Agree 100%.
To be honest I’ve never paid much attention to the forums. But having just joined this one to read the consensus on the Discovery news, it’s actually quite disheartening.
There’s a surprisingly large web of disagreements and differences in attitude that I naively thought wouldn’t exist. On top of that there are a huge amount of side gigging composers out there who have something else to do during the day anyway - it just seems near impossible to have real unity when most people don’t depend on this to pay their mortgage. Im sure they have the best intentions, though.
I was so surprised to hear there was no union when I started working in the biz almost 10 years ago and I feel like it’s almost too late for one now as Ive seen the ‘perceived value’ of composers drop year by year and is at an all time low.
It is indeed a sad state of affairs fellow composer!
However if one steps back and looks at this objectively the "music industry" has and always will be an "industry" run by non creative people. As such nothing has changed. Non creative people are only interested in numeric success- they don't give a hoot about artistic merit unless they are firmly reminded that ignoring it is detrimental to their income!
The irony is that both non creative people and us composers alike are goading software development toward AI driven composition. Company executives attitude to the music industry has never changed: they have simply seen a new way to continue there monetary "raison d'être"! Yes! one can call them greedy, money grabbing etc but they have always been this way. It is in fact the digital age itself that was the real catalyst to the likes of Discovery announcing their proposed fiscal intentions at this time.
Composers livelihoods have in fact always been hindered more by technology than corporate greed...
Before Hard Disk took over tape, from the 50s to the early 90s, the sheer cost of analogue machines needed to compose and record music precluded a lot of potentially brilliant composers from earning a living. Composition and production facilities were prohibitively expensive and if you didn't somehow manage to scrape the money together to record to the high fidelity both the A & R or TV/Film executives demanded you simply would't get a look in!
Today everyone can compose, produce and record to a high fidelity standard on digital equipment costing 1000 x less. However the digital composing/recording tools available to all are yet again blocking the composers path. The irony is these software driven tools that we all now use on our laptops are fast taking over the composers roll in his own studio to the point where it almost auto-writes music!... I vouch that in even as soon as a decades time, at least at the lower end of the industry, a lot of composers will have become monitors of AI written music where their roll to creating a composition will simply be a sequence of mouse clicks on the ubiquitous "randomiser" tab on any given VST. Digital algorithms will inevitably become more sophisticated perhaps to the point where composition can auto-adapt to the visual content! Even the engineers roll may well disappear replaced by adaptive ancillary presets fulfilling all tasks of mixing and blending frequency and sonic enhancement. Of course as we all know any robotic task needs fewer human resources to run which will again diminish a composers roll even further, if by that time one can still regard his or her roll as a "composer"!
Also all this "adaptive" music composition software is fast diluting a lot of the very music we create into generic wash. With such sonic power available to all at the flick of a switch or a key assignment it's not surprising that the likes of Discovery sensed a possible move toward AI driven music. Of course they were forgetting the very fact that without a bespoke composers creativity their programs would no longer have the same impact on sales. Indeed if Discovery are to continue putting out quality programs they will need to continue respecting the vital cog in the production of those programs that a human composer fulfils. The same goes for any other program maker that wants to sustain a healthy income.
Yes! I'm painting a depressing notion here but all the signs are there to indicate that AI could become more destructive if we as composers do not remain vigilant in the use of the abundance of modern digital tools we have at our disposal.
I'm all for unionisation and "fighting against the machine" but the question is what really is "the machine" we are fighting against?...!
Every time we all dip into this very website we are perpetuating the development of the AI machine.