JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Brian Austin Whitney Blog A.I. article published June 4th

Finally, rational posts to respond to!

Yes, you are paranoid.

There is NOT much difference between the revolution in music that has repeated over and over and displaced what came before and this won't be different. Each new generation has plummeted the cost and expanded the options for creating however YOU want to create. In the past you simply put your life savings into paying some gatekeeper tech person to record, mix and master your music using the best tools they had available to make you sound competitive in the marketplace. This is the same. Every time it happens, people panic and say the end is near! But it hasn't gotten worse really. From an "art" point of view, the number of people making music has expanded 1000s of % points and growing. Whether it is a 6 year old with more music tech on her little home keyboard than existed 40 years ago, it's awesome! Computer workstations are a direct descendent of all that came before. Now the "manual" part of moving your fully written song to a marketable quality level has been replaced by technology. But anyone can STILL use any amount of any of it they want. There will be a market for all varieties and no one NEEDS to pay off gatekeepers with money, drugs or sex to get to the customers. I have been teaching people to create a 5K fan base over however long it takes which can directly support you. You can speak to these people anywhere in the world with FREE tech any time you want. You can perform live to the WORLD, any time you want. And now you can put out an album that sounds as good as 99% of the rest of music in history with a little effort on your part, without going broke.

I have given up ZERO rights to my music. My melodies and lyrics have the EXACT same copyright protection as anything YOU do using no electronics at all. I own it fully the moment I fix it to a tangible medium. Writing down a lyric protects it. Recording protects your melodies. The rest is just processing and just like food production, we no longer need literal or figurative slavery to produce foods. Same with music. You don't need to blow the producer or sign your life and rights away to make something that people might like.

The developer doesn't own ANY copyright. Tech used to make music cannot receive any copyright protection. Your sampler or sequencer or synth or guitar amps all create sounds, but those manufacturers can't claim ownership of those sounds. They can't claim anything that comes out of A.I. either. The creators however, must participate significantly in creating a song to have rights. Well, I had secured all my rights before I even used A.I. at all, so it was a done deal already.

You really need to learn what you are talking about because you seem actually fearful. That is a silly way to live when the info is easy to find.

As for the rights to scan and analyze, what do you think HUMANS do? They scan and analyze and get inspired and quite often mimic everything that comes before. That is how music has always been passed down. Painters all paint the same flower pot over and over. They copy and share all their techniques. This commercial worry you have is silly in the first place. Commerce has been a short window nearly universally controlled by gatekeepers from corporate cabals who have exploited artists at every turn. This is taking power away from them. As Art, that is wonderful. As commerce, that is even better. When they automated the assembly line, those who built cars by hand were all replaced. Should we go back? No one would do those jobs anyway. Will this cause some people not to learn piano? I doubt it, it is still the most efficient tool to create music WITH technology. Guitars are now becoming digital without the need for strings and brand new instruments and methods are coming out, so future instruments are impossible to predict. But people use ALL these tools in interesting ways even with automated stuff available.

Only about 1 in a million songs will ever be heard by 1000 people or more. I am more excited by people bringing music into their lives than seeing the fraudulent "rock star" myth go away.