Quantity vs Quality in the age of AI overlords
Sometimes I wonder what kind of artists I would have been in the 70’s or 80’s or being a bit older in the 90’s.
It was the age of analog. There was no YouTube or simplified self production and self distribution tools. But there was also an abundance of attention.
People didn’t have as much pulling at them from all different directions and so if you made something truly cool, you’d be able to see your work have an impact, even on a small scale.
Now my friends and I send each other videos of people doing incredible things, a man paragliding with his dogs, a 4 year old playing amazing guitar solos, home made instruments, people painting 4 paintings at once with their hands and feet. And we are all like “yeah saw it already bro”
What a crazy world where nothing is all that crazy anymore…
I am not one of those old timers who just complains about change all the time. I recognize the improvements. I take advantage of them and I’m not passive aggressive about it.
I love certain things about social media. I hate other things about it. It’s not black and white.
I love that I can stay in touch with my friends from different parts of my life easily and make new friends from around the world. I love how I can get information on demand. I love how YouTube can teach me more than school could have in a fraction of the time.
I don’t love the corporate incentives to make these things as addictive as possible or the data collection or the algorithms which oversimplify our habits and encourage to be mindless in our scrolling.
I love how everything has become so accessible. Spotify will recommend me unknown artists from Mali and Sweden because it knows what kind of sounds I like even beyond genre. If I travel to a new city I can try to use social media to find a music or art space I might like based on which friends have followed them. I can use google maps to find an eco village in the hills and hitchhike there.
AI to remove static noise from a podcast, cool! Deepfakes trying to convince me that someone said something they didn’t? Not cool!
So much of progress is a double edged sword, and people act like it’s inevitable, and to some degree it is inevitable, but to what degree, that is not inevitable. That depends on us and what we support and how we decide to live.
I probably would have been a very serious artist in the 70’s or 80’s. I would have only out out an album when I knew it was ready, after years of trial and error. That’s how I released my first EP because I grew up with bands like A Perfect Circle who did just that, sat on an album for 10 years before releasing it because they wanted it to be perfect.
But when attention is so scarce and my creative impulses come at such a high rate, what is wrong with just flowing and showing everything that I can create?
The funny thing is, sometimes I feel my garbage is almost as good as my gold. Something about the fast pace of this overwhelming endless array of stimuli, combined with being in the moment AND having access to all these tools people before didn’t have, I feel I could create the greatest album of all time in a weekend, from scratch, if I were in the right state of mind.
So maybe my frivolous instincts are the ones to follow. I wrote my novels in about three takes. With each chapter, I sat down once to write it, and another to edit it. Then when the entire book was finished I reread and re-edited. That’s it. I didn’t read it 7 times and tweak things for months. I didn’t worry about perfection. There might have been a typo or two. I didn’t care.
And the result is a book I’m ultra proud of, something that I feel is powerful and will really hit with the people who it resonates with. I love it, and that’s really all that matters in the end when it comes to whether or not it’s worth sharing.
When media is in such abundance, perfect isn’t even valuable anymore. In fact it never was, but we wanted to keep the illusion that the things we liked were perfect because we didn’t have as much access to everything in existence and we were disempowered to think that we could never be Jimmie Hendrix or Bjork or Hunter S Thompson or whoever you admired.
People are still disempowered in their mindsets, but the tools are all right there. You can create your Sergeant Peppers alone in your living room, in a single take. You can self publish it and earn most of the profits yourself. You can print merch on demand and earn money passively if you can find people interested in it.
But now the problem is visibility. When it’s so easy to make stuff, no one knows you exist and even if they do, they may not care. There are 1000 other Sargent Peppers being created every weekend.
This is not to belittle the magic of an album like Sargent Pepper. It was much harder to create something of this level back in the day, and so it deserves its place in history.
But what deserves its place in the history of the future?
I believe the future will be decentralized. Our attention will go to different places based on our interest and algorithms rather than what everyone is listening to. This has been the trend for years already and it’s not slowing down.
Giants still exist but the attention they get will be continuously chipped away at by whatever else people happen upon.
The algorithms are frustrating though. The starving artist of the past was incentivized to optimize for quality but had less competition. They had one chance to hit and they had to hit hard. The starving artists of today are forced to optimize for quantity.
It doesn’t even necessarily have to be quantity of art, it could be quantity of interactions and engagement. Play as many shows as possible, post as much on social media as possible. Do as many outlandish things as possible.
And so I could spend half of my time trying to promote my art by turning social media into work….
…But if I have endless songs being channeled through me and I’ve got to keep sharing something to get attention, why not just share everything I create? Why not throw it out for the world to do with it as it pleases since I can’t compete with the dude playing bagpipes with his butthole and electric guitar with his nose.
I can’t be the most fantastic guitar player. But I can write a song a day like Prince, and although I can’t wail on guitar like him, I can be much more consistent with quality than he or anyone else sharing so much art. That is my strength. Consistently channeling powerful emotions and sharing it in different ways.
