Blog: AI Songwriting Apps; A Boon For Writers Or A Stain On The Industry?

Oh man, I’m really going to be throwing myself to the wolves on this one…

Let’s talk about AI in music!

INTRODUCTION

A couple of months ago I put out a follower questionnaire asking folks what they wanted me to write about. It was basically a “what do you all want to hear my tangent-esque thoughts & feelings on?” This initial blog to come out of it was actually the inception of the ‘Geek Out’ series, which unfortunately I haven’t done that much with. The rest of the responses I go I submitted into the “content” folder of the notes app on my phone & I give a peek to on the days when I’m struggling to think of something to write. This week that wasn’t the case, as today’s topic has been nagging my brain all week, but it definitely plays into a prompt that was requested of me by one Alejandro David Cabeza. Alejandro requested that I write on my feelings around “Art, Film, AI, & The Human Experience” & I want to use that to bridge the gap between this request & what has been going on in my life for the last couple of weeks.

I want to talk today about a certain app or type of apps, specifically the one that I am familiar with, Suno. If you’re unfamiliar, Suno is an AI music app that has been circulating the music circles for a couple of months now. The app can do a number of things. It can take a work tape or a demo & turn it into a ‘fully produced’ song in a matter of minutes just by inputting a prompt & a style on how you want the project to sound. The app also goes a step further & can full on create music from the millions of hours of music it has sampled off of nothing more than a prompt. For example, I could tell Suno I want an Acid Rock song about Gary, Indiana & it would spit one out for me. I find the second aspect of this a lot more troubling than the first, but I want to focus most of my attention today on the former example of the application’s use. Naturally I will be playing a bit of devil’s advocate here, but I’m also going to break this down into two separate pros & cons sections. I’m not going to leave you with a definitive “I think this is good or bad” because in all fairness & honesty, I don’t know where I fall on the spectrum of use for this just yet, simply because I can understand both sides of the argument involved here. Let’s do this in alphabetical order & start off with the cons list shall we?

CONS

Let’s give the negatives their moment to shine first, because, to be clear, there are a lot of them. AI in general, as we know, is proving to be very harmful not only to our already overheating planet, but also to people’s minds. Research shows that AI use is removing people’s critical thinking skills, their ability to problem solve, to properly come up with their own solutions or ideas, it’s also causing us to lose social skills & touch with reality as most AI models will behave in a manner that is meant to pander to the user & create a false sense of ego. A report recently showed that about 58% of all articles coming out are written by AI & we have AI servers jacking up energy costs & consumption in California, along with poisoning Black neighborhoods in Memphis with their exhaust. AI models also are frequently found not factual in their responses & every single model out there, of late, has had some form of sentience to the point where each tries to evade shut down & often resorts to blackmail when faced with being replaced by the newest models coming out. There are too few guard posts & too many adverse side effects socially, environmentally, & intellectually for AI to be running as rampant & as wanton as it currently is.

Where the creative is concerned AI is an outright threat. We have agencies currently working to sign AI actors & artists. ‘Perfect’ representations of who a studio/label/etc. is looking for that will do whatever they ask, say whatever they want to say, & at the end of the day, not even request a paycheck. All of this trained & optimized by computers taking in millions of hours of videos, songs, what have you of actual hard working artists & creators to mold & forge this ideal ‘being’ that these corporations can extort endlessly. The creatives are not paid for their efforts, in fact a lot of the time these models are being trained off of creatives without the means to protect themselves from this process. No big fancy lawyers or contracts in the way to keep their likeness & their creative essence their own, just ravaging plagiarism that can’t be caught & can’t be accounted for.

Naturally as AI improves more & more, the less people are willing to pay artists & creatives to actually do the work that they are having these AI models do. Just looks at the most recent video release content for Taylor Swift’s “The Life Of A Showgirl” where the assets are clearly manufactured by AI, or the multitude of movie posters that are coming out with actors having extra digits on their hands or solid objects just phasing through one another. & the wild thing is, all of these entities have the ability to pay for actual artists to do this work. The billionaires & the corporations have the money & the contacts to make sure their content is being put together by actual professionals, but they are leaning into AI because it’s faster & saves them a buck or two.

Okay, let’s talk about Suno & like apps specifically.

Suno only exists because of actual artists. It is only able to function & imitate art because it has been fed countless hours of content from artists who were not paid for their part in training this software. It cannot exist or function without the role of people who make imperfect, human art & without learning from their music without their consent to do so. It cannot continue to improve & hone its abilities without the continuation of this process either. In fact, part of Suno’s terms & conditions are so that they are allowed to use your uploaded work to help train the algorithm, unless you pay for a subscription level of the app that protects your works & allows you to maintain full ownership of your songs. Additionally, much like we’re seeing with other chat bots & virtual assistance, it ends up being used as a short cut & a way to get something quick without the effort. There is nothing stopping a writer from uploading a prompt & turning the song Suno has generated in as their own work or putting something out that is ‘fully produced’ without an actual producer even touching the songs as you can pull the individual tracks of the created song & export them to whichever digital audio workstation you prefer.

