Opinion: People are angry about Velvet Sundown, but Spotify is the real villain

Big Tech, Big Media, Big Bucks

It was always going to happen: an AI-generated band has hit the number 1 spot (admittedly it was Sweden's Viral 50 on Spotify), racking up more than a million streams in a few weeks. Equally predictably, the backlash has been a mixture of cultural gloom mixed with some very human existential angst. "‘Spokesperson' for AI ‘Band' Velvet Sundown Now Says He Is an Imposter" was one Rolling Stone headline, while The Atlantic declared, more pithily, that "Nobody Cares If Music Is Real Anymore".

This, as any teenager recognises, has been the heartfelt cry of adults for generations, if usually expressed along the lines that today's musicians don't - or can't - make real music. Something does feel different this time, but it isn't for the reasons that many seem to suggest. While plenty of commentators have argued that whatever the abilities of computers to generate music, we would need humans at least to perform it, the end of human civilisation as we know it can be traced back to one specific event: July 21, 1989 when a breakdown in the backing track for pop duo Milli Vanilli proved they had been lipsyncing all the time. More seriously, software such as AutoTune has frequently made it much less important for some singers to be able to, well, actually sing.

Before asking whether music is real, we should perhaps stick to the question of whether a song is any good before even considering the technology. After all, one woman's Kraftwerk's Robots is another man's Benny Benassi's Satisfaction. Can AI provide intriguing, stimulating music? I for one would argue that Brian Eno's 2017 album Reflection, comprised of generative ambient music, is worth listening to, even if it can never aspire to the heights of his and David Bowie's experiments on their 1977 album Low. My allusion to Low, still one of my favourite albums of all time, highlights a problem with any form of musical appreciation: nostalgia. Nobody cares if music is real any more. Thus it ever was.

What has changed, however, is that for the first time Big Media has combined with Big Tech. Music has always required technology, from the ability to stretch animal skins over wooden frames to the modular perfections of Robert Moog, but when the power of AI is harnessed into distrubution platforms that reach tens and hundreds of millions, even billions of users, we are in an environment that treats its participants very differently, and where the effects of AI will be what Mustafah Suleyman calls "complexity amplifiers". 

One of the most important consequences of the combination of Big Media and Big Tech is the open, dirty secret that while there is plenty of cash sloshing around in the system, very little of it reaches performers. Consider the following chart of estimates for payments:

As the Musicians Union points out, there are no performance rights for music on streaming platforms as there were on broadcast media. Also, while the figures above would suggest that, per million streams, someone whose music was played on Spotify would earn $3,500 against $10,000 for the same song on Apple Music, these figures are unlikely to be seen in most cases. 

These are not the droids you're looking for

What is most significant, then, about the rise of Velvet Sundown is not so much what they say about human production, important as that is, but human consumption and the attitude of the Big Tech-Media to "product". Spotify is my particular bête noire, not least because it is one of the worst paying platforms for all but a handful of its "talent". It also has a pretty dismal attitude to the shovelware it serves up. Daniel Ek, almost certainly the inspiration for the tech mogule Lukass Matsson in the excellent drama, Succession, has been accused by a number of music commentators for being more interested in muzak than music, and I highly recommend Mark Beaumont's excellent, excoriating article for NME on how the CEO of Spotify blatantly wants musicians to churn out content.

In a totally unsurprising move, Ek has recently shown himself more interested in how his venture capital firm Prima Materia can make even bigger bucks from the military industrial complex, investing €600 million in AI-powered warfare - a move that led Deerhoof to boycott his platform (no, I hadn't heard of them either, but they're good and you should listen to them - just not on Spotify). One of the greatest lessons Big Tech learned from Big Media was the ways in which entertainment could be integrated into vertical financial structures to leverage anti-war pop music into better ways of killing people.

Which brings me to the Velvet Sundown. They were meant to sound like classic Crosby Stills and Nash, although for me they evoke a Mumford & Sons vibe (this is not a good thing). The most interesting thing about them is their name, which they admitted was a knowing tip to another manufactured band, The Velvet Underground - a group as pop culture as a tin of Campbell's Soup with a dash of Andy Warhol. That said, Velvet Sundown's music is as inoffensive as much of the content which sloshes around streaming platforms today, demonstrating that AI-generated music is catching up with the diatonic noodlings of the vast majority of slush served up as background noise. By contrast, I suspect that any self-respecting music technician responsible for The Velvet Underground would want to rewrite the algorithm from scratch once it generated the inspired vocal style of Nico.

To repeat: the first question regarding music and tech is not whether it is real but if it is good, with as many answers as there are people. I have no desire to ever listen again to Velvet Sundown, but I'll follow with interest anything released by Brian Eno or Aphex Twin (who has long used generative techniques, if not AI). One thing that matters profoundly, however, is that when you make the choice you need to know. This is where companies such as Spotify are being extra sneaky. As Sophie Jones, chief strategy officer at the BPI, told The Guardian, there needs to be clear labelling of AI product: "We believe that AI should be used to serve human creativity, not supplant it," What Daniel Ek wants is product, and even 8 billion humans may not be enough to satisfy his greed for a constant stream (pun intended) of contet on his platform, which is where AI will serve him very well - particularly if you don't know what you're listening to.

Like Big Food, which has long been resistant to labelling unhealthy food, Spotify and many others would prefer AI generated music to gorge ourselves without knowing what we are consuming. It's more important to be able to flood the market with muzak to ensure that the algorithm can continue to glut itself in the never-ending attention economy. To paraphrase the Sex Pistols, Big Tech-Media needs an unlimited supply - but not a reason why.