Ear­li­er this month, a North Car­oli­na man was charged with gen­er­at­ing songs using an arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence sys­tem and con­fig­ur­ing bots to stream them auto­mat­i­cal­ly, thus rack­ing up some $10 mil­lion in ille­gal roy­al­ties. Though that amount no doubt star­tles many of us, in this age when legit­i­mate musi­cians pub­licly lament the pit­tance they earn through stream­ing plat­forms, such a case prob­a­bly comes as no sur­prise to Rick Beato. This past June, the promi­nent music YouTu­ber put out a video deal­ing with just that inter­sec­tion of cul­ture and tech­nol­o­gy, with the high­ly click­able title “The Real Rea­son Why Music Is Get­ting Worse.”

Con­sid­er the ques­tion of how we evoke one par­tic­u­lar cul­tur­al era rather than anoth­er. We can use its fash­ions, its slang, or its inte­ri­or dec­o­ra­tion, to name just a few pos­si­bil­i­ties, but noth­ing works as pow­er­ful­ly or imme­di­ate­ly as its music. Most of us grew up in a world where the sound of pop­u­lar songs changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly every decade or so. This hap­pened for many rea­sons, prac­ti­cal­ly all of them down­stream of devel­op­ments in tech­nol­o­gy. Blues­men elec­tri­fy­ing their gui­tars; Frank Sina­tra singing into micro­phones sen­si­tive enough to pick up his nuances; the Bea­t­les cre­at­ing com­plex, often strange minia­ture sound worlds in the stu­dio; rap­pers telling their sto­ries over looped frag­ments of dis­co records: all of it was made pos­si­ble by feats of engi­neer­ing.

Yet, in Beat­o’s view, tech­no­log­i­cal progress has late­ly back­fired on music, and both musi­cians and lis­ten­ers are feel­ing it. The con­ver­gence of com­put­ers and music pro­duc­tion is now com­plete, mak­ing any sound the­o­ret­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble at vir­tu­al­ly no cost. But “the cre­ative depen­dence on tech­nol­o­gy lim­its the abil­i­ty of peo­ple to inno­vate,” and “the over­re­liance on sim­i­lar tools” brings about “a lack of diver­si­ty” and a per­sis­tence of for­mu­la­ic trend-fol­low­ing. The ease of cre­ation has caused “an over­sat­u­ra­tion of music, mak­ing it hard­er to find real­ly excep­tion­al things.” This is tak­en to an extreme by the only-just-begin­ning avalanche of AI-gen­er­at­ed songs (and the storm of law­suits it has drawn).

Of course, if I’d known back when I was grow­ing up in the nine­teen-nineties that all the music I want­ed to lis­ten to would be made instant­ly avail­able at lit­tle or no cost, I’d have regard­ed it as the immi­nent arrival of heav­en on earth. Pre­sum­ably, the prospect would also have excit­ed the ado­les­cent Beato, bag­ging gro­ceries to save up the mon­ey to buy Led Zep­pelin and Pat Methe­ny albums in the sev­en­ties. Today, by con­trast, “music is not as val­ued by young peo­ple. There is no sweat equi­ty put into obtain­ing it, hav­ing it be part of your col­lec­tion, hav­ing it be a part of your iden­ti­ty, of who you are.”

Music, in short, has become both too easy to pro­duce and too easy to con­sume. It would be easy for any­one under 30 to dis­miss Beat­o’s argu­ment as that of a mid­dle-aged man reflex­ive­ly insist­ing that things were bet­ter in his day, when we knew the val­ue of an album. But even the youngest gen­er­a­tion of music-lovers must, at times, feel a cer­tain dis­sat­is­fac­tion amid this end­less abun­dance. To them — and to all of us — Beato says this: “Vote with your atten­tion” by try­ing to lis­ten to music delib­er­ate­ly, with­out dis­trac­tion. Per­son­al­ly, I rec­om­mend lis­ten­ing to not just full albums but com­plete discogra­phies, which at the very least cul­ti­vates a cer­tain dis­cern­ment. And to cross the musi­cal land­scape ahead of us, we’ll need all the dis­cern­ment we can get.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Sur­pris­ing­ly Long His­to­ry of Auto-Tune, the Vocal-Pro­cess­ing Tech­nol­o­gy Music Crit­ics Love to Hate

Nick Cave Answers the Hot­ly Debat­ed Ques­tion: Will Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.