The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly exploration of music, culture and the new Internet.

On the culture-tech byway, things move at breakneck speeds. From web3 to AI, copyright to collective ownership, art to psychedelics, The Beat is an exercise in association. We all contain multitudes, and within them, vast differences. But there is some connective, fundamental essence to be found.

The Beat is dedicated to that essence, and to the people who seek it; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Darkside

A few months back, at a record shop in Warsaw, I found – to my surprise – some vinyl by the Dave Harrington Group. What was this doing here, so far from home? I bought the album – Pure Imagination, No Country – and brought it back to London.

In 2016, I interviewed Harrington at Dynaco, a barely identified, cabin-like bar in Brooklyn that he fondly called his “office.” Alongside Nicolas Jaar, Harrington is one of the co-founders of Darkside.

We sat down at a table in Dynaco’s quiet back room. Vintage folk rock music filled the space. Over cocktails we discussed his jazz-head dad’s “Wall of Records,” the organic flow of collaboration, and the push-and-pull of seemingly disparate acts in the music-making process:

At the time, Trump was six months into his first term. I’d recently written a Brian Eno profile, inviting people to listen to Eno’s then-new record, Reflection, as “a clarion call for action” during the presidency of a man who had no music in him:

On the cusp of Trump’s second inauguration, I’ve thought a lot about these words, and of the music-making process as an allegory for how we operate in this world: “If you get lucky and you work hard enough – you get a song out of it.”

Each day, we lean further toward a technocracy that’s obsessed with convenience – one whose leaders are trying to convince us that easy is best, and hard is not worth doing at all.

But there is no music on this path.

Suno or Later

Back in May, the generative AI music platform Suno raised $125 million. It was the eleventh biggest music-tech funding round ever.

On Suno, simple text prompts generate songs. The company touts the accessibility of its tools to turn anyone into a music-maker – to the extent that its founders are trying to convince us that making music, otherwise, is too arduous an endeavor.

In a recent interview (h/t Rob Abelow), Suno founder and CEO Mikey Shulman said:

In sum, the guy with $125 million to spend on the future of music is telling us it’s too hard to make music. To borrow some colloquial language from my adopted home: what utter bollocks.

In a recent edition of The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia published a medley of journal ideas on music, AI and other life musings. In one resonant anecdote, he recalls standing in line behind a stranger at a cafe. He identified the man as a musician simply by the “intonation and phrasing” of his whistling.

“That’s a simple measure of musicality,” he wrote, “but I fear that the people who now run our musical culture – the execs at Spotify, Apple, Google, etc. – would not be able to pass it. Not even close.

“This might not seem like much to you,” he continues, “but I fear a world in which the people who control our music don’t have a strong personal connection to it. For them, it’s just ‘content’. That can’t be a good thing.”

Indeed. There’s no music in these men.

Shulman walked back his comments, posting a clarification to Twitter that cited his own music bona fides: “I've been playing piano since age 4 and bass since 13.”

But even in his amendment, he continued to promote Suno as a solution for “people who drop their craft out of frustration before they get good enough to truly enjoy it.”

No self-respecting musician who understands how the music industry works could trick themselves into thinking there’s craft in Suno (well, maybe if you gave them $125 million…) – it’s text-to-song, complete with an AI model trained on copyrighted music made by real musicians (all three major labels are suing Suno). 

Projects like Suno are particularly damning within a streaming landscape that operates on a scaled, pro-rata payout system – like Spotify’s, which pays artists based on their percentage of the platform’s total streams. In this environment, very little differentiates the hobbyist and the professional. That’s a byproduct of missing context – one that the company is exploiting through its Perfect Fit Content program. As I wrote in last week’s Beat, Spotify has been systematically replacing real musicians' work with anonymous stock music to reduce royalty payments and improve its profit margins.

Shulman is playing right into the callous blueprint of the Spotify Mood Machine. What’s stopping Spotify from building its own Suno? Or acquiring the company to furnish its catalog with royalty-free music – generated atop a foundation of millions of royalty-bearing, human-made songs? It’s the perfect crime.

Many of us will scoff at Shulman’s words, but others will acquiesce to the convenience, slowly embracing a reality where instruments aren’t so important, the craft isn’t so worthwhile and music is simply wallpaper to adorn the vacant halls of our music-less minds.

Hugh Mann

In Shulman’s tweet, someone tagged Jonathan Mann – aka “Song A Day Mann.” Mann replied with a thread about his own AI project.

For nearly 6,000 consecutive days, he’s written and released a song. And over the weekend, he announced that he’s trained an autonomous songwriting AI on all of that music. Every day, in perpetuity, the bot – named Hugh Mann (a Star Trek reference) – will write a song, mint it as a 1/1 music NFT on the Ethereum mainnet and mint subsequent editions on the layer two blockchain, Base.

Mann’s been thinking about this since 2015, he says, back when the tech was too rudimentary to feasibly build it. “Soon tho,” he writes, “creating a model like this will be trivial. Then the question becomes: What's interesting about AI generated songs?”

Nothing, he answers. But, he adds, an “AI that autonomously decides what to write about, writes the song, makes the video, mints it, shares it, every day, forever is interesting to me.”

Hugh v1.0 works by simulating Mann's creative process. He uses dual Llama models trained on his personal data, generating daily conversations and songs. Existing NFT holders can directly influence Hugh's creative process by submitting one message per day to its consciousness. The system then references that information and generates music.

Now here’s fertile middle ground – using technology in net-new ways to gather people and amplify craft. Imagine if Suno’s $125 million were instead allocated to thousands of musicians to cultivate their practice.

But then again, why give money to musicians when you could give it to technologists who will exploit those musicians – and make you more money by convincing people that the craft of music is no longer worth their time.

The Dreamtime

In a recent essay (h/t Cheryl Douglass and Seed Club), Robin Hanson — an economics professor at George Mason University and a research associate at Oxford’s now shuttered Future of Humanity Institute — describes this period in history as the “dreamtime.”

The term is borrowed from Aboriginal mythology. It’s a spiritual and cultural framework that encompasses creation stories, laws and values — “more real than reality itself.”

For Hanson, this era of humanity is a moment of rare delusion and possibility — an opportunity to define the coming aeons. Through the lens of our heirs, he imagines how this dreamtime will be framed:

Those dreamtime advocates abound, and as we embark on the second term, this is our chance to pay attention – more clarion calls for action. Like Yancey Strickler and his manifesto for post-individualism. Or the champions of net neutrality, who, despite losing their recent appeal, continue to fight. Or the folks deleting Facebook after the platform ended fact-checking in an apparent capitulation to Trump. It’s the people unsubscribing from Spotify. It’s the sleuths who spent hours – some, years! – investigating the “most mysterious song on the Internet” because context matters.

It’s the people willing to do a little bit of work so that, if we get lucky, and if enough of us do it, we’ll get music out of it.

Coda

In 2023, Darkside added drummer Tlacael Esparza to be their third official member. The band just dropped the second single, “S.N.C,” from their forthcoming record, Nothing – the first of the Esparza era.

Outside of Darkside, Esparza is also a technologist. He’s the CTO and co-founder of Sunhouse, a “technology company creating the future of AI for the music industry.”

The core product is Sensory Percussion, a system for drummers that transforms an acoustic instrument into a controller for digital music making. Its another example of technology that augments human efforts instead of supplanting them.

And it’s reflected in the Sunhouse mission:

It’s the artists that should be guiding the future of music.

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.