The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse

hey everybody I'm Rick biato we're going to try something new today this video is on the history of the music business and technology in two acts act one music is too easy to make what do I mean by music is too easy to make let's just go back to the 1940s and 50s Frank Sinatra used to get up in front of an orchestra and sing a vocal take and they had one microphone and they would get it balanced just right Frank would say okay I'm ready to do it and he'd sing it come fly with

me let's float down to Peru then you get into the 1960s or so and then you have things where you have multirack machines you could go in if you had a mistake in a vocal part or any instrument and you do a punch in oh I don't like that word I sang It Out Of Tune or I want to change this lyric you go in you just punch in fix line punch out fast forward to 1998 with Sher the Believe song they invented this thing autotune that I've talked about this a million times on here

but autotune was a plugin that would go into these d W's digital audio workstations so you'd have something like Protools or logic or Ableton what you do is you take the vocal let's say the song's in C major any note in the key of C major it would tune the note too well T Pain and people like that realize if you put it on a really hard tuning it would make it sound like a keyboard and that's what they did in the Believe song well then the same thing starts happening with drum Parts guys's playing

a drum part and you're like you know what this would be a great take of this first verse if this one high hat wasn't a little drag well let's move it back a little bit or let's move it forward whatever then you move that and you're like well the snare after it kind of sounds weird because we move that forward now the snare sounds like it's dragged so we do that then you're like well you know what let's just look at the grid lines the bar lines and we'll just move them to that then you

start cutting out moving them then they give you this tool called beat detective then you can actually quantize an entire part so then it becomes like a drum machine so it's not human like here's an example of a quantized drum part it's John Bonham's drum performance from Fool in the Rain that's a shuffle here's what it sounds like as a machine now here's the actual human performance of John bonam notice the swing in [Music] it once you've quantized the drum part it's a drum machine it's just like Superior drums so what started happening in the

year 2000 or so is that everyone started quantizing their drums because the budgets to hire session guys like Josh freeze and Kenny Aronoff went away and you'd have to use the crappy drummers I mean some bands would have good enough drummers to play but You' typically have these crappy drummers that you'd have to fix their parts and once you fix their parts you start moving the bass around you start moving the guitars around and then you pretty much have sterile generic quantized rock music that has no vibe at all the other thing that people realize

is that it's really difficult in time consuming to record a drum set you need a studio and a lot of gear look at all these mics now you can put up three mics and get a drum sound you can put up two mics and get a drum sound but to get a professional drum sound you tend to mic up the different instruments I got two mics on the bass drum I got a mic on this time Mic on that time mik on the ride two mics on the overheads two mics on the snare here I

actually have three mics on the snare and a mic on the high hat and I have a couple room mics it's hard to record it well not only is it hard to play the drums well but it's hard to record the drums well and you have to have training it's not easy to do you got have a great ear you got to know how to tune them you got to know what is a good snare sound from a bad sound you got to know if the toms Are Ringing too much you got to know if

they're in the right pitches all this kind of stuff there's so many decisions to make now some of you are out there thinking what are you talking about Rick you don't need to have a good sing room you're going to have a crabby sing room you don't even need good mics because you're going to just replace everything with samples well where do you think samples come from they come from people that know how to record them that one was for free it's difficult to get a good guitar sound you have to have a good sounding

app you have to have good sounding speakers good microphones that work well most people now just use amp modelers they plug into their computer they pull up their program everything is done for them and they've already been pre-ic pre-selected they're all using the same algorithms then you create great sounds they're so easy to use doesn't take any skill at all but it doesn't take any creativity either then of course you have the midi packs that you can buy if you can't play keyboard so it'll just have pre-programmed chord progressions because for some reason people can't

just kind of space their fingers out and learn to play a few chords like that or maybe just experiment huh what is this what is this in the early 2000s labels stopped signing rock bands essentially because it was way too resource intensive it was far easier to sign artists that could make their own music using a laptop and a microphone why is this a bad thing well let's start with the creative dependency on technology limits the ability of people to innovate I believe could be wrong about that maybe it helps them innovate I don't think

so though the homogeneization of Music the over Reliance on similar tools as I just brought up with the amp models creates a lack of diversity I think that leads to music becoming more formulaic and people just following trends of using certain types of sounds this is why these trap beats have been in Vogue for the last 20 years people just they know they work so they just keep using them all the time quality versus quantity this is a big big thing okay so the easier production makes the process go faster which creates an oversaturation of

