ChatPOP
Will robots take Kim Petras's job and other pressing questions
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What we fear about A.I. is not our eventual subjugation to robot overlords, but rather our own quiet obsolescence.
One day you’re a copy writer for “Paramount +,” and the next day you get the fateful email: you’ve been automated. It turns out that the key to crafting the perfect ad or slogan does not reside in the complex and clever psyche. Maybe all of it is a game: linguistic and cultural puzzles waiting to be solved. Today, Stacey in sales can simply type the words “Please write a tag line for Yellowstone: 2055” into an AI platform and out comes the copy: “Family is Future.”
ChatGPT, the wildly useful and often wildly impressive AI system from OpenAI, has recently made a beta version of its chat bot available for the public. With an easily typed prompt, one can ask the bot to write copy, articles, songs and tweets about any subject and in any style. For example, I asked ChatGPT to “Write about the rise of neoliberalism in the style of Mother Goose” and it responded: “Government restrictions she’d spurn/Austerity would be the concern/Privatization was her desire/Taxes cut and regulations higher.”
Okay, some factual inconsistencies, but not bad. I mean, I couldn’t do much better. Could many other writers? Maybe this all spells trouble and, idk, #YangGang.
The things is though, I’m not particularly worried for my future as a writer. What I do here on this Substack is inherently tied to me, my persona, my vibe. You could read an AI-written Gen Zero Substack Post, but even if it successfully calibrated my jen ne sais quoi, what good would that writing do for you? Criticism, in all its forms, is subjective. Objectively derived criticism is quite literally an oxymoron and thus the validity of AI-written culture criticism gets us right to the center of questions of consciousness a la “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?” Maybe someone could use AI for the text behind this Substack, but they would still need to craft a profile and persona around the writer. Because who, for example, would really want to read a NewYorker review by HiltonAlsBot1000??? It seems to me no more interesting than a party trick.
This is not to say though that all creatives are protected from their future automation. The areas where creatives should be getting worried in regards to their future is areas where the final product is completely disentangled from its source. And for music, that spells real trouble. In our current era, more and more music is immediately decontextualized and absorbed into the Great Big Stream.
So much of this newsletter is about the ways that our current modes of listening have morphed music from artform to vibe-setter.
This happened because of an active choice made by Spotify in the early 2010’s. With so much music that can be listened to at any time, users became overwhelmed and found themselves listening to nothing rather than sorting through the muck to find something. The goal then was to make Spotify into a seamless listening experience. And the seams here were the strain one feels when deciding what to put on.
It was through this that playlists, and specially mood/situation/vibe playlists, became the guiding infrastructure of Spotify and thus the major listening platform of our generation. Rather than searching for music, you are recommended it. The morning begins with morning music, the evening winds down with night time anthems.
In this context, much of the music users listen to is not selected by them, but by an algorithm or rather Spotify’s (algorithmically-informed) editorial playlists that are selecting songs to suit a discrete purpose (driving, being sad, the vibes).
Even the pretentious among us find ourselves enmeshed in this listening dynamic.
In an insightful piece for WIRED, Shiva Rajaraman, who served as Vice President of Product during crucial years in Spotify’s development, offered the key thrust to much of Spotify’s product development in 2015: “Instead of orienting around this idea of having music which you put in a library,” he said, “we orient more around your life.”
According to Rajaraman, the whole notion of music for “moments,” began with an assessment of users’ workout playlists. These playlists were played and altered (meaning songs were added, taken away and re-ordered) with a notable intensity, piquing the interest of Spotify’s product team who thought to take this “to its logical conclusion.” The WIRED article reads:
Spotify is beginning to read your context—your location, the time of day, and more—to make deeply educated guesses about what you might want to listen to. You always run at 7 am, before work; Spotify's going to start showing you running playlists at 7 am. In the morning, Rajaraman says they've found most people like uplifting music, so they're starting to show users playlists like "Have a Great Day!" End of the day, you're heading home, maybe you want "Evening Chill" to mellow you out a bit. It's 2 am and you're still listening to Spotify? You're probably drunk, so here comes Avicii.
The vision described above should seem recognizable to most of us. We don’t even think about it, but we awake to dozens of little nudges to what we listen to. Nudges, that push us towards some algorithmically derived vision of recommended chill, or trendy. Many of us resist, and say: “you know what, I’m gonna play some jazz this fine weekday morning,” but we can feel that we’re swimming upstream (no pun).
Within this, certain songs that fit Spotify’s preferred yet varied vibe naturally rise to the top. We all have the songs that haunt us, and though we may feel particularly put upon by these tunes, we should know that we’re not really special. Spotify has algorithmically determined that certain songs set the vibe. These songs may be huge hits, like “As it Was,” which to me represents the auditory Goliath of Spotify-music, or they could be from unknown or lesser known artists. And these selected bops may have, despite their relative cultural anonymity, tens of millions of streams.
