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How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop

90 points1 hourgamechops.substack.com
nluken28 minutes ago

I would highly recommend that folks read Liz Pelly's Mood Machine, which is referenced here via the Harper's excerpt, not just because it shows artists' perspectives on the long tail model that tech pitched to them, but because it can be read as an indictment of the platform model that increasingly dictates how we engage with art and society at large. Pelly's account really gets to the heart of the problem: these platforms are neither neutral nor meritocracies and don't care about the content that they host. Sounds obvious, yes, but reading about the concrete consequences of this fact, namely the aesthetic flattening that results from conditioning the audience to listen to music passively, definitely got me to reexamine how I was using Spotify and consuming music in general. It really drove home the fact that some people treat art as a fungible object, and that these folks are the people deciding what music we're hearing unless we really make an effort to seek it out on our own.

Is the model profitable? For some. Good for society? Perhaps not.

EDIT: also want to concur with others here that the problem here isn't necessarily AI but how we're selecting what music we're listening to. In the book, Pelly specifically identifies channels like Chilled Cow as being part of the watering down of this genre, since they have a similar incentive to play music at as low a cost to the channel as possible versus playing the best music available to them.

goosejuice3 minutes ago

I will read that but...

I'm so tired of this anti-Spotify crap. Artists and listeners are free not to use it, just as they are free not to use Tidal, SoundCloud, bandcamp, YouTube, etc. It's a platform and the market is free. If it's not working out for you find a different way to market yourself. It's not like top 40 or the Grammys are fair either. Art isn't a fair industry and never will be. How many amazing artists barely made a living their entire life and some person sticks a banana on a wall and walks away with 6 million.

If some producer wants to make music under 50 personas that seems perfectly within their rights. Many electronic artists do this.

Spotify made a product that people want and continue to pay for. That includes me, someone who has spent thousands, likely over 10 at this point, on physical albums and live music. Some of those artists I discovered on Spotify. Access to lesser known artists is better than it ever has been and that's thanks to platforms like Spotify regardless of what kind of shitheads are running the place.

qoez1 hour ago

AI seems like a scapegoat here when I think the real answer is simply that it was a tired genre that died out like many music fads over the years. (Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market, independent of AI.)

acdha4 minutes ago

Spotify wouldn’t have entered the space if there weren’t listeners, and it’s not their responsibility to be some kind of garbage collector for aging genres.

The article doesn’t seem to me to scapegoat AI as much as the dual role which Spotify has being both the dominant distributor and recommendation source as well as creating their own content: even if they were paying studio musicians that would still be a major conflict of interest, just as it is when Ticketmaster/Live Nation controls band management, venues, and ticket sales or when Amazon uses their knowledge of buying habits to compete with their own sellers. We should have laws requiring separation between the delivery layer and content creation, but sadly that is not the era we live in.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y751 minutes ago

> Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market

That is a strange way to view music to me.

Just because people can make music doesn't mean others will enjoy it. It isn't really obvious to me that overwhelming the supply would decrease demand. I mean, look at any extreme pop genre.

One would assume that there are more complicated economics at play.

tengbretson35 minutes ago

If people's ability to produce slop outpaces the ability for content delivery and discovery platforms to separate the wheat from the chaff, the category as a whole will diminish.

hnlmorg17 minutes ago

The problem when a creative niche gets flooded with low quality ripoffs is that people end up fed up with the entire genre.

Plus even that aside, people often crave change. No genre of music has ever remained entirely static. And all styles of music comes in and out of fashion.

lanstin7 minutes ago

I don't know that much about current music, but I do spend a lot of time listening to LoFi study girl live stream, is that music the genre being discussed here? Perhaps it's just the normal hype cycle and then things settle out? Innovation, enthusiasm, copy cats, burn out, a solid genre for decades?

mgfist27 minutes ago

Pop by definition is catchy music and the actual sound underneath is adapts to current trends. It's an ephemeral genre. LoFi is a specific sound and so if people are bored with the sound it'll stop being popular.

atoav42 minutes ago

As a musician I agree that "regular people can make it without sacrificing their soul" is not an indicator of bad music. Some of the greatest, most creative music I had the honor to listen to was made by drunk teenagers who didn't know how to tune their instruments after all.

