The Disastrous State Of The Music Industry

Comments · 461

• DA

  @DamianKeyes · 5 months ago · pinned

  Thank you for the love ❤

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• PE

  @PeterAveyardMusic · 5 months ago (edited)

  There is one main issue you didn't say enough about Damian that is artistry. I've been writing songs for 40 years and I love the process. I've got better and better at it over the years because every time you write, rehearse, record and gig you learn. Artists suffer for their art, spending hours trying to figure out and fix small things. If you use AI to fast forward to the end reault. You are not learning, you are not suffering for your art. How can you claim to be an artist. I love your stuff man. Keep it up.

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• TR

  @TrentFuehrer · 5 months ago

  So sorry for your loss, Damo.  Good to have you back.  Appreciate your authenticity.

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• DO

  @DoubleSlashCJ · 5 months ago

  When I was younger I looked down on the old blokes playing in pubs. Didn&apos;t they want to &quot;make it&quot;? Now I&apos;m 40 years old and playing with my friends in a pub is a dream. <br><br>The music industry has been dying for ages. Bands have been declining in favour of solo artists. But for me, music is about hanging out with your friends and making a noise. <br><br>I&apos;ve binned off Spotify. Don&apos;t bother with social media. I record albums with my mates and sell them on CDs at gigs. It&apos;s great.

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• FR

  @freezetheatlantic · 5 months ago

  I’m 55 this year and there have been 3 distinct phases to my musical ‘career’. I started in the early 90s and my goals were all the things you were talking about that were part of the journey.<br>I joined a band, we wrote, we rehearsed, we gigged, we found a little label, they put our record out, we got in the press, we got on the radio, we got a manager, we got bigger gigs, we got more press, we got major labels coming to shows, we signed a deal, we made an album, it did quite well, we had to make another that did better, we went from travelling round the uk in van to travelling round Europe in a van, and so on, sleeper buses, sports hall tours supporting bigger bands, festivals etc etc. Then we were off to start trying to crack America, show case gigs in NY, getting a slot at SXSW. It took 7 years. We made 3 albums. But by that time, musical trends were changing and so was the music industry.<br>That band came to an end as file sharing took off and people were talking about something called Napster.<br><br>That was the first phase. My second phase was in a new band, trying to re-do all I’d achieved in the first band in a landscape that was totally upended by a seismic shift in technology. The old rules and methods did not apply anymore. Vinyl was gone, CDs started to decline rapidly, streaming appeared. We did make a couple albums, with small labels that had no money. But we, and everyone else operating at that grassroots roots level, flailed about trying to hit a square peg into a hole that we didn’t even know the shape of any more. I would say I’d lost my way in what the experience of making music was about, desperate to try and recreate what I had achieved in the previous decade through the same now useless methods. I decided to accept I didn’t understand how this industry worked any more. I didn’t think about the fun we’d had I focused on the abject failure of my second attempt to get a bite of the cherry. I got a proper job, raised a family. The bass guitar went dusty in a cupboard.<br>At 50, I got back with an old musicians friend and we started writing music again. I thought maybe we could sell our songs to labels for some younger artists. We were too old to be in a band ourselves, right?<br>We met a talented young singer songwriter lady who was starting to make a name for herself, just her and her acoustic guitar and she wanted a band to back her. When we started collaborating with her, we still assumed she would be finding a group of pretty young things to perform the songs we were writing and demoing together. Instead, she asked us. Well I thought there’s no chance this is going to go anywhere so I just decided to say ok and we’ll enjoy the ride - experience. Wherever it takes us. Just forget the industry and enjoy writing, rehearsing, recording and playing songs in front of people. Whether there’s 50 or 500 in the audience. Well now we’re playing festivals and getting on the radio and being offered gigs all over the place. No, we haven’t cracked the charts or been offered a big deal or anything and I absolutely don’t care. I’m having the best time as a musician that I’ve had for 25 years. We don’t chase gigs, they come to us. We haven’t played anything rubbish because we turn stuff down that looks awful.<br>You have to decide what success looks like for you and when my attitude to what makes your music projects successful changed - the memories, the experiences, the friendships and the connection with an audience, whatever their size, the craft of writing, rehearsing, polishing, recording and playing music with and to people - that’s when I became happy to be doing music again. I’m not a dog chasing cars anymore. I don’t give a shit where it goes. I’m enjoying life and making music with people I love doing it with and that’s all that matters.

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• DO

  @Dogsinthepark-iz9jl · 5 months ago

  &quot;Dopamine industry&quot; is a very apt way to describe the era we&apos;re currently in.

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• RA

  @RachelRatcliff33 · 5 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R0f3epJLCw&amp;t=376">6:16</a> truer words have never been spoken. Also, my deepest condolences.

