Local Music vs. The Machine
Generative AI isn't the Grim Reaper for local music outside major hubs, but it's playing an effective role-as-omen: The Coroner.
A twenty-nine-year-old has been making dubstep in the same mid-sized city since he was nineteen. He has 1,400 monthly listeners, a SoundCloud with eleven years of uploads, and a Discord where forty of the same people have encouraged each other since 2016. He often buys his slot at the venue: twenty tickets fronted, sold to the same friends, the unsold ones eaten out of pocket. Sometimes, he runs sound for free at the next guy’s show because that’s how it works. Showing up (social currency) is the new currency, and the scene is a thing you build by simply being in the room. He’s opened for three medium-sized acts that later got slightly bigger and did not bring him with them. He’s done direct support for almost every big artist in his genre who’s passed through his town, and these artists have not brought him along on tour either. He has a folder of unreleased tracks he is saving for when the moment comes. Most of these tracks never get released; most social media response to the ones he does release never crest a few dozen engagements and a couple thousand impressions. Everyone who knows him agrees he is talented, which he is, and he is always about to blow up. Ten years of about-to. This promoter, like the last three, will quietly go bankrupt one year from now and move on to something else. The venue recorded a bar tab, lower than it has been in the past few years. The platforms he distributes on — either by himself through TuneCore or DistroKid, or through a digital-only proxy “label” which does the same or through a distribution network like The Orchard — recorded a stream count below the threshold at which a stream pays anything whatsoever. Like the veteran we highlighted in The Dreamer Economy, our producer recorded a decade against an asset that does not exist. Every party to the arrangement behaved rationally and the aggregate result is that a talented adult spent his twenties subsidizing a local economy that was selling him the potential for a thing it could never deliver. However, unlike the Dreamer Economy, this isn’t theft. It’s death.
This person was never lied to. Nobody promised him he would make it (probably). The promise was structural and unspoken and therefore unprosecutable: built on falsifiable claims that presence converts to opportunity, the room itself (anywhere) is a ladder, and that the people who show up are the people who eventually get pulled up. This is the load-bearing hyperfiction of every local scene, and the reason it’s fiction is that the relationship between showing up and winning is a tournament (it follows power-scaling laws). The scene cannot make him and it cannot make artists anymore; it can only host the contest in which, statistically, he loses. And like every tournament dressed as a community, it needs a steady supply of entrants who believe in it, or the whole thing collapses.
So watch what happens when he encounters the thing he hates. He hates Suno with a heat that surprises even him. It wasn’t like this 6 years ago despite the practices of musicians + AI researchers being roughly the same (