But the thing about fads: if everybody and their dog knows how to make "proper" punk, low-fi-hiphop or whatever, the result will be bland, uniform, shapeless and generic. That doesn't mean the genre stopped producing great music, it just means you will have to wade through the bland stuff to get through the gold. And few people are willing to keep doing just that.

hassleblad2342 minutes ago

But that doesn’t diminish its utility.

serf39 minutes ago

>Everyone could learn how to make these with a 10 minute youtube tutorial which flooded the market, independent of AI

'ease of creation' has never been the metric by which popular media has been judged.

mtalantikite8 minutes ago

I think like anything, the lineage evolves. If we're to call Madlib and Dilla 'lofi', as the wikipedia does, then we can follow that lineage to someone like Knxwledge, who just this week won a grammy for 'Why Lawd?'.

Meanwhile, you have all these people on YouTube that distill something out of that lineage and just make tons and tons of boring versions of it. As more people encounter it, divorced from it's history, the term takes on a new meaning and now the boring version is what the label means.

So I guess you could say the lineage is alive and well while the genre is boring and dead. And I agree, it's not AI's fault.

boringg11 minutes ago

The problem is actually Spotify was a bit of a market maker here in terms of getting access to peoples ears. AI probably hollowed out the quality of the music for all but the most dedicated listeners as someone who has listened to lo-fi for a long time. Spotify probably also boosted their own preferred content.

The article sounds part whiny and part boosting Wish on the Beat (multiple mentions of their linked playlist) - which I am supportive but also don't believe all the content in the article as a result.

ixtli58 minutes ago

True but its clear that these systems allow this process to happen at rates orders of magnitudes larger than without it. That changes the severity of the problem and definitely turns it into something people need to intervene in.

hecanjog57 minutes ago

A genre is a conversation you have with other people.

emsign22 minutes ago

And the emphasis lies on people, without people there is no meaning.

TrackerFF25 minutes ago

Next up:

How corporations killed stomp clap hey!

carabiner6 minutes ago

oooo lawdy

hassleblad2342 minutes ago

But that doesn’t diminish its utility.

spinach54 minutes ago

Lofi music is a really popular genre to listen to as background music, I wouldn't say it's a tired genre. Perhaps for creators it is, but for listeners it's not.

echoangle39 minutes ago

How much background music do you realistically need though? If there's a few thousand hours, would you notice if it repeated at some point?

(Assuming the general style of the genre is staying similar and you don't listen to specific songs you discovered but just put on some collection of songs from the genre.)

Is there new elevator music being composed all the time too?

lanstin4 minutes ago

The rebellious authentic music from the current middle-aged or old people's youth is todays elevator music. I've heard the Pink Floyd's the Wall being played at a soothing volume in the grocery store as I tried to find lactose free milk for my adult children's visit.

roywiggins58 minutes ago

> We can support musicians we like by adding them to our personal playlists and playing their music every day.

We can also just buy their albums like ye olden times. Buy tracks for $1.29 like ye slightly less olden times! If you have disposable income, buy albums! It's easy and also fun.

perfmode42 minutes ago

I’d love a way to directly Cash app or Zelle my favorite artist

Minor49er2 minutes ago

Assemblage 23 used to do this on their website. It was labeled something like "for anyone who pirated our music and feels bad about it, you can chip in here". But it seems to have been long removed

I guess the closest equivalent is Bandcamp where artists can still use a pay-what-you-want model

roywiggins39 minutes ago

You kind of can with Bandcamp's "pay this much or more" model, though obviously there's a substantial percentage taken.

