People listen to thousands of hours of rain or whale sounds, no one thinks "chill beats to study and vibe to" is high art either. I think that is the main market this is competing with not your favourite band or whatever.

Sounds awfully like vocaloid but lazier and undisclosed AI use.

I don't understand streaming music as a concept. My collection of individual tracks stands at about 1,700 (clocking in at 190 hours -- that is 22 hours more than a week), and there are several full albums atop that.

Streaming is very useful for people who don't have such a curated collection already. Especially younger generations who didn't grow up on physical media.

you don't want to choose what you listen to

You can though? You can always pull up a specific artist, album, or track. You can even curate your own collection of favorites on these services, and shuffle from there.

But for a lot of users, there's added value in discovery algorithms that'll find new music for you. It is radio with extra steps, but those extra steps of telling the system what music you like and dislike do result in much better results than radio stations that weren't tailored to your exact tastes. Before you built up your collection, how did you use to discover new music back in the day? I'm guessing probably from the radio, this is that for the current generation.

The slow death of being able to own things is sad. But unlimited access to nearly all music, with discovery tools, is a pretty dang tempting deal. The average user doesn't really care about whether not they 'own' their music, just the practicality of being able to listen to music.

Consider that music piracy is way way way down compared to how rampant it was in the 2000s, because people are really happy with streaming now. There's an old saying that piracy is a service problem, and after unsuccessfully trying to fight it head-on for so long, the industry won in the end by simply offering a better service.

Before streaming services were a thing, I had a very carefully curated and tagged music collection. But these days? Streaming is fine. There are a few songs, less than 10 out of a library of ~ 800, that I’ve added manually.

But you don’t own it!

For most people, they don’t care about that. They care about convenience. Open an app, search for a playlist/genre/band/song and hit play.

AI music sucks, because it is so bland and boring. It is certainly possible that it will get better, but for the genres I listen to, I highly doubt that.

Nobody Cares If Music Is Real Anymore

I'm nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too?

I still have my library of tracks from the mid 2000s on a drive in my PC. Hell, I still have my iPod Classic.

That said, I spend 99% of my time streaming music.

That said², I never ever engage with playlists. They only serve to poison the well that is my algorithm. I have a tightly curated Youtube video algorithm and, even though Youtube Music's algorithm is dogshit compared to Spotify, I still protect it at all costs.

You can still be an active listener on streaming services.

I'm currently three quarters of the way through Decapitated's Organic Hallucinosis record while I clean the house. For the last month straight I've been mainlining Steven Wilson's solo records as well as Porcupine Tree records. Music is not dead for the active listeners in the world. The focus should be on encouraging kids to appreciate a good album every once in a while.

Curiosity got the better of me and I had a listen to this "band".

If you had told me it was Rival Sons, I would have totally believed it. That's to say, it's a pretty decent interpretation of the genre, but nothing ground breaking.

It's sad to me that this is the case. The music is really fine genre fodder which means it will get listens

Huh? I care and I would refuse to listen to AI music

I do care. And this is what was missing for me to completely stop listening to new things and hear how glorious music was in the past.

My phone is literally my music player, not really a phone. 500G of music to play whenever I want. I own it, I don't need a subscription or the internet. And it's real people putting their passion into a quality product.

People post nasty anti-social shit like this on lemmy and for what? and then you get a bunch of other accounts that just pop on to post "oh, and I just love my spotify, I just love to keep giving money to anti-social parasites." Insufferable.

I use streaming services to check out new albums or new to me artists, but my main playlist lives on my own server.

I don't use streaming at all, I buy every song I own on iTunes or other services that give you DRM-free files. I have a thing (call it a compulsion) about not using "other peoples' things" when there's an alternative.

As with all AI, I'm not intrinsically opposed to AI music as a concept, but I don't want to use it now when the services that make it are leeching off of artists without paying them. I don't get "into" bands (e.g. I can't tell you the names of almost any musicians in the bands I listen to), and I don't usually like concerts, so it's not like I'll be missing out on those like some fans would be.

I’m sure “AI” can produce perfectly milquetoast music, but are you ever going to want to listen again? I have tracks I’ve listened to hundreds of times because they mean something to me emotionally (and often have a temporal element wherein I remember where I was living and what I was doing the first time I heard it) – and most of my tracks do not have lyrics.

Layering nonsensical lyrics atop forgettable melodies sounds more like torture than a service providing any value.

I suspect this is mostly an artifact of our current early AI music models. Just like we got past the days of 8-finger monstrosities in newer image models, we'll get more 'context-aware' and sensical lyric models for music. We just won't be getting there ethically.