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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

I was at a department store recently and heard a song I hadn't heard before. There was something strange about the singer's voice, and for a moment I wondered if it was AI generated.

Then I realized, I already can't tell the difference. It already might be! (Probably not, but you never know... maybe they put Spotify on autoplay ;)

Strange times.

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There's a whole industry of "royalty-free music", full of songs you hadn't heard before (or if you had, you'd forget about it anyways), which you can license for a fixed fee that's much lower than either mandatory royalties or negotiating with labels for "branded" (for lack of better term).

Existed for years, nothing to do with AI (though, with AI, you don't even need those).

Google "royalty-free music providers".

Department stores often play covers. I'm guessing it's cheaper than playing the originals. And now, with AI, they could play original AI creations for even less!

My supermarket plays music that they apparently commissioned. They play the same few songs over and over again.

One of the songs has themes around food and appetite and I thought they might have done it that way to make people hungrier while shopping. But the others don't, so maybe I'm reading too much into it ;)

But if all they wanted was the cheapest music possible they could license generic songs from one of those massive online libraries. There's evidently value in playing known melodies

Department store musak, worse than hotel lobby or elevator musak.

I just heard a country cover of Gangnam style in Korean with Southern accent. Hundred percent not "AI artist".

Spotify is too expensive for the amount of slop they push onto users. We used it as background noise for our dog. Switched to Tidal. At least that one I could trust not to push slop into artist radio, for now. If they do ot I'll cancel and play JS Bach and Antonio Vivaldi.

Just gimme a break. Added sugar in our food, now slop in our music too. What's next, "AI poetry"?

You don't like slop and you left Spotify for Tidal? That is pretty much the only one that's even more infested with fake tracks than Spotify is.

AI slop specifically isn't even the worst problem on Tidal, it's like the third worst behind Tidal being incapable of properly handing multiple artists sharing a name and adding the track to the wrong discography (not even allowing the listener to properly report it) or shitty producers tagging a popular artist and pretending they've collaborated with them.

Sounds for the Supermarket (1975)

https://youtube.com/watch/gcU7ZlnJFPE

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