0x07338 minutes ago

Same though.

Spotify killed lofi hip hop? Lets continue use spotify but use playlists.

eppp56 minutes ago

Who gets the money?

spencerflem55 minutes ago

On Bandcamp Fridays 100% goes to the artist/label

roywiggins44 minutes ago

if you are putting $12/mo into a big pot via Spotify there's way less money available to pay artists than if you buy a few albums outright a month, it takes a lot of Spotify streams to earn an artist a dollar. If you stream an album a few thousand times on Spotify maybe it works out in the artists' favor, I suppose.

adrr30 minutes ago

Spotify the split is 70% rights holders and 30% for Spotify

99990000099940 minutes ago

>The Lofi style itself is nothing new, Lofi beats bear a striking resemblance to instrumental hip hop of the 90s and 2000s.

Lofi IS instrumental hip hop. Dilla was doing this in the 90s.

cool_dude859 minutes ago

It's probably better to say that lofi is a genre or type of instrumental hip hop. You wouldn't listen to e.g. Endtroducing... on the lofi girl stream.

Synaesthesia20 minutes ago

Dilla is still the greatest to ever do it.

midiguy12 minutes ago

Lofi peaked long before the term lofi even came about

fallinditch12 minutes ago

There seems to be a lot of anger around Spotify these days, often misplaced I reckon.

One of the biggest impediments to new artists making a living from recorded music is not the existence of Spotify and other streaming platforms, rather it's the massive and growing library of existing music, some of which is excellent.

But it's not impossible. My neighbor manages his music career himself. In 2024 he went from having 250,000 monthly Spotify listeners to 800,000. A few months ago he was able to give up his job and devote himself to music full time - he is getting decent streaming royalty checks.

If you complain that Spotify is contributing to a generic and bland listening experience then that is totally your own fault. Spotify will give you excellent and adventurous listening experiences, but you have to put in the time to 'train' your personal algorithms first, mainly by liking tracks, saving albums and playlists, and making playlists. Also: by paying attention to DJs/curators and researching dark corners of the music blogosphere, SoundCloud and Mixcloud.

rappatic51 minutes ago

The first two albums by Nujabes, the "godfather of lo-fi," are some of the best I've ever heard. Metaphorical Music and Modal Soul.

Eric_WVGG2 minutes ago

I was delighted to see Nujabes and Samurai Champloo cited right off the bat.

For the uninitiated, Champloo is the second anime series by Shinichirō Watanabe of Cowboy Bebop fame. Where Bebop is science fiction meets jazz, Champloo is medieval Japan meets hip hop. Weirdly under-rated IMO.

To this day I still bump into fellow Nujabes fans in the wild and it’s like having a secret handshake

chrisweekly28 minutes ago

Thank you! Listening to Metaphorical Music right now and it's hitting me just right. (fistbump)

portaouflop26 minutes ago

Calling it lo-fi is almost an insult - Nujabes is a category by themselves

rappatic11 minutes ago

Yeah, it is nothing like the lo-fi of today. Nobody else has ever made an album quite like Modal Soul and nobody will again.

dvngnt_1 hour ago

Spotify and other streaming sites also killed mixtapes of rappers on other people's beats.

The AI generated stuff will probably be good for its intended purpose white noise with a beat to help you study but its unlikely you'll find you're next favorite artist

lawgimenez51 minutes ago

Datpiff mixtape era was one of the best. It is where I discovered Kendrick Lamar before his fame today.

portaouflop23 minutes ago

Spotify is a blight upon music and it would be better for our culture if it would cease to exist - I have been boycotting these vultures and culture-vampires since day one but apparently I’m a big weirdo Luddite for that.

