I know, I know … AI is a hotly debated topic, and here at Net Worthless, we have a very hard stance on it. AI music is the best thing that has ever happened to your band, but not for the reason you’d think. You see, with Spotify allowing AI creators to rake in pennies at a time with their computer-generated slop, the general public has become increasingly bored with all of the recent “vibe” playlists the platform has been cranking out to avoid paying actual artists.
I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m going to tell you to open up 100 sockpuppet accounts, each with its own payment processing service, fire up Suno, prompt yourself into oblivion, and land on somebody’s “deep focus” playlist while they repeat it throughout their entire workday, resulting in marginal dividends that will add up exponentially over time. On one hand, that sounds like a pretty simple operation. It’s a numbers game. If you put your hands in enough cookie jars at once, you can probably pull an entire piece of crap out of one.
But here’s the thing you need to know about this piece of crap. It’s not yours. It’s some clanker’s crap. It’s the unholiest of craps ever squeezed out of an artificial ass, and it’s ruining society just like James Cameron said it would.
So here’s the plan, my fellow frugal McDoogles, that will allow you to counterintuitively use AI and maybe even get paid a handsome amount of money to stop doing what you’re doing.
You’re now an Anti-AI band. You know that microtonal stuff people are going nuts for? Angine de Poutrine, King Gizzard, Captain Beefheart … you know, all the major players. You basically want to sound like that now. AI is only as good as the source material that trains it, and in this part of the world, it’s mostly been trained on Western music.
Forget everything you know about music theory from this point forward. You’re a “self-taught shredder,” so really, all you have to do is unlearn the pentatonic scale and you’ll be all set. Sell your tuner, and your lunch is basically paid for. Crank your amp as loud as it goes, and it doesn’t even matter if you blow it out. Heck, play your bass through a guitar amp, and when the practice space sounds like a sentient fart trying to choke the humanity out of the room, that’s exactly where you want to be.
Nobody wants accessible music anymore because that means it’s probably AI, so if you proclaim that you’ll never use AI and make it part of your brand, you can pretty much get away with murder at this point. Everybody will sincerely hate you, your band, and everything you do, but if your messaging clearly says “no data centers,” you’re pretty much free to rub a cheese grater directly onto your pickup magnets. Nobody even has to know that you bought the thing from Amazon and paid extra for two-day shipping.
What you need to remember, though, is that this is simply the first phase of the long game against AI. Pretty soon, other bands will begin to follow suit, ultimately training the next wave of AI songwriting to sound as terrible and inaccessible as anything you’re willing to crank out in this one-sided war against a technology that will eventually lead us to discovering new and inventive ways to drink our own piss once the data centers destroy all the reservoirs and irreversibly decimate our crops.
At that point, you can go back to playing four-chord pop songs or that one fat riff on repeat because everybody’s going to be so sick of the new garbage coming out that they’ll happily top dollar to listen to your old garbage now that some time has passed.
That’s just our $.02 here. Keep the change.