This divergent dynamic, between music that’s popular on Spotify and popular in culture can be thought of as what Liz Pelly once deemed “stream bait pop,” pop music suited for the strange and specific incentives of the streaming economy. When Pelly wrote of that in 2018, there was a growing list of songs that were performing extraordinarily well on Spotify playlists but had essentially no cultural foot print. The music that Pelly filed under this banner, she argued, did so well because it was the “type of music that could easily fit on mood- and affect-oriented playlists.”
Today, the TikTok age has both shifted and reinscribed this dynamic. If we can expand the term “stream bait pop” to now encompass music that also thrives on the primary music discovery platform of our time, TikTok, we’d see that there is a specific sound and vibe of music that does well on TikTok, but not necessarily elsewhere. But different than Spotify, which is only a music/audio platform, we couldn’t necessarily claim so boldly that the music that thrives on TikTok has no real cultural impact. The most viral TikTok songs do have an impact in that they become the background or means by which the collective does discourse. And yet still the artists that make such a mark on TikTok rarely translate the stunning success that they find on the app into lasting statuses as cultural icons. In this way, there is a clear divergence between a TikTok music career and a music career. Though many make the leap (pinkpantheress my QUEEN).
I chatted about this in June with Scott Cohen who was then the Chief Innovation Officer of Warner Music, in charge of how the major label utilized emerging technologies such as Blockchain and the Metaverse. I offered to Cohen the following analysis about about one of Warner’s biggest artists, GAYLE, who succeeded in making the biggest song in the world through TikTok machinations. I said:
“I think creating culture-changing stars is more difficult today. So to take an example, GAYLE, who’s signed to Warner, had the biggest song in the world for a period of time with “abcdefu”. You would think that GAYLE would be more culture-driving, similar to Alanis Morisette with Jagged Little Pill, than she currently is.”
Though GAYLE of course has a career, the fact that she once had the biggest song in the world would lead one to think she’d be at least more culturally omnipresent than Julia Fox for example.
To this, Cohen responded in a roundabout way, saying:
“My personal belief is that I wish more artists would push culture a little further. And some are, [but] our job is to help them make the best music and reach audiences. If we need to tell you what to do, we wouldn’t sign you in the first place . . . People pour their hearts out into their music and people are just going on a jog. I get it, but in many ways it’s soul crushing. But you know, we’ve always optimized for certain things. If it’s album sales, we had to optimize around top 40 radio to get it to the top of the charts so that when the album drops people run to the stores. It even meant you have to change your songs to get on the radio. Was that good or bad? Regardless, that’s what we do, we optimize. So today, we’re optimizing for where people are.”
In this sense, the Music Industry can be thought of as the liquid that forms around the solid that is technology. Slimey snake it is, it shapes to, but does not shape. And thus, in a context where the two major listening/discovery platforms of our day incentivize artists to make music that suits moods or works well as TikTok memes, the artists that supply us with our auditory vibes have taken on less and less importance themselves. To put it simply, our relationship to this Spotify /TikTok-music is, by and large, not a proxy for a relationship with the musicians behind it. If our needs/vibes have been met, who cares who’s behind the curtain?
Now maybe many artists are content to supply mood-content for the masses (though that’s unlikely to provide a solid income), but artists who seek to make that devil’s bargain should be aware that when you consign yourself to background status, so too are you paving the way for your future obsolescence.
ChatGPT will never take my Substack job, because if you are reading this, you are engaging with me as a human author and mind. You are, to put it bluntly, obsessed. Kidding. But if a robot had made your favorite tune in a vibes-summer Spotify playlists, would learning that fact compel you to skip the song? Every other artist on it was anonymous to you. It was all just background. Why then, would you care, if a robot took that one artist’s job?
Right now, Chat GPT cannot make music, but it can write lyrics, and why wouldn’t it, in the future, be able to analyze the billions of bits of musical data and produce a “120 electro-dance song in the style of MUNA about a future where crickets have colonized Bulgaria.” I see the future, even if its slightly off.
The solution, I believe, is for the musicians of the world to refuse supplying mood content for the great vibes machine. Try, no matter how hard, to build a brand and persona. Making TikTok viral hits and songs that do well on algorithms may feed the sugar rush, but you’ll soon be automated out.
It’s a good thing though, that a few artists seem to be attempting, against the odds, to do so. And consumers are vibing with their humanity. Next week, I’m going to write about the urgent return of pop persona. But for now, resist the vibe, young readers. It turns out that stanning is praxis. Low key.
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Your writing is great, but are you really going to leave us with claiming hemlocke springs and RAYE aren’t trying to make “mood content”? You bring up the issue of the TikTokification of pop music, but you never really specify what the problem is with consuming that type of music. I think there’s a much larger issue here that is about the attention economy and attention deficit. I also think there’s a world beyond pop that is applicable to this discussion
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