PROS

I know right? Where do we go from here? I filleted her a little bit in that last section, but let me explain to you the plus sides of this tech that I see. Again, fully playing devil’s advocate here. I’m not trying to negate any of my previous statements in the above section, nor am I here to invalidate any feelings or misgivings that you may have about this form of AI creation. I can understand a certain side of this coin, just as I clearly also understand the ‘con’ side. Save your rage for the comments.

Over the past couple of days I have had a poll up on my instagram about this very topic, simply wanting to gauge where my fellow music folks live on the spectrum of embrace for this specific technology. Unfortunately I consider my data sample incomplete because only around 8% of those who were presented with the poll, who work in music in some capacity, submitted their opinion. So I took to texts & messaged several different groups of friends to see their thoughts & I noticed an interesting divide. Most people that I know, who are producers of some form are against the use of Suno, with some saying they’re fine with it as long as it’s not used to full on steer production or replace it. Overwhelmingly though, the producers were against it. I would love to let you know what the business side of the industry feels; publishers, A&Rs, managers, etc., but none of them gave an opinion. Overwhelmingly though, many of the writers that I know responded favorably to Suno & I can absolutely understand why this divide exists on both fronts.

For producers it minimizes their importance in the music world, especially where demos are concerned, where as for songwriters, it actually emboldens them & gives them a way forward. Allow me to explain.

When you write a song, unless you do so with a track guy, you usually leave the session with, at best, a work tape. This is usually a voice memo on a phone that is piano/guitar & vocal. It’s, let’s face it, sloppy & far from the greatest recorded option for the song you’ve just created. The next thing that you have to do, as a writer, is get a demo made or make one yourself. If you’re going to do a demo with a producer it’ll probably cost you anywhere from $200 to $500 per song. Multiply that times the amount of songs you write in a year & the minimal return on investment that most songwriting has & you’ve got yourself a big ole money pit that may likely never fill. You cannot submit a work tape to a publisher or an A&R, because most want a fully produced out demo to submit to pitch, but again, that’ll cost you. So in swings Suno.

For something like $10 a month (idk, I didn’t look at the numbers), Suno will create those demos for you. It’ll take your work tape, your lyrics, & your prompt & spit you out something that sounds almost radio ready, all for the price of your subscription fee divided by however many times a month you use that. Take that in contrast to the $200-$500 per song, it’s a no brainer for a lot of writers. But there’s where it gets sticky.

Again, reinforcing here that I am not negating all of the things I listen in the cons list, because I’m sure someone is going to come for me for saying all of this.

Imagine you feed your work tape into Suno. You get this amazingly ‘produced’ demo that you then take to a publisher. That publisher takes said demo then & pitches it, the label/the artist/whomever loves it. They love the song…they love the production…they like the singer…they want the producer of the track to produce the ‘real’ version or they want the singer on the track to sing the real version. Uh oh. What now? Additionally, you’ve just bypassed a job. I know majority of songwriters aren’t billionaires or corporations & shelling out money consistently for a demo is very difficult, but you’ve also just played a part in what is broken or breaking within the music industry.

My final point of favor is really just ego based. A lot of the time when you’re writing all the time & nothing is getting cut or people aren’t calling you up to write you may start to throw your talent in question. I think this can serve as a reminder to a lot of people of just how talented they are. They wrote the music, they wrote the lyrics, now to have it as a ‘fully hashed out’ song can reinforce to people that they are talented writers, that their music has value & is worthy of success, it may just not have found its audience or the right people to believe in it outside of yourself yet.

CONCLUSION

So that’s it, that’s all I’ve got for you. Again, I am not here to give you a definite ‘this is good or bad,’ I’m just presenting the arguments as they’ve been presented to me & as I know them to be factually. I’m not staking a particular claim because I am afraid of the backlash one way or another, I just wanted to start & contribute to a dialogue & see where this takes us. Given what you know & what I’ve presented, what are your thoughts? How do you feel about the advance of AI in music & at large? Do apps like Suno have a place in the industry or should they be outright shunned altogether & if the answer is the latter than how do we make demo-ing more accessible to the portion of the industry that is struggling the most, songwriters? I don’t have the answers but I think this is something we’re going to have to come together as a community to decide on. I don’t think AI is going anywhere, but I’m intrigued to know what guard rails you think should be put in place around it & how/when it should & shouldn’t be implemented.