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• RC

  @RC79100 · 5 months ago

  I needed to hear this today mate. &nbsp;Sorry for your loss

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• PH

  @philiprourke7732 · 5 months ago

  This was so insightful and exactly what Ive been struggling with recently. &nbsp;Ive been aware of AI music and been getting better at identifying it when I hear it, but never really looked at it.<br>My sister sent me an instagram reel featuring John Denver&quot;s country roads song done as an irish folk song with a golden voiced female singer..she loved John Denver, cried a river when he died. &nbsp;And she fell for it God bless her! It wasn&apos;t her fault, she isn&apos;t a musician..I almost fell for it myself, &nbsp;for the first 30 seconds or so, but I just knew..not really something I can define other than its a spiritual thing, you just know in your soul that its AI. So I looked into it, only took a few minutes &nbsp;to track down the source of it and AI it of course was.<br>This incident really triggered me, I wanted to get more educated on this AI stuff, I have heard of Suno and seen something of how it works thanks to the Rick Beato youtube channel..<br>I downloaded the free version on my phone and started playing with it. <br>I&apos;ve written songs as a hobby for 25 years, made my home recordings for absolutely no one to hear, just a hobby, but I always thought that the lyrics, arrangements, &nbsp;melodies and structures of some of my songs , were actually pretty good and if a real artist, with their studio musicians and producers were to record one of my songs,they would make it sound amazing and legit...and thats how a lot of commercial music has actually been made up until recently, &nbsp;a songwriter pitches a demo and it gets taken up by an established artist and brought to the world.<br>Enter Suno...I ran 3 of my songs, my own recorded versions of the songs , through the free app on my phone, getting Suno to generate a cover of each song, actually, &nbsp;it generates 2 versions each go around. &nbsp;After a bit of learning about how to write promps inside the lyrics box, I started to get the AI versions to sound more like how I wanted them to.<br>So now I have some AI &nbsp;versions of my songs that sound absolutely amazing to me, Im proud of how they sound, they were my songs that I wrote and worked on at length, they have appeal to myself and others Ive played them to, but theres a catch.. a very big catch.<br>The songs sound professional , appealing and legit after being processed through &nbsp;a free AI phone app..absolutely anyone can do that and surely millions of amateur song writers are doing exactly that with their songs.<br>The novelty has worn off very quickly, &nbsp;there is no point to doing it as you rob yourself of the personal satisfaction of having done it yourself, &nbsp;even realising that there was no way I could ever achieve those results myself.. Who really can? &nbsp;What solo artist with no money can record a song with multiple different instruments played like a pro, &nbsp;backing singers &nbsp;, quality of engineering and tracking, mixing and mastering...all of that entirely by themselves at home? &nbsp;Not too many!<br>Established artists with recording contracts have teams of musicians, &nbsp;engineers, &nbsp;producers, &nbsp;song writers etc , to bring their art into a commercially viable reality. <br>Now any one of those amatuer musicians that never got to that level, but posess a smart phone, can have instant access to all of that, or at least something that sounds a lot like that from the end result.<br>I just think it devalues musicianship even further.<br>Where will this all go ? <br>I can only guess.

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• RO

  @Royston-e2p · 1 day ago

  I&apos;m sorry for your loss Damian. I miss Colin too. 🤗

• DR

  @drewstephenson · 5 months ago

  I&apos;m not an AI user, environmental and ethical concerns, but I think your point around the 15min mark is bang on. Coupled with people trying to feed the streaming algorithms, the conversation is so often about frequency of output - quality, originality, personality, passion... all these appear to be an aside.

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• KE

  @kelsiekimberlinofficial · 5 months ago

  Thanks Damian for saying what so many real musicians have been thinking. &nbsp;Not only is this bad for the industry, it is bad for the musician, because if AI does all the work, there is no need for the musician, and if the musician relies on AI, they lose the skills they had or wanted to have. &nbsp;My sister is in university, and the professors fail the students who use AL Chats to write their papers, and the professors have AI detectors. &nbsp;The technology will catch up to block AI music, and it won&apos;t be long coming. &nbsp;Consumers will rebel against the AI music which might sound good at first listen, but it gets boring very quickly because there is no humanity. &nbsp;I refuse to use AI in my music in any way. &nbsp;Two years ago, I released my first EP and my team used AI to create the music videos for the eight songs. &nbsp;Well, now YouTube refuses to allow monetization of AI created videos, so that was a bad decision. &nbsp;Everyone should demand that AI music, which is basically created for free, not be allowed to be monetized. &nbsp;Then people will lose the incentive to create it.

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