UBUNTU
Ubuntu, Motho ke motho ka batho Umunthu ngumunthu ngabantuA person is a person through other people.
The conversation at the center of this post (see videos below) was motivated by a LinkedIn post by Ashish Paul, a recent graduate in Mechanical Engineering from SRM Institute and the Gen-Z Founder of SoundSpire, a music tech strategist, and CEO of an online music magazine and platform that redefines the way music is discovered, reviewed and enjoyed.
His recent post addressed several critical ethical issues regarding AI for independent artists and those who represent them. He identified a “Plot Twist” in the music industry, with the recent album to hit one-million plays called The Velvet Sundown. This Al-generated band was able to amass 300k-400k a month on Spotify with no verifiable band members, even though Spotify claimed them as verified artists initially. The industry as a collective jury has made a verdict on their authenticity, but behind this smokescreen, CEO Daniel Ek recently made a €600 million or $694 million investment in an AI military defense company. He claims that “AI, mass and autonomy” are “driving the new battlefield.” To break it down, Spotify, though owned and controlled by third-party rightsholders, including record labels and distributors, has taken the profits of licensing the original recordings of hard-working musicians and flipped this service into profiting from the military-industrial complex.
It is a minefield and battlezone out there for the artist, there is no doubt, and the intersectionality of these recent events got my goat, so I decided to call Ashish myself in Mumbai and have a deep dive into his perspective early on in his pioneering career.
Just wait a second before you click the link to The Velvet Shutdown–rather, The Velvet Sundown–on Spotify, and consider one important thing that might be driving the rapid growth of this AI-generated band. We have made another spatial turn with the exploitation of the psychology behind clickbait, rampant on the Internet. Take into account how several innate human tendencies and cognitive biases, like curiosity and the information gap theory, emotional manipulation, fear of missing out (FOMO), social proof and herd mentality, and finally, dopamine and reward seeking, to name a few, are being used on you daily. It’s a minefield of socially engineered deceit and entrapment, where we are coerced into participating in ideas we had no interest in participating in at all, for the benefit of the advertising game. This might be too much to take in right now, so let’s “rewind and come again”, as they say in Jamaica, for a minute and take a look back in time for examples of the same exploits on a different scale.
The phenomenon of appropriation and theft of intellectual property and extraction. It is nothing new for the cultures of the Global South and people of color and independent artists in general, but it reflects how manipulative and cunning the imperialistic colonial project has always been. These recent events with this technological age we have entered are surpassing basic logic through a self-cannibalization, transcending race, class and gender by going all out to extract hooks, beats, tones and musical tropes. We remember the old minstrel shows and wannabe Blackface extortionists, impersonating Black artists and reaping the benefits of Black music since the beginning of the recording industry. Black artists, and other marginalized creators, have been able to keep up with the forgeries and the appropriation, and the theft of the music industry since its inception, due to their bottomless creative ingenuity with the ability to change the genre on a dime.
Mr. Paul from LinkedIn and many other music analysts, journalists and social commentators across the world are not ignoring this trajectory and calling it out dead in its tracks. Saul Williams put it succinctly in my recent interview with him about his groundbreaking film about technology and the crisis of extraction in Neptune Frost when he said, “There’s no computer that can do what I’m doing right now. I have songs in my head just like my phone does, but I can recall them randomly. I have a shuffle. I have all of those things. There’s nothing they can do. If I can pour water on this computer, it’s dead. By pouring water on me, more life. It’s more life”.
The silver lining is that human beings, artists, are irreplaceable, and those consumers with a soul will always gravitate to music created by the human spirit. It’s not the algorithm that’s going to kill AI music, it’s the consumer whose heart is already hardwired to the original technology- the drumbeat- coupled with shifting demographics of a very sophisticated consumer. These jarring developments driving AI music through the manipulation of human curiosity and behaviors might not be the most existential threat we are dealing with in a deck of existential threats, but for musicians, it strikes a particular nerve with feelings of being exploited at every turn.
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By the 1990s and the end of the Cold War, the Internet brought global change, opening new markets and free trade policies to the developing world and multiculturalism to the West, making interconnectedness inevitable. The current push to reverse that human progress and re-segregate the world, through tariffs among other things, is a pipe dream, based on the personal and political interests of undereducated autocratic leadership. Consumers and shareholders alike are recognizing their agency in this process, and reconsidering where to make and spend their dollars. Freedom of choice means exercising your freedom to make informed investments and reviewing these nefarious enterprises before committing yourself to ideas that will ultimately impact their own lives down the line.
This plot twist moment in music history is worth taking note of and preparing ourselves as lovers of music and musicians by articulating a counter-narrative and by not supporting such platforms altogether. We mustn’t lose sight of the clickbait phenomenon in media as a strategy aimed at driving user engagement. There was a part of me that didn’t want to go to the Velvet Sundown Spotify page to add another click to their duplicitous racket.
