The digital platform era hasn't been kind to musicians, to put it lightly.

Though platforms like Spotify and Apple Music make it easier for audiences to access their favorite bands than ever before, the algorithms and contracts behind those apps are ruthless, paying artists fractions of pennies for their work. Though companies like Spotify have tripled their value during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of artists who are even eligible for royalties, regardless of the paltry amount, continues to shrink.

Now, the rising tide of generative AI is boxing out real artists as those same music algorithms become infested with gobs of computer-generated slop.

As Pitchfork's Kieran Press-Reynolds explored in his latest column, the "lo-fi" genre — which emerged in the 2010s in an earlier, though less overt era of algorithmic chaos — is fast becoming a wasteland of unchecked beatspam thanks to the rise of AI bots.

Younger app dwellers will know lo-fi as the dreamy, unobtrusive genre that first took shape via hours-long beat mixes on YouTube, usually dressed up with nostalgic videos playing on loop. Its devotees make up a close-knit digital community, sharing skills, advice, and new tracks via social media and messaging apps. At least, they used to.

Now, Press-Reynolds writes, those artists are losing out on royalties and production contracts, as they struggle to discern which tracks were even made by a human, and which have been pumped out by an algorithm. Many are leaving the scene altogether, saying the genre's been "overtaken" by AI crud.

"Previously, you could stream a track on Spotify or Apple and almost be certain you followed them on Instagram or spoke to them on Discord because the community was so tight-knit," a beatmaker named Mia Eden told Press-Reynolds. "Now, it feels so nameless — where this could be an artist that maybe doesn’t like to show face, or it’s a computer. You can’t always distinguish now, and I’d say it’s over half [AI]."

Alex Reade, another artist from the UK, streams his work under the pseudonym Project AER. His once-growing Spotify account previously clocked two million listeners a month; now it's down to less than 500,000.

While Spotify's notoriously opaque royalty system is hard to parse by design, artists who've similarly reported clocking 2 million streams say that's worth a little over $7,600, not accounting for expenses. That's a lot of revenue to dry up overnight — indicative of the precarious nature of the platform economy.

"I’m trying to find any other means so I can take that reliance that I have on lo-fi out of my life because it causes me a lot of stress," Reade said.

Lo-fi isn't the only genre being polluted by slop. Earlier this week, social media users flagged an "indie rock band" called The Velvet Sundown which appears to be entirely generated by AI.

The "band," which now boasts over 750,000 monthly listeners, has no presence beyond social media. Everything it puts out — band photos, album covers, and especially the music — show telltale signs of having been spat out by GenAI. The group's track names are suspiciously close to existing hits: "Dust on the Wind," for example, not to be confused with the iconic Kansas hit "Dust in the Wind."

Even the group's name runs agonizingly close to Lou Reed's influential The Velvet Underground, which some crafty bot farmer is no doubt capitalizing on. At the time of writing, a search for "The Velvet" on Spotify shuffles Sundown to the top, with Underground camping underneath. (After initially denying it, the group's creator admitted the whole thing was an AI creation.)

This is just a taste of the rent-seeking beatslop that's pushing real artists out of visibility. Thanks to the dominance of for-profit content feeds, the only ones who can reverse the bot flood are the tech executives who will do just fine either way.

More on Music: SoundCloud Quietly Updated Their Terms to Let AI Feast on Artists' Music


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