AI seems like a scapegoat here when I think the real answer is simply that it was a tired genre that died out like many music fads over the years. (Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market, independent of AI.)
> Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market
That is a strange way to view music to me.
Just because people can make music doesn't mean others will enjoy it. It isn't really obvious to me that overwhelming the supply would decrease demand. I mean, look at any extreme pop genre.
One would assume that there are more complicated economics at play.
If people's ability to produce slop outpaces the ability for content delivery and discovery platforms to separate the wheat from the chaff, the category as a whole will diminish.
As a musician I agree that "regular people can make it without sacrificing their soul" is not an indicator of bad music. Some of the greatest, most creative music I had the honor to listen to was made by drunk teenagers who didn't know how to tune their instruments after all.
But the thing about fads: if everybody and their dog knows how to make "proper" punk, low-fi-hiphop or whatever, the result will be bland, uniform, shapeless and generic. That doesn't mean the genre stopped producing great music, it just means you will have to wade through the bland stuff to get through the gold. And few people are willing to keep doing just that.
The problem when a creative niche gets flooded with low quality ripoffs is that people end up fed up with the entire genre.
Plus even that aside, people often crave change. No genre of music has ever remained entirely static. And all styles of music comes in and out of fashion.
I don't know that much about current music, but I do spend a lot of time listening to LoFi study girl live stream, is that music the genre being discussed here? Perhaps it's just the normal hype cycle and then things settle out? Innovation, enthusiasm, copy cats, burn out, a solid genre for decades?
Pop by definition is catchy music and the actual sound underneath is adapts to current trends. It's an ephemeral genre. LoFi is a specific sound and so if people are bored with the sound it'll stop being popular.
Spotify wouldn’t have entered the space if there weren’t listeners, and it’s not their responsibility to be some kind of garbage collector for aging genres.
The article doesn’t seem to me to scapegoat AI as much as the dual role which Spotify has being both the dominant distributor and recommendation source as well as creating their own content: even if they were paying studio musicians that would still be a major conflict of interest, just as it is when Ticketmaster/Live Nation controls band management, venues, and ticket sales or when Amazon uses their knowledge of buying habits to compete with their own sellers. We should have laws requiring separation between the delivery layer and content creation, but sadly that is not the era we live in.
I think like anything, the lineage evolves. If we're to call Madlib and Dilla 'lofi', as the wikipedia does, then we can follow that lineage to someone like Knxwledge, who just this week won a grammy for 'Why Lawd?'.
Meanwhile, you have all these people on YouTube that distill something out of that lineage and just make tons and tons of boring versions of it. As more people encounter it, divorced from it's history, the term takes on a new meaning and now the boring version is what the label means.
So I guess you could say the lineage is alive and well while the genre is boring and dead. And I agree, it's not AI's fault.
True but its clear that these systems allow this process to happen at rates orders of magnitudes larger than without it. That changes the severity of the problem and definitely turns it into something people need to intervene in.
The problem is actually Spotify was a bit of a market maker here in terms of getting access to peoples ears. AI probably hollowed out the quality of the music for all but the most dedicated listeners as someone who has listened to lo-fi for a long time. Spotify probably also boosted their own preferred content.
The article sounds part whiny and part boosting Wish on the Beat (multiple mentions of their linked playlist) - which I am supportive but also don't believe all the content in the article as a result.
> Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market, independent of AI.
I remember back in the 90's a friend who had the same critique of EDM and Daft Punk.
After all, you have to do is learn how to write and play some catchy melodies on a keyboard, learn synthesizers, samplers and sound generation, percussion patterns, and use a DAW.
Is it much easier to self produce Lo-Fi now than it would've been in 1995? Sure, but that's true of music in general. But one isn't going to be able to produce a song similar to what GameChops puts out in 10 mins, even if you are an expert.
That AI is making it hard to have a decent signal-to-noise ratio in Spotify isn't doesn't mean the genre is dead.
Lofi music is a really popular genre to listen to as background music, I wouldn't say it's a tired genre. Perhaps for creators it is, but for listeners it's not.
How much background music do you realistically need though? If there's a few thousand hours, would you notice if it repeated at some point?
(Assuming the general style of the genre is staying similar and you don't listen to specific songs you discovered but just put on some collection of songs from the genre.)
Is there new elevator music being composed all the time too?
The rebellious authentic music from the current middle-aged or old people's youth is todays elevator music. I've heard the Pink Floyd's the Wall being played at a soothing volume in the grocery store as I tried to find lactose free milk for my adult children's visit.
Atleast for me the repetition is the point. It's calm enough when I'm working but I get a little jolt of joy whenbi recognise a groove I really liked before