Buy music directly from the artist or on bandcamp, stop supporting Spotify if you give a shit about music

mns19 minutes ago

Without Spotify and the rest of the streaming services most of the people would just pirate music. I would probably spend less on music than I do now on Spotify per year.

portaouflop6 minutes ago

You would still give more money to artists directly though — most artists get basically nothing from Spotify

jrm432 minutes ago

As a long time (actual) hip-hop fan, I do find it quite hard to muster sympathy for this weirdly isolated, and perhaps disposable, genre? Kind of like, okay, how much did you try to build with the origins of the thing you're using to make new music?

Reminds me a bit of "nerdcore" hip-hop; which also made little sense because e.g. Del the Funkee Homosapien and RZA were also nerds making VERY nerdy music, but for "some reason" weren't seen as the same thing.

cool_dude856 minutes ago

I mean, I don't disagree with you, but nobody should have to compete with AI on the biggest market out there. If the genre was dying because it isn't cool anymore, whatever. If more people are listening than ever, but they're just getting AI lofi to avoid paying artists, then it's bad news.

joshdavham9 minutes ago

> as most punk rockers and rap artists will tell you, once your sound hits the mainstream it’s time to move on

This is a really interesting quote. I definitely feel that there are analogies in other fields as well.

fph53 minutes ago

Is there a website that let me auto-queue music based on what I have listened to in the past, and is not a for-profit algorithm like Youtube and Spotify?

With Youtube, I feel like I am the product, and they can't wait to put "sponsored" songs into my feed.

stronglikedan39 minutes ago

The only good recommendation engine is Pandora's Music Genome Project. It's the only one that auto-queues songs that sound like what you've seeded. Every other service will play you other songs from the same artist or genre, even though they sound nothing like what you've seeded. And then they pepper in other things that have nothing to do with anything - the "sponsored" crap.

It's just too damn bad that Pandora refuses to keep up with the competition and add higher quality streams. It sounds noticeably bad by comparison when using modern sound hardware. I just use them for recommendations now, so that I can curate my playlists in services that do offer high quality sound. They could easily be the only music service I pay for, but I'm not going to pay for subpar sound.

stwrzn22 minutes ago

[dead]

calibas31 minutes ago

> For Japanese soundtrack producer Nujabes, the “lofi” sound wasn’t an aesthetic choice. It was an artifact of creating such forward thinking music with the dusty equipment from 20 years ago.

I trying to figure out where the author got this from? Audio hardware/software hasn't changed that much in 20 years, and Nujabes' lofi aesthetic seems intentional.

According to Wikipedia, it originated from an effect button on Roland samplers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lofi_hip-hop

quintes28 minutes ago

I love lofi I was actually creating a few lofi tracks and doing so taught me a new style, mixing and mastering and release process. If course no money no followers but it’s the creative process. Lofi girl is about the only thing I listen to in that genre on Spotify.

For all it’s “Ai playlist promotion is bad” Spotify will only play things that someone somehow got through their editorals

d3rockk16 minutes ago

Yeah, this article misses the mark. The author definitely frames the issue of AI-generated music and stock music in Lofi Hip Hop through a Spotify-centric lens. While they acknowledge that lofi originated and gained popularity outside of Spotify's control, particularly mentioning YouTube channels, it's BS to act like Spotify is the be-all and end-all of this (or any) genre. Disclosure: I've never paid for a Spotify account.

The Truth: Lofi Hip Hop continues to flourish far beyond the profit-prioritized walls of Spotify's garden, a meticulously manicured space where genuine discovery is choked out by the weeds of algorithmic control. True artistry is blossoming in the wilder, freer spaces online.

Also I really recommend Shlohmo & quickly quickly for some fresh Lofi.

jmuguy24 minutes ago

Wish on the Beat is on Bandcamp as well, although the embedded youtube track isn't available :( https://wishlyst.bandcamp.com

madmountaingoat52 minutes ago

I do not dispute that Spotify creates "perfect fit content" tracks. What I will dispute is that, artists with generic bios and AI sounding tracks, are always Spotify tools.

tantalor32 minutes ago

Glad to see the latest generation coming online has rediscovered and embraced adult contemporary genre / muzak / elevator music / smooth jazz.

pipeline_peak14 minutes ago

Lo-Fi hip hop already sounds AI generated. It’s music for bubble tea shops.

briantakita52 minutes ago

Lofi Girl still has an active audience. >100k for each video. GameChops has a channel as well with >5k & <100k for each video.

