Farewell, dear Jared, we hardly knew you. Come to think of it, we didn't know you at all, and you wanted it this way. But now that you have seemingly shuffled off your (im)mortal (digital) coil and have gone into the great beyond of other cyberegions, we salute you for...uh...your infatiguable work ethic, your high work standards and your sophisticated artistry of sounding like a couple of different people all at once. Rest In Power, Jared, no matter where that power comes from. New server rooms, maybe.
Hey, you guys remember Jared Hutcherson, right? To some, he's the country-singer/songwriter that created dozens of albums as if it was nothing. To others he was the name of one of the most shameless A.I. slop generating programmer imaginable, pointing out modern country radio's hollowness by churning out hours and hours of inoffensive, bland country-pop pap that would go unnoticed among real artists on country radio. And now he's gone. I'm not saying my little article calling out 'Mr. Hutcherson' had something to do with that, though I'm not saying it didn't, either. Who knows how Youtube got wise to the systematic shenanigans behind our beloved Jared, or whether the people behind Jared took the money and ran, while they still could.
If you remember, 'Jared' was notoriously productive, as A.I. slop machines tend to be, churning out albums, and long albums at that, contrary to real artists, whoe albums get shorter and shorter, due to the Tik Tok-isation of the younger generations of music listeners. And now his thirty albums are seemingly gone from all music streaming services, having also quit Apple, Amazon and the rest of the bunch. Jared you are gone, but not forgotten.
Music recommendations straight from the slop shop are of course continuing. a couple of weeks ago, together with some albums from the early 70s that go well with my All Pearls, No Swine project, Youtube proposed me a band called The Rash Cooper. I liked two of their songs, though they didn't sound much alike, and wanted to find out more about the band. a Google research yielded absolutely nothing besides that album: no web presence, social media, even a mention on a website somewhere. If an abum with non-descriptive artwork is the absolute only thing a 'musical artist' has out there, there's a pretty much 100% probability it's A.I. So, I kept a tab on these guys, and guess what. Almost exactly a month after the first one, the second album of the 'band' dropped, again with nothing but the album and its obviously A.I.-generated cover to show for it. Goodbye, The Rash Cooper, you sloppy A.I. slop.
The stories of A.I.-generated slops and sloppy fakes are becoming legion and getting worse - music streming platforms now have to delete thousands if fake songs every day - and that is, when they're trying, which considering their business model they don't have a real incentive to. But they really should, as the scammers have upped their game, now skimming both sides of the aisle. As seen in the article I linked to, A.I. now steals or 'creates' fake tracks by fake artists, which then get streamed thousands of times by A.I. bots on a loop, allowing the scammer to goose the streaming numbers for a half-way decent payout. It's not much money per se, a low four digit figure, but it's like phishing mails. You repeat this often enough on a small scale involving small local bands to rip off, and you got yourself a salary. The loss, however, is on the scammed artists, not the streamers, so it'll probably take some turns for the worse, before the wave of A.I. slop & scam music really gets monitored and persecuted as it should.
No such stuff here on One Buck Records, pbviously, though nowadays I have to be careful as hell as well when sourcing the All Pearls, No Swine and Bluegrass Chartbusters series. So far, no A.I. has made it past ol' OGB's quality control, but the enemy is getting stronger and better. Still, all human-made music right here, of which there is more coming up very soon, same as it ever was.
Tell us about the last time you ran into something A.I.-related. Good? Bad? Ugly?
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