The Invy Horn Jam heads up McBride Avenue taking their audience along for the ride.
Photo: Dyonn Dimmock
Photo: Dyonn Dimmock
By Alison Chapman
RICHARD Osman, in a British podcast with Marina Hyde, The Rest is Entertainment, claimed it took him just 35 seconds and a chatbot to create a band, a song and a video clip. The band was called Quiet Alibi, the song Rewind the Summer, with a fuzzy film of four young men performing.
I couldn’t find it on YouTube (where I had found the Osman podcast). Maybe he was joking – Osman is often very funny, whether on the game show Pointless or in his Thursday Murder Club novels. But toward the end of the podcast, he did play a sample of the “band” performing the song.
That’s the unsettling bit: what is real? Can we even tell?
RICHARD Osman, in a British podcast with Marina Hyde, The Rest is Entertainment, claimed it took him just 35 seconds and a chatbot to create a band, a song and a video clip. The band was called Quiet Alibi, the song Rewind the Summer, with a fuzzy film of four young men performing.
I couldn’t find it on YouTube (where I had found the Osman podcast). Maybe he was joking – Osman is often very funny, whether on the game show Pointless or in his Thursday Murder Club novels. But toward the end of the podcast, he did play a sample of the “band” performing the song.
That’s the unsettling bit: what is real? Can we even tell?
The podcast also discussed The Velvet Sundown, an AI band created complete with video. Nowhere was it disclosed that the music was AI-generated. On YouTube, I found clips of the controversy around their track Dust on the Wind – which sounded eerily like Adele. One comment read: “AI hits hard” (@DerShooneKlaus KI haut rein). Music producer Rick Beato also weighed in with a video titled So It Begins … Is This a Real Band or AI?
If an AI-generated track on Spotify gets half a million listens, it might earn around $500. But who gets that money? There is no songwriter, no band. AI has simply ingested the work of countless musicians – without their consent – and reassembles it within parameters requested by the operator. Is this song writing? Is this music production? Or is it theft?
And then there are the algorithms. The more plays a song gets, the more the platforms push it. Radio programmers, venues and promoters also pay attention to streaming data. It means the successful get more successful, while local, emerging singer-songwriters are left chasing gigs by first proving they’re “on Spotify”.
All of which makes me rethink how I listen to music. For me it’s visceral – I feel it. When I sing, my whole body sings. When I perform, the audience becomes part of the song; we connect. Music is both technical and personal, frivolous and profound. Songs carry our memories, our histories, our cultures.
Maybe that’s where live music can save us – in the shared space where real bodies, real voices, and real feelings meet, beyond the algorithms and the avalanche of machine-made “so-called” music.
If an AI-generated track on Spotify gets half a million listens, it might earn around $500. But who gets that money? There is no songwriter, no band. AI has simply ingested the work of countless musicians – without their consent – and reassembles it within parameters requested by the operator. Is this song writing? Is this music production? Or is it theft?
And then there are the algorithms. The more plays a song gets, the more the platforms push it. Radio programmers, venues and promoters also pay attention to streaming data. It means the successful get more successful, while local, emerging singer-songwriters are left chasing gigs by first proving they’re “on Spotify”.
All of which makes me rethink how I listen to music. For me it’s visceral – I feel it. When I sing, my whole body sings. When I perform, the audience becomes part of the song; we connect. Music is both technical and personal, frivolous and profound. Songs carry our memories, our histories, our cultures.
Maybe that’s where live music can save us – in the shared space where real bodies, real voices, and real feelings meet, beyond the algorithms and the avalanche of machine-made “so-called” music.