How to solve the AI problem in music
And a brief history of the music industry
Six months ago, music from fake, AI musicians started appearing on real music charts.
A month ago, Rolling Stone published a story about how AI is impersonating real, actually-living indie musicians and making music as those musicians. In some cases, this has led to music distributors filing copyright claims for the AI imposters against the actual musicians being impersonated. And in case you were looking for some insult to injury…
A week ago, Futurism published “Berklee College of Music Students Furious That It’s Offering an AI ‘Songwriting’ Class”.
Yes, we musicians are on our own and it feels like we’re dealing with some terrible sci-fi version of every problem on earth all at once. We’re fighting an exploitative entity masquerading as original creators using means both legal and illegal to steal money and audience and in some cases tradition from actual original creators. Not only that, absolutely nobody asked for any of this and the market for it is entirely manufactured by greedy predators who, apparently have nothing but contempt for the actual original creators. Oh, and anybody with enough power to do anything about it is either silent or actively embracing it.
This is all very frightening and confusing. Fortunately, there is a solution. But before we get to that, we need to fully understand the problem.
So, come with me back to the 1830s, when a new craze was sweeping the New York City nightlife! It featured white men onstage, mocking the Black people enslaved in the South! The white men would wear tattered clothes, move around buffoonishly while speaking and singing in a ridiculing accent! And, of course, they would be in blackface. This was called minstrelsy.
These blackfaced minstrels would sing songs in Black styles like blues or jazz while portraying Black people as stupid and lazy and greedy and cowardly and music sales went through the roof. These were the days before recording technology, so they were selling sheet music. Not to put too fine a point on it, but these songs were so popular that music publishers employed stables of songwriters just to write this white supremacist slop. These stables were collectively called Tin Pan Alley.
Now, when I say “popular” I’m not talking about the masses organically yearning for some kind of inherently compelling product. No, I’m talking about a thoroughly manufactured market. Music publishers would hire musicians to demo their “darky songs” at music stores. These publishers eventually established a national network of hundreds of venues in which they employed musicians to perform their minstrel melodies. They also paid top stars of the day to perform bigoted ballads. Publishers even hired “boomers” or audience plants to attend these concerts and get audiences singing along and shouting for encores.
This scheme worked so well that blackface performers became huge stars. Al Jolson, for one, became the most popular entertainer in America. His star began to rise from singing “You Made me Love You” in the 1913 Broadway smash hit The Honeymoon Express. Here’s a photo from the show, so you get the vibe.
Another way this music market was manufactured was through charts. Again, even though it was still in sheet-form at the time, Billboard started charting music in 1913. Can you guess the very first song to ever top the Billboard charts?
That’s right, it’s “You Made me Love You”! A quick glance at the rest of the titles will tell you that Jolson’s blackface ballad wasn’t alone on that list.
Billboard didn’t bother to acknowledge the existence of actual Black music until 1942—and even then, it was with the entirely segregated category of the “Harlem Hit Parade”. Of course, Black music was getting made and when technology permitted, recorded. And yes, it was segregated into the “Race Records” category. And yes, that music was stolen, too.
“Railroad Bill” , for instance, is a Black song from the 1800s about a Black train robber. Many years later, a white woman named Roba Stanley—said to be the first woman to record country music—not only claimed to have written the song, but also copyrighted it.
This kind of thing happened all the time. In fact, white people were so ravenous to plagiarize and copyright Black music that they’d steal some songs more than once. This musical theft went in many directions. A Black musician you’ve probably never heard of named Charles Anderson was known for his yodeling style of singing. In 1923 he recorded the song “Sleep, Baby, Sleep”. Four years later, a white man named Jimmie Rodgers recorded the same song and became known as America’s Blue Yodeler. And then The Father of Country Music.
It goes deeper. In the 1940s, Merle Travis became famous for a particular fingerstyle of guitar playing. This fingerstyle had been common among Black players across the country since well before Travis had ever picked up a guitar. Even so, this method of guitar playing became known as “Travis picking”.
There really is no end to depth of this theft. Even if a Black person could achieve the impossible by being such an undeniably great musician, stage performer, songwriter, businessperson and possessor of luck as to break through all of these barriers, they would likely just become a bigger target.
Chuck Berry, hailed as the Creator of Rock and Roll (He wasn’t. It was Sister Rosetta Tharpe) was one of the biggest stars in the world during the 1950s. And he was stolen from in so many ways, from so many people, it feels ridiculous to list them.
Famously, battles with The Beach Boys and The Beatles ended with Berry’s success in copyright claims and court rulings. If that wasn’t enough, at one point, Berry discovered two people were listed as cowriters of “Maybellene”—a song he’d written by himself. Even stranger, the two people were a DJ and his record label’s landlord.
From Elvis to Bob Dylan to Led Zeppelin and Post Malone to Machine Gun Kelly to Jack Harlow, the music industry is designed to create and reward plagiarists and wannabes. And now, with AI’s scraping methods bound for even more diminishing returns, the future of music looks especially bleak.
So, if the problem is that the entire music industry was designed from the beginning to deliberately and explicitly exploit Black people and now, with the help of AI, all participating performers are in danger of being exploited, then the solution is simple: Musicians must come together, design a community free of these restrictions and create a new market centering around live, in-person performance.
This sounds difficult—and it is—but most musicians build our careers in almost this exact way. We meet other bands, trade shows, build and expand our networks, build relationships with venues, build indie labels, etc. Build, build, build. Just don’t forget to keep a check on that white supremacy…
But, if the only problem is that AI is now targeting white musicians in the way the entire industry was designed to target Black musicians, I recently heard about a class at Berklee I think you’ll really love.
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To find more banned histories of music in America, go here and here and here and here and here.
Now, please enjoy a performance from the Creator of Rock and Roll.
https://gizmodo.com/berklee-college-of-music-offers-ai-course-students-are-pissed-2000746946
https://www.guitarplayer.com/players/five-times-famous-musicians-stole-from-chuck-berry
I appreciate the historical perspective on theft of Black culture. Capitalism seems to be the engine of forcing white supremacy products on people.