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Thank god we are taking care of the “researchers working on things like music classification and generation” ! As long as we can convince ourselves we have a so
by 1dry 9mo ago
Thank god we are taking care of the “researchers working on things like music classification and generation” ! As long as we can convince ourselves we have a sound analysis of it, no need to support and defend people making actual art right. So much already made, who needs more?
This is not to defend Spotify (death to it), but to state that opening all of this data for even MORE garbage generation is a step in the wrong direction. The right direction would be to heavily legislate around / regulate companies like Spotify to more fairly compensate the musicians who create the works they train their slop generators with.
- fao_ 9mo agoSpotify doesn't take care of artists, if you knew any artists you'd understand that Spotify is atrocious for people who make music.
- nimih 9mo agoWhat, precisely, is the point you’re trying to make here?
- 1dry 9mo agoExpressing frustration at the pervasive tendency of technologists to look at everything, including art which is a reflection of peoples' subjective realities, with an "at-scale" lens, e.g., "let's collect ALL of it, and categorize it, and develop technologies to mash it all together and vomit out derivative averages with no compelling humanist point of view" I hope readers will feel our frustration.
- nimih 9mo agoWell, that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to be pissed off about, thanks for taking the time to elaborate. I think the overlap between the bureaucratic technologies developed by people who, by all accounts, are genuine lovers of the subjectivity and messiness of music qua human artistic production (e.g. the algorithmic music recommendation engines of the '00s and early '10s; public databases like discogs and musicbrainz; perhaps even the expansive libraries and curated collections in piracy networks like what.cd), and the people who mainly seem interested in extracting as much profit as possible from the vast portfolios of artistic output they have access to (e.g. all of Spotify's current business practices, pretty much), should probably prompt some serious introspection among any technologists who see themselves in that first category. I read an essay a number of years back, which raised the point that, if you're an academic or researcher working on computer vision, no matter how pure your motives or tall your ivory tower, what do you expect that research to be used for, if not surveillance systems run by the most evil people imaginable. And, thus, shouldn't you share some of that moral culpability? I think about that essay a lot these days, especially in relation to topics like this.
- flir 9mo agoI'm reminded of the Zero One Infinity rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule) We're very much trained to solve the most general case of any problem, for sensible reasons. I first learned about this formulation of the rule from a case study in Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, where breaking the rule resulted in a much better user experience.
- kachnuv_ocasek 9mo agoHow does Spotify defend people who actually make art? There's virtually no difference between pirating and steaming through Spotify for the vast majority of artists.
- Griffinsauce 9mo agoPersonally as an artist I'd rather give it to people directly for free but I'll meet the audience where they are. The "compensation" does not factor into it at all. Interestingly, I'm seeing more and more small bands stepping off of Spotify, mainly because of AI clones and botted stream scams. Apparently they've decided losing that reach is acceptable. (anecdotal ofc. but even on local scale it's an interesting choice)
- 1dry 9mo agoupdated - thank you commenters for making it clear that my sentiment was not clear