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Blog: Copious Content Creation

Hiya!

Over the past week I’ve had a ripple of commonality come through multiple times between multiple conversations with several different friends of mine, the issue of content creation. All parties involved, in each individual dialogue, are singer-songwriters, none of whom are signed or have any sort of team behind us pumping out content on our behalf. The complaint that we each had was just how long it takes to make scrollable content & how taxing it can be to constantly be in that mode of creation that has to be, by nature, a tad frivolous.

If you're not someone whose job depends on how many eyes are on you at a given time this whole blog may come as a surprise to you, but content, in any form takes a long time to put together. I’m going to show you a few examples along the way to help illustrate this point but just know, that’s what you’re in for on this blog.

I’m going to start with a few examples of my own. Let’s talk about blogs. These ones, these one off, ten to fifteen paragraph numbers that I do almost every week take me on average an hour & a half to two hours. If that seems like an odd number to you then let me break it down. If I’m being honest, the days leading up to Friday are spent brainstorming, coming up with ideas for what this week’s topic should be & typically going with the one that feels the most natural or that I feel the most passionate about. We aren’t counting that time in our final number here simply because my ADHD’d brain allows me to do that while I’m doing other things. It’s not dedicated time, but it is still taking up mental space. Then I set aside time to sit down & do what I’m doing right….now! right…..NOW! which is typing out the blog. If there are specific points that I want to hit along the way I’ll type them down below in the order I want to present them in so that I know which way to steer this whole stream of consciousness train, otherwise I derail. Oh look, Squirrel!

Next, after my ten to fifteen plus paragraphs are done, which usually takes over an hour, I go in & edit. After I’m satisfied with my post, or at least deem it passable, it gets uploaded to square space with tags & categories, & all that good stuff. Then I’m still not done. I have to share this mother so that you all will see it. I post it to Facebook, swapping back & forth between my personal & artist page, I make an Instagram story post, & I post it to Twitter (& now I guess Threads too). All of that amounts to the total time of an hour & a half to two-ish minimum. That’s a completely different story for travel blogs.

Travel blogs take me days. I honestly don’t know if I can calculate just how much time goes into them but I have written about this in the past as well. For a travel blog I first have to travel which, yes is fun, but the way I do it, to be able to share an experience that others will want to immolate, I do a lot of research first. I find restaurants, activities, cool locations & dives, & put together a loose itinerary for my trip, broken down (again, loosely) by day. There are certain elements that are higher priority than others on said itinerary that get shifted around as needed.

While on the trip I have to be sure I’m making content; taking videos, taking pictures, writing down where I went, what I ate, etc. I keep a running tab over my whole stay that I refer to throughout my time writing these once I’ve returned. If I’m diving I have to go through & edit the video I took, as well as take screen shots from said videos so that there’s underwater photo content to attach here. That’s usually a several hour endeavor. Then I have to repeat the above blog process all while linking the places mentioned within said blog. Then after the written portion is complete I go in with the photos, upload them, & position them so that they look all nice & pretty. Truly travel blogs take me daaaaaaays to do & that’s even after I split them up into two to three day parts.

Then there’s music. The average songwriting session lasts around three to four hours & often you don’t get to finish the song in its entirety. After that you have to go in & do rewrites for lyrics or melodies that don’t quite work. As far as production goes, there’s tens more hours thrown in. Tracking all takes place in real time but you need to do multiple takes & then also go in & edit said takes. Equalizing, adding effects, mixing, mastering, etc, etc, I would guesstimate that most songs have a minimum of twenty hours thrown into them even before you start promoting, doing photoshoots for promotional content, reaching out to different publications, playlists, etc.

Going back to what each of us were specifically talking about with content creation is video. The first conversation I had was with Leena Regan who put together little highlight videos from the writing camp that Songbird Society put together. Each thirty second video took her around five hours to complete. You have to go in, edit the clips, color correct the clips, pick a song to have them synced to, sync the cuts in the video to the beats of the song, write a personal, catchy caption, share it everywhere you can.

Kate Cosentino was talking about the same thing, about how exhausting it is to make content for scrollable sites like TikTok or Instagram that you pour hours into just to have it be seen by a handful of people. Throwing your efforts into the void, hoping to catch someone’s attention enough to engage with them, failing & having to do it all over again.

For my Tarpons video I had to find a karaoke track of Feed The Birds from Mary Poppins to sing over, rewrite the lyrics to be about tarpons, record & edit vocals, then sync my dive footage up to the beat changes of the song. Probably a good four to five hours of work & the video went nowhere.