The Musician's story adds to the vibe. If someone can relate to the creator, it helps to create more connection with the audience than a pure algorithm. The human curated/generated animations seem more coherent...even if it's on a loop.

I like some of the new AI animations for being novel...mostly futuristic. Though this will soon become common & something new will show up.

ZeroCooly29 minutes ago

You should check out the artist "Home Alone." Their stuff has a very neatly crafted vibe. It's lofi esc maybe a bit more jazzy than you'd expect. But their album covers are great and albums are coherent.

Just another example of an artist doing well for themselves still.

josefritzishere47 minutes ago

I used to work in the record industy. If you want to understand how artist royalties work the seminal article on the topic was written by Steve Albini and is highly reccomended. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music

ToucanLoucan1 hour ago

AI is best stated as a tool to permit wealth to access skill without skill being permitted to access wealth.

I've been called a Luddite so many times on this website asking basic questions of how in a world where your labor is required in order for you to earn a living these entire reams of people are meant to continue living, and nobody has an answer.

avidiax38 minutes ago

There is this narrative that "every technological revolution eventually created jobs, and this one is no different."

I think that glosses over some critical historical facts. When the saw mill upfitted with "labor-saving" machinery, those displaced saw hands didn't necessarily "upskill" themselves to get office jobs or start waiting tables. Chronic unemployment and an early grave from drink was a pretty likely outcome.

Where AI is different is that the scale and speed of job displacement is going to be unprecedented. We will need a new operating principle for our societies, and it will have to come about quickly. Otherwise, millions of displaced workers will have no reason not to defect from the social contract.

Eventually, humans can act as a managerial class for AI agents, just as we manage existing technologies. But you have to transition to that point without blowing up society.

It's little comfort that current AI has some rough edges. Sure, current AI might be adequate as a junior graphic designer or junior software engineer. But in the process of using these AIs, the senior humans will be generating the data to train the AI to replace at least mid-level positions. This doesn't require "AGI", just that the AI can follow instructions at one level higher abstraction and critically judge its own work.

This is a subtle and uncomfortable argument to make without falling into the "class warfare" or "luddite" tropes.

pinkmuffinere52 minutes ago

I think you’re arguing against continued development of AI? (Apologies if I’ve misunderstood)

I won’t use the word “Luddite”, but your argument could be applied word-for-word to automatic looms:

“[The automatic loom] is best stated as a tool to permit wealth to access skill without skill being permitted to access wealth… how in a world where your labor is required in order for you to earn a living these entire reams of people are meant to continue living…“

Historically, automatic looms were a net benefit to society. I think this indicates that your argument against development of AI is insufficient.

dmonitor38 minutes ago

Perhaps we need to differentiate between "end products" and "intermediate products". Cloth/fabric is an intermediate product. You use it to make things to sell, so increasing its production while decreasing human labor input is net beneficial, since it increases demand for jobs downstream of the supply chain. Music and art are enjoyed as end products, though. There hasn't been an industry-wide supply chain shortage of music since the invention of the record player (an invention that took music to the consumers, increasing demand from artists).

ToucanLoucan46 minutes ago

Truthfully, I don't give a shit about AI. It's a tool to generate mediocre garbage, be that writing, be that images, be that music, whatever, and in those tasks, it can largely succeed. If you want a lifetime of generated Lo-Fi to listen to, it will do that. If you want a lifetime of generated hentai to fap to, it will do that too, and the outputs meet your standards, congrats, you are an average consumer of mediocre art, one among millions, perhaps billions. I wish you personally no ill will.

