Neeley (16:33): “I hate small-minded people with money who use technology as a cudgel to enforce their terrible taste on the rest of us.”
Neely's page:
Berklee College of Music now teaches classes in AI songwriting, and that's a really dumb idea.
0:00 Intro
0:43 Student Backlash
2:53 Berklee President’s ties to Suno
4:01 “book burning”
5:42 Problem 1 - Branding
8:17 Problem 2 - Berklee is out of touch
11:03 Problem 3 - “AI Music” and Suno
14:11 Problem 4 - People really don’t like AI music
CEO of Suno, Michael Shulman (c. 5:35):
MIKEY: It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.
ADAM: Berklee had better hope that that's not true because its business model - as well as any music school’s - is based on the idea that people like to make music.
In fact, they like it so much that they're willing to spend a lot of money to learn how to do it better.
Suno was created so that people could make music without having to learn to play instruments, to sing, or how to arrange and compose. It was created to circumvent the human process of music-making. This makes use of Suno idolatrous in the technical sense of that word.
On Problem 2, Berklee being out of touch, Neeley points out that Berklee has courses offering to teach students how to use the Metaverse, which Zuckerberg killed in March, 2026.
"MIKEY: It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time." It takes a lot of practice.' One of the few 'virtues' I have is patience and that's a learned from practice. Mikey the antichrist of art.
ReplyDeleteI remember how I resisted practicing the trumpet in the first two years or so. But Dave Dysert set me straight. Yes, practice is often boring. But it's necessary. Actually making music gives you a kind of pleasure you can't get from listening, even from listening to the the best. Good old Mikey there comes from a world of passive listeners, of people conditioned to be consumers.
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