde's famous saying: Everything in the fashion world is related to music, except for music itself, which is only about entertainment.

If you still have doubts about this judgment, think about how quickly Pang Mailang's "My Skateboard Shoes" climbed the charts.

The second story is about the “Little King of Asia”.

In 2019, Jay Chou's new song "Say Good Not to Cry" was sold online, with the single price of 3 yuan. By the next morning, its sales had exceeded 15 million yuan, setting a record for digital single sales on the QQ Music platform at the time. Three years later, in 2022, Jay Chou, still on the QQ Music platform, an album "The Greatest Work" had sales of over 100 million yuan in just one hour. According to the financial report for that quarter, Tencent Music's average daily revenue was far less than 100 million yuan.

Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music each own copyrighted tracks worth millions or even tens of millions. Although the joke that "Jay Chou alone supports half of Tencent Music" is not true, from the perspective of revenue and traffic contribution, online music platforms generally follow the "80/20 rule": about 20% of popular tracks contribute about 80% of traffic and revenue.

Music is the industry with the most obvious head effect. The flip side of this is that most music will never be heard by anyone - regardless of whether it is created by humans or machines.

German philosopher and music theorist Theodor Adorno believes that although jazz appears to be very diverse, its structure is actually very simple. Because of its simple structure, the various parts of jazz can be broken down and rearranged to produce seemingly "new" music in an infinite number of ways.

Adorno died in 1969. When he was alive, he probably never expected that human technological civilization would one day advance to the point where ordinary people like us could produce a piece of jazz in less than a minute without using a single brain cell.

I like a comment on Zhihu:The role of AI is not to create a good thing all at once, but to create tons of garbage in a short period of time and then pick out the gold from it.

Human beings' obsession with producing tons of garbage in various fields has been formed since entering the stage of socialized mass production, and it is not worth making a fuss at this time. But Adorno's other judgment is buzzing in my ears: popular music, which is mass-produced and mass-consumed through assembly lines, has "averaged" the human spirit, which should be diverse.

In this process of averaging, the original diversity of music disappears. This is what we should be wary of.

Just like human nature,The subtlety and depth of creativity, thought, and art cannot be described by algorithms, or even explored by human language.Those things that are different for every individual and every moment are the most wonderful gifts God has given to carbon-based life.

Cover source: Photo Network