What I care about is all the musicians, the designers, the artists, the writers, who to be clear, are already and have been for many years struggling to earn a living plying their craft, who are in for even more torment for trying to just... live. For trying to turn their given and practiced talents into money so they can not freeze to death.

And I'm frustrated that they need to go without a means to live because billionaires, apparently, need more billions. And I'm angry that our society has allocated power solely to those billionaires to make those decisions. And I'm nursing a visceral hatred of every single one of them who are preparing to break the social contract to millions of people so they can have another, and I can't stress this enough, absolutely meaningless massive amount of money, to go with their already massive amounts of money...

For. Doing. Nothing.

So yes, I am a Luddite. I see monied classes financially backing new technology that will allow them to generate more products of lower quality using fewer (if any) human laborers so they can pocket even more money while fucking over working class people.

genewitch5 minutes ago

I started writing music in the mid-90s, did 7-8 albums with intrepid demise, and a few solo albums as well.

My latest and possibly last track is called "I ain't even writing music anymore byeeee" because AI can take the shit I hear in my skull and translate it pretty good to and mp3.

I'm done. I made so much $0 that I'm set for life from my music.

https://m.soundcloud.com/djoutcold/i-aint-even-writing-music...

You can peruse my older tracks. My soundcloud is hotlinks and esoteria, not my collected works.

ta864535 minutes ago

Money flows to the things people want. The real housewives, the view, twilight, etc. Hell people make millions simply playing video games on twitch. But nobody is owed an income for doing something they love.

The question you should be asking, is how do you increase demand for the things you value? How do you make people want the thing you have to offer. Musicians, comedians, and other artists who figure out that answer (or luck into it), get very wealthy indeed.

> For. Doing. Nothing.

That's obviously not true. I've tried doing nothing for a long time, and am not anywhere close to a billionaire.

pixl9711 minutes ago

The key to doing nearly nothing and getting rich is to start out rich and then invest.

The problem is not being 'owed' an income. The problem comes in when there end up being a class of people that can't make a living doing anything. When this class becomes too large bad things tend to happen. Be it government enabled purges or the masses breaking out guillotines or riots burning entire cities down.

I, an invested member in the continuation of society, would like a rather non-violent world to be in our future.

simonbarker871 hour ago

I also wonder what everyone is supposed to do if skills are simply AI’d in to uselessness.

The usual answer is something about how rich people want to rule the world and not pay for labour … but then that world will become pretty unpleasant for them to live in so that doesn’t track to me.

thatguy090047 minutes ago

Rich people seem to be content with building a luxurious emergency bunker in new Zealand and then just rolling the dice on whether the world will go to shit or not. The only conclusion I can really come to is that they know the world will be going to shit no matter what they do or something.

avidiax35 minutes ago

Rich people have a prisoner's dilemma if they are sufficiently self-aware. Maximum individual wealth and profit will come from maximally embracing AI. But if everyone does that, they are indeed rolling the dice on whether they'll instead be eating canned beans in New Zealand instead of upgrading their 150ft. yacht to a 155ft. yacht.

ToucanLoucan1 hour ago

This presumes the rich are looking further ahead than next quarter which doesn't scan for me considering the sorts of things a lot of them say.

dublinben37 minutes ago

Would an AGI that is “intelligent” enough to replace any kind of human labor deserve independent personhood and remuneration, or would they just be the perfect slave to capital?

ixtli55 minutes ago

Thats because there is no answer. Marx and all of the people who developed his theories after him have exhaustively and scientifically proved this. That's really whats happening: its not that people dont have an answer is that they're not admitting to the exploitative nature of private capital accumulation. The main internal contradiction of capitalism leads to the system creating large amounts of wealth but also equivalently large amounts of poverty.