music making it harder to find really exceptional things as Ted Joya talks about in this clip this is spotify's way of using AI they have ai songs they attribute them to people that don't exist and this allows them to take royalties that would go to musicians and keep them for themselves on the AI front related to music is too easy to make I made a video last week called I told you this was going to happen and I played some songs off udio and I was saying how my kids could detect that they were AI

songs but other people could not well it just came out all three major labels are suing AI startups for copyright infringement Universal Music Group Sony music and Warner Music are suing sunno and yudo for copyright infringement because guess what they're using all their music to train these AI models well of course they are how else do they get to train it now companies like Universal are not doing it for the good of their music to protect their copyright owners what's going on here is they just announced that they're partnering with a company called sound laab

to make AI models of their artists for themselves they can use this sound laab plugin in Protools or logic and you can sing your own voice and replace it with one of their artists like Drake or Taylor Swift or Billy eyh or whoever agrees to this and I guarantee you all these labels are going to do that because they want to own the AI versions of these songs whether you create it or whether they create it they're going to own it and just to show you how easy it is to model someone's voice with AI

I'm speaking to you through a voice modeling program called 11 Labs that was trained on my voice over a 4-week period so for those of you that keep writing to me every day I get about 20 of these a day and they always start Rick I wrote a song that I think can be a hit I used AI to hear it because I know nothing about making music that's literally from an email I got yesterday this reminds me of the best AI critique I've seen creative AI tools can be seen as sophisticated plagiarism software as

they do not produce genuinely original content but rather emulate and modify existing works by artists subtly enough to circumvent copyright laws well what's funny about that is that was actually written by Chad GPT act two music is too easy to consume so this is the water faucet in my kitchen but imagine this is streaming on Spotify or apple music you can turn it on you can turn it off but what's going on in the stream of water is all of the music that's on these platforms now imagine this is one artist's entire output their entire

catalog might be the police could be Billy ish could be Leed Zeppelin The Beatles and then this dropper is each of their songs one two 3 four oh I just did a whole record there and eventually you exhaust their whole catalog when I hit this and I start the stream the music has very little importance if you think about it this way it goes from the faucet down the drain out to the Sewer where it's recycled again except in this case the music is not recycled like it is through the sewer there were 100,000 new

songs added every day in 2023 to streaming platforms that's more than one song per second for the entire year by comparison when I was a kid if I wanted to buy this lead Zeppelin 2 record I had to get a job or borrow money from my parents to buy it it because I wanted to own it I wanted it to be in my collection this album here Pat maeni new shiaka I paid eight bucks for brand new with the money that I made by bagging groceries at Topps grocery store in Fairport New York you actually

had to expend energy riding your bike or walking to your job working your shift getting your paycheck at the end of the week depositing it in the bank getting money out going to the record store buying the record bringing it home playing it listening to it a bunch of times going over to your friend's house sharing it with them when a kid opens Spotify and clicks on on a song they can just skip to the next one if they don't like it think about this all of the music that exists or at least it's been

uploaded the Spotify or apple music is available for $10.99 a month I'm talking about all of Michael Jackson's music all of ACDC Pink Floyd Whitney Houston Tupac Kendrick Lamar juice World Eminem Dr Dre all the works of beeen of Bach of Mozart of Stravinsky of shastovich of Charlie Parker of John col train of Miles Davis Brad Maldo of Pat maeni Keith Jarrett all of that $10.99 a month for the price of what we used to pay for one album it's all available on these streaming platforms which is why music is not as valued by young

people there is no Sweat Equity put into obtaining it having it be part of your collection having it be part of your identity of who you are these are the bands I believe in these are the artists that I love and I'm going to share it with my friends I'm going to bring that record to school I'm going to play it for my friends after school we're all hanging out reading the back cover of it and seeing who played on it these things meant something what was on here meant something produced by John Burns and

Genesis it was important what I'm saying is that music has basically become valueless if you only have to pay $10.99 a month to have access to anything what is one song worth you know people tell me that they want me to make certain kinds of videos they have these aspirational ideas as my friend Todd calls them but then they ultimately vote with their attention Rick make more what makes a song great videos make this kind of video or I wish that people would write songs and odd meters or use these more complex chord changes but

you know ultimately people people will do that and then they don't listen to them because you vote with your attention so try this try to sit down just couple times a week play just a few songs don't look at your phone or as I call it the thought deletion device because it empties your mind out don't look at Tik Tock don't look at YouTube or Twitter don't look at Instagram just listen to the music Let it Flow over you think about the lyrics think about the melody and try to experience music like you used to

or if you're young try to experience music in the way that we used to love to know your thoughts hit the Subscribe button leave a comment thanks for watching