And so with this I’ve decided to stop being a perfectionist. My first EP took 10 years to come out and would have taken another 10 to become what I hoped it would become but before I released I was allowing myself to be constipated. Its release was the end of the constipation. And my second EP will come out sometime this year, no question.
I will release a ton of videos and experiments between now and then. Some might be more likely to catch people’s anttention and some not so much. The algorithms have abandoned me, and my 50 likes per post on instagram have become 5. I know that doesn’t mean it’s worse, it just means the algorithms probably changed or were giving me a boost to encourage me to use the platform more.
It does kind of suck to put 3 hours into a little experimental video and feel really proud of it and then get 3 likes when you got 50 for a picture of yourself making a funny face, but at some point some people are bound to realize that I shit gold. I may not make the best stuff on the planet but I really believe that I might be able to make the largest quantity of good stuff on the pla…ok maybe not on the planet, but at least out of everyone you know!
This is just me, if you can play mad drums with your feet while singing like an angel, maybe you’ll have a different path. If you want to be a perfectionist and find your inspiration in that then go for it! There is a place in the world for perfectionists, as long as they don’t get constipation.
Follow what excites you! And what excites me is taking an old song and rewriting, recording and making a video for it in a day or two and not thinking about it again for a few months when I rewrite it again.
Here is my latest experiment!
Here is my first EP on Spotify, on Apple Music, or other services and YouTube if you search “Sun Shone Blue”!
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It it was 80s I can only imagine you in a hippie hairstyle cant imagine you being a potato head. LOL!!
Your still would still be same, even stronger anti-government point of view and less tech-savvy. I don't what could have been maybe we lived in that era and reincarnated in this again. who knows.
but I know some things about our present selves
I keep telling people that we are slowly evolving into Vulcans. All logic and no emotions.
The tech especially the short format video content is designed to keep our senses attached to it and distracted all the time. It's destroying the sense of amazement and the appreciation for the buildup and and the proof can be found in the comment section of the videos where the public is demands for the 1 min video to be cut short.
I think I’d most definitely be more crusty and whiny in the 80s 😆 full on punk mode, I’d probably be anti everything cause I wouldn’t have access to the world in the same way and that’s where I get my energy from
I’m definitely not becoming a Vulcan. I still feel people so hard, it knocks me out when I’m in crowded places
I can’t imagine you being that different in the 80’s, maybe you would have gone to America and been my neighbor. And I would have scared you with my crusty punk music.
All music on I+Everything channel is mine. In fact absolutely everything is mine, the singing, guitar, mixing, video editing and spoken word is all me. About 20-30% of the filming is my gf, videos she gives me
forgot to ask whats the background music on your video?
This...we have to take onus on our circumstance.
Well, back then only the labels decided what music we all could have access to. So we didn't have any freedom like now. Yes, we are enslaved by the algorithms (but there are alternatives) but you can virtually find any music you want to listen. And as a musician you can produce and publish any kind of music you want with no one stopping you from releasing it.
Also you must consider where do you live. Because if I was growing up in Italy in the 70s I absolutely wouldn't have the minimum chance to become a professional musician, even less releasing my own music. And I think that is true for 99% of the places in the world.
Even in the greatest America of the past people still needed to move to some big city to get a bit of a chance.
Now I can produce my Futuristic dystopian cyberpunk metal music in my bedroom from the Venetian countryside and I have thousands of people from all over the world listening to it. And there's no label gatekeeper teeling me I can't publish it because it's not perfect and it wouldn't work on the radio
For the majority yeah! But there were still traveling musicians and people outside of that system. Some of the early blues guitarists come to mind. Punk rock is another. Early electronic music and rap too. A lot of the times the labels tried to take over a movement after it started gaining some momentum, not too different from today. But yeah the majority of listeners it was about what the labels fed them.
It wasn’t easy to make a good living without the labels, but there were people who managed to survive doing it!
Also I guess it depends on what you mean by professional. I know some bands who tour and play some big shows but they can’t manage to do that constantly so they teach their instruments, are they professional? They can make a living between those two things.
It’s definitely an interesting topic! Cool music btw!
When I say professional I say it in a very entry level way. Just having the chance to record your stuff in a decent way would've been far away from available for the 90% of the musicians today. To distribute your work was even harder, because you had to make some copies of a demo and send it to every label you know and then prey every God to be the chosen.
It's true that all this led to an enormous quantity of music that should've been kept locked in a drawer. But I prefer knowing that my music discoveries are in my hands (and depends also on how the band promote itself) than to go to a record store and being forced to choose from what the labels decided I must listen to.
And yes, I know that often the bands went directly to the store and give them a bunch of their albums, so you can find a way to some independent music. But here's again the difference on where we live. Because if I lived in New York or LA, I could find some new born Guns n roses or Ramones album. But I live in Veneto, Italy. There's no chance I had found such amazing bands going to my local record store