good morning ~

(click the link / bloomers to listen)

My Big Breaksilence felt like the most elegant option

today’s track is me searching for peace and stability in midi sequencing

really happy to be joining the Matt Evans’ Aquatic House band for his album release show at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn this Friday - - his great new record also on AKP drops the same day, Chris Williams is opening, tickets and I think a live stream are available here

I went out of my way to avoid naming names in today’s writing but if you want a link to the thing just shoot me a message :)

The other day I got an email from somebody. They were excited to have discovered my music on one of those 24/7 livestreams on YouTube. He mentioned the name of a very well known Artificial Intelligence company, this was the their branded playlist - apparently the idea is that this is music you can listen to while you use their Large Language Model product. Lo-fi beats to write prompts to, you get the idea. The thing is, I did not know what he was talking about and I had no idea that this livestream existed. I graciously thanked him for the note and asked him to clarify, what stream was he talking about? He provided me with the link, noting that name and music were appearing on the stream, like, 60% of the time.

Hadn't been able to focus at home all day, needed a change of scene, but then found myself totally distracted by this weird development. I clicked the link and pulled up YouTube on my phone - sure enough, there was an old My Big Break track of mine playing on the stream, accompanied by my name in the corner and a little dancing animated guy in the frame. The stream itself didn't really give any specific info on where it came from or what it was really trying to be. The description below just said "Press play and keep thinking. Made and curated by musicians." Which kind of made it seem like - if my name was in the corner and my music was on the stream that I had somehow participated in or otherwise made realize this thing. Checked the viewer count - 1,000 other people were also currently watching this little guy dance around.

My music has often wound up in strange places over the years. About 12 years ago there was a weird glitch on WFMU's Free Music Archive that made it such that certain of my instrumental tracks always appeared first if you searched for ambient music, so there was a wonderful period of those sounds winding up in people's wedding videos, camera demos, vlogs, etc. It was the final days of Internet 2.0 and we were all really stoked about the distributive, utopian possibilities of a creative commons license. I was thrilled that the music could have its own life, go out into the world on its own accord. The best of all these was most certainly this video where somebody had set a camera in the driver's window of a train as it speeded through the countryside, my music unfurling as the track chugged below. And I've put my music into ads and films over the years - there's like 30 seconds of a Cicada Waves song at the beginning of a really great snowboarding video that Quiksilver made, many years ago something from my first LP got used in a behind-the-scenes video for Prada that I think very few people saw. The unexpected few hundred bucks you can make from something like that has been very, very clutch on occasion. You can make more money letting someone use a portion of your recording than you might playing a whole week of shows.

But of course there is something very different about an Artificial Intelligence company grabbing ahold of my IP. Would you have also assumed the worst? I immediately leapt to the worst possible scenario, that these presumptuous assholes, these out-of-touch techbros who are trying to arbitrate reality with their psychosis-inducing software had simply taken what they wanted and used it to their own end.

(I feel pretty vehemently anti-AI and have so far almost entirely avoided using generative or large language model software - this newsletter project, the music I work on, I prefer to toil on it and make mistakes myself, I don't need any help)

After my name popped up in the top right corner a few more times I noticed that some of the tracks were unreleased, or more specifically they were music that I made in collaboration with a music licensing service and library, work that was absolutely essential in my long list of freelance hustles last year. Which could explain things - perhaps the Artificial Intelligence company had done the right thing and actually paid for use of the music. But when I checked my artist dashboard I didn't see anything listed. So I reached out to my buddy at the company asking what the deal was. I also asked the listener who originally alerted me to the situation to let me know if he came across anything about who made the stream.

The next day there was a hilarious confluence of messages and emails because it turned out that the tracks actually had been licensed through official channels, but the notification software from the music licensing company wasn't working properly. Both my buddy at the licensing company and his boss reached out to me to tell me that they were aware of the livestream and that it was all aboveboard. And in fact I would be getting paid in a couple of months when the next quarterly statement came out. But while they were writing me to clarify, the original listener had published screenshots of our correspondence to a subreddit dedicated to the Artificial Intelligence company. There were like 200+ comments, including direct clarification from the music licensing company themselves. Apparently my old roommate happened to see the thread, too. I resisted the urge to get in there and defend myself, silence felt like the most elegant option.

Part of me wants to ask that my shit be taken down, cut ties with the whole enterprise, such is my distaste for LLMs. But then again, I could really use the payout that's coming my way in July. I've been working various freelance gigs for the last 18 months. I'm exhausted and making money from music remains rare and elusive. Sure, I guess the little guy can keep on dancing. But you know, this is exactly how they win.

But what about you? Are you being aggregated against your knowledge? What is fair compensation for work that you do? Would you rather also die before letting smoke and mirrors write your emails for you?