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The question of whether and where composers lose their jobs is more about status than cost or automation. As with, say, pilots and running an air route, their labor cost is a relatively minimal part of the product. Already, developers often spend much more on music than they have to, eg. hiring symphony orchestras to record their soundtrack on Abbey Road when the gap between that recording and a well-produced synthetic track with modern tech will be extremely minimal and won’t matter to pretty much any players.
It reminds me of the discussion we were having last week where it turns out that most businesses aren’t actually run in the interests of shareholders, something as true for a local mom-and-pop store as it is for Google and Citigroup. Shareholder influence often rarely even asserts itself, these are places that exist primarily to support their own internal hierarchy, their employees who actually operate the machine.
Its also a bit funny that there seems to be some sort of inverse relationship with how much some studio spends on their soundtrack and how good it is, at least in the west, with "indies" and small studios consistently having (much) better soundtracks and sound design than AAA productions.
Intentional? Result of friendship corruption? Something else?
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Who does this?
Nintendo does full orchestra stuff, and I’d agree there’s some luxury-good signaling involved. Still, I don’t think they’re renting out famous studios and getting star musicians involved? I’d expect it to have a pretty streamlined production process, one driven by the composer’s preferred workflow.
I think it’s a lot more common for AA/AAA projects to use the small-team approach with experienced composers. The only ones who go even cheaper are smaller, indie productions, culminating in the “developer winging it” school of soundtrack design. And not everyone can be Daisuke Amaya.
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Sadly, I think the artists lose this one.
Businesses like Google with huge moats can be run as private fiefdoms. But businesses that are disrupted end up having to compete on cost. Look what's happened to newspapers.
Most older consumers still get their music from Spotify or the radio. I think incumbents will continue to do well here. Probably AI music will get locked out of the market.
But my understanding is that younger consumers get most of their music from TikTok. When human artists have to compete with AI in an algorithmic feed, they will lose. Human artists can only produce so much. AI can throw infinite spaghetti at the wall to find what sticks. The best earworms will get amplified by the algorithm.
At some point, these earworms will be attached to a real-life human group (like a KPop group today), and the real-life humans will tour, dance, and sing the AI song. Some groups will get really big. People will pay thousands of dollars to watch them live, holding their device aloft to capture the moment for posterity.
There will still be a small market for real human artists. It will be similar to how there are still horse-drawn carriages today, a quaint relic of a simpler time.
Probably bigger than that. Music is already a "winner take all" kind of market, with most of the money going to those on top, many of whom already don't write and produce their own work. Replacing the "back office" with an AI changes little.
In the rest of the market, people are more likely to care that there's a human making the music rather than just that it sounds good. Can't wait for the scandals that reveal a particular musician has actually been ai generating his tracks though.
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Newspapers are interesting because they had layoffs for fundamental economic reasons, they literally didn’t have the cash flow to pay reporters. But if you look at the newspapers that survived, whether they found a successful business model like the NYT or a billionaire to bankroll them like the Bezos Post, they still employ hundreds of pointless reporters. The NYT has 2000 journalists and the majority of them are working on completely pointless news that nobody wants to read, they still have like 10 people in Albany to report on the minutiae of New York State lawmaking. It’s clear they don’t really exist to make a profit, just to employ the maximum number of journalists they can.
So the question tends to be whether the entire business collapses, in which case yes people are getting fired, or whether the mere ‘need’ for the job is eliminated, in which case they might not be.
Part of the problem, though, is that the NYT only continues to exist because it continues to employ over 2000 journalists covering everything from politics in Belarus to a DIY column that runs articles like "All You Need to Know about Fixings and Fastenings". No, each individual article probably doesn't drive sales enough on its own to justify the cost spent on it, but I'm buying the NYT because I expect to get All the News Fit to Print. I went through a similar divorce with my own local paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. When I first started subscribing in college it covered all the national stories, local news, sports, etc. to the extent you'd expect from the major newspaper in a mid-size city. They were always accused of having a liberal bias, which led to the establishment of the Tribune Review in 1993 following the demise of the Pittsburgh Press (which was on-par with if not better than the PG). I wasn't a fan of the Trib, not because of the conservative views (which were limited to the editorial page), but because it was clearly a bush-league paper. It had existed in Greensburg for years prior, and, while the Pittsburgh edition got better over the years, it still always felt like a small town paper a little over its skis, relying more on being the conservative choice than having better coverage.
But as time went on, the PG became less and less worth reading. They dumped the DC bureau, and most of the national coverage was wire stories from the AP and bigger newspapers. More of the op-eds were nationally syndicated columnists (and not ones like George Will whom you include because they're big names with national followings). The sports department stopped sending reporters to out of town events that didn't involve local teams. It started to read more like the Trib, but I kept subscribing anyway because it was at least something that came to my door that I could read every morning and get a good idea what was going on in the world. Then they limited print editions to a few times a week and that was the last straw. My dad still gets the pdf edition but it isn't the same; I can't browse a pdf like I can a broadsheet. I probably didn't read half the stories when I got it, but I liked being able to browse it. Most people jumped ship before I did. To use a trendy term, it became enshittified, even if it still did a decent job of providing information about the big stories.
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Good point. NYT exists on a sort of patronage model. There are lots of people who have subscriptions who never or rarely read it, but they want to support the cause.
Music could end up being similar. It already is in many ways.
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