Also, if you havent read the wikipedia article on the luddites you should. It's not as bad a moniker as revisionists would have you think! (Hint: they were protesting labor abuses, not simply opposed to advencement.)

quintes31 minutes ago

So communism it’s the answer cuz Marx?

pixl978 minutes ago

The answer doesn't seem to be late stage capitalism.

josefritzishere1 hour ago

Spotify is ardently anti-consumer and anti-artist. Their business model extracts revenue by siphoning off artist royalties through label rev-share and then compounds the issue by restricting royalty payouts. Further siphoning off revenue by loading the playlist with AI-trash is not even their worst offense. They're a company begging for an artist boycott.

izacus1 hour ago

Yeah, can't wait to go back to Sony installing rootkits on my playback device to make sure we don't pirate their CDs.

bdcravens1 hour ago

Isn't this the result of consumers devaluing art? We want a $12 all you can eat plan, which tends to favor package contracts on the supply side. The direct-to-consumer model for music has been mostly rejected.

steveBK12324 minutes ago

Consumers want fast & cheap then want to find fault and point fingers when it isn't good.

By historical norms, music is hilariously cheap. And $12 isn't even the floor, you can get a $17 couples plan, or a $20 family plan split 6 ways. Or $6 for students and they throw in Hulu TV with it! And theres are 2025 dollars.

In peak CD mall rat era, Northeast HCOL area minimum wages were $5, gas was $2/gal and CDs were $20+ for new releases, each. Or inflating that $20, is $38/album in 2025 dollars. And teens with allowances and/or jobs would buy more than 1 per month.

No matter how the pie is sliced up, there just isn't that much revenue coming in the front door.

pixl9723 minutes ago

Did (most) consumers ever value art? There has always been the very wealthy that commission art, but it seems like throughout history more for less is the typical behavior.

Kuinox27 minutes ago

This is the result of companies screwing over consumers for years.

mingus881 hour ago

The model to look to is bandcamp

roywiggins55 minutes ago

Sony being bad doesn't mean Spotify isn't also bad.

mvdtnz53 minutes ago

A DRM scheme from 20 years ago is not the one and only alternative to Spotify.

ghaff26 minutes ago

I can 99.999…% guarantee that if you buy a CD and rip it today you won’t be rootkitted.

renewiltord1 hour ago

Does anyone ever comply with these "As listeners we must band together" things? I couldn't care less. I like the lo-fi sound myself and put on some Nujabes while in the kitchen. It's a good time.

But whether any specific artist gets to play or not doesn't concern me that much. I've found that single artists rarely preserve the feel so much as ones in a genre.

mingus8859 minutes ago

If you love AI slop and truly don’t have any care in the world about making more musicians to train the next models for your AI slop, then by all means lean into your playlist slop.

At some point we are going to see the AI artistic equivalent of the meme video that has been reposted for the past decade to the point where it’s so compressed and shitty it’s garbage as the model runs out of public human output to train from

And folk like you won’t really care. Win win I guess for you.

ddingus47 minutes ago

Punching down is rarely helpful.

fkyoureadthedoc54 minutes ago

>> put on some Nujabes

> If you love AI slop

Did you even read what you're replying to? Nujabes is basically the GOAT of the genre.

nonrandomstring46 minutes ago

> For us listeners, it’s more important than ever to seek out real artists.

I can understand listening to genai music as a background space filler but music has more functions.

It is a signifier and mnemonic, and sets mood for production.

Everything on https://cybershow.uk is made in house, on the fly as needed. We mostly use Ardour, Audacity and some weird old computer music tools like Csound, Puredata, Supercollider for all the beds and backings, many of which are in the old-skool, lo-fi styles because these sit behind talk as 'beds' very nicely.

It would be easy to grab licensed tracks or use "AI" to make music, but we don't do that. That's mainly because its better to keep control over the feel and exactly craft everything. An example is this poetry episode [0] where everything is cut specifically for the poem, and this latest episode "Owned By Bots" where the grungy "crime beat" is a main feature [1]

[0] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=13

[1] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=38