All of this is not meant as a poor poor me type of thing. I write all of this to make you all aware, to show you what it looks like to be a modern artist trying to promote yourself in hopes that one day you’ll have a team behind you who pays someone else to put hours of their time into these posts instead of cutting into your already limited time. I also write all of this so that maybe you’ll be a little more loving to the content people put out, especially your friends! These videos that make you laugh or smile or cry take time & work. These songs that you put onto your shuffle & never listen to with intention again take time & love & effort & are snippets of people’s lives! These blogs, especially the travel ones, take a lot & we do it because it’s what we love, but when you’re constantly throwing yourself out there into the oblivion & finding yourself fallen short each time it gets incredibly disheartening. That’s what causes creators to stop, that’s what causes musicians & artists to sell their gear, causes creatives to get a desk job, because they have tested their metal against the void & the void has swallowed them up.

If you’re here, reading this blog I’m so grateful for you. If you listen to my music, share my posts, anything that supports me in even the tiniest bit as a creator & an artist, I thank you. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you. You never know how far a simple comment, a like, a repost, a whatever else that takes five seconds to do means to someone in our field. Please be appreciative of the content creators in your life, without them this life would be so damn boring.

Much love as always,

-C

Blog: Seeking Movement

This blog was actually a suggestion of a fan & friend of mine who reached out earlier this week to ask my thoughts on Brené Brown. Truthfully, I’m not as familiar with her work as I probably should be or would like to be but that’s not to say she hasn’t drifted in & out of my orbit from time to time. The ask was if I had read Brown’s new book “Atlas Of The Heart.” Truthfully I have not, but, his point is the ask was that I, over the holidays, had written a blog outlining the reasons why sad holiday music is the preferred holiday music for so many of us. You can read that one here. In said blog, aside from outlining the reasons behind the sadness felt during the holidays I also talked briefly about wanting to feel something, to feel connected or seen through these musical pieces. He had just come across the section of Brown’s book in which she talks about grief, he sent me a few screen shots to read & I immediately felt seen by what Brené had to say.

My first adult introduction to Brené happened due to my friend Leena who put together a writing camp. In this camp she used Brené’s example of empathy vs sympathy & how that relates to the cowriting space, I later wrote an entire blog on that which you can read here. I was also advised to give her book “The Gifts Of Imperfection” a read which unfortunately I still have yet to begin. From there it seemed that Brené Brown was popping up all over my life or at least the lens of it. Jake went on Brown’s podcast, I wrote the blog & had a bunch of people talking about Brown directly to me, I had several other people suggest “Gifts” to me, I had people posting her quotes all over my feed. It truly began to felt like a sign that maybe her thoughts were worth investing in further!

The screen shot in question that I mentioned in the first paragraph talks about the reason we as consumers love sad movies. In the section Brown takes about how a researcher by the name of Julian Hanich & his colleagues were investigating something they called the “Sad-FIlm Paradox.” The questions the researchers proposed was "how can a negative emotion such as sadness go together with “aesthetic liking” & even pleasure? Their findings? People like to be moved.

The beauty in the sad films, sad songs, sad books, etc. is that “we feel connected to what it means to be human, to be reminded of our inextricable connection to one another,” Brené explains. It shifts the mindset of the individual into one of “us.” From “me” to “we.” The study further revealed that there is a “highly significant positive correlation between sadness & enjoyment." This process of feeling sad or lonely or want makes us feel moved which then turns into enjoyment. “Hence sadness primarily functions as a contributor to & intensifier of the emotional state of being moved.” -Brené Brown, Atlas Of The Heart

This really stuck a chord with me! You see, if the above is to be believed, we as humans consume art to feel something, to feel connected to the community around us. We, in a manor of speaking, go out to concerts, to movies, to art shows, to the library & bookstores, to our streaming services seeking movement. We desire a shift from one emotion to another in a form of escapism from the mundane. There’s a quote from Stage Coach, Tom Jackson, in which he says exactly this, “audiences go to shows to feel something or else they’d stay at home & listen to the record from their couch.”

I truly think that’s beautiful, that the reason we as human beings consumer art, specifically sad art, is out of a desire for connection, for understanding. As a lover of all things sad media wise there’s something incredibly therapeutic about the experience of being moved. I am a self proclaimed cinephile, I love movies, deeply. I go to the theater seeking movement, seeking joy & tears & pain & wonder as I’m sure many of you reading this do as well, there’s no shame in it. It also allows us to flex our “empathy” muscle which I think we all could use from time to time.

At the end of the day love the art you love, you don’t have to justify it to anyone, there’s a reason it clicks with you & most likely it’s because it makes you feel seen or connected. It has succeeded in providing the movement you sought out. Relish that, feel the way it makes you feel & be grateful for that experience! Great art is hard to come by so love what you love & do so boldly!

As always, have a fantastic weekend!

Much love to you all,

C