matthodan

The other day I made a song on SUNO (suno.com/), a generative AI tool and holy moly did it deliver... In about 30 minutes, I had created an alternative pop song that is almost indistinguishable from a live recording. As I was making the song, I felt like I (a guy with no musical ability) was working with one of the most talented (and patient) bands to bring my song to life through brute force trial and error. This experience has singularly changed how I see the future of the music industry.

In the future, I don't think musical artists will make songs. I think they will make models. Those models will contain all of the information needed for generative AI tools to quickly and accurately create music that reflects the sound and compositional qualities that define that artist. AI tools will create new original music spontaneously that is customized to the listener, perhaps taking into consideration the listener's mood and activities. Net net, the principal unit of economic value in the music industry will shift from being songs, to models.

It is a brave new world.

I thought it would be good to survey the HN community each week as COVID-19 plays out to track sentiment as we all face new challenges from COVID-19. To that end, I was hoping to recruit the community to develop a list of questions. Please respond with questions (must be multiple choice) that you would like included and upvote the best ones. I’ll provide a few examples shortly, though anything is fair game.

If people think this is a good idea, please upvote the thread and add questions. If this gets traction, I will post a survey with the highest ranked questions each Monday for several weeks to collect feedback.

If anybody has a good tech for hosting the survey, please send me a note on Twitter (@matthodan). Otherwise, I’ll likely just use Google Forms.

Is there a master mailing list, facebook group, meetup, or some other organized approach? Or, is it all just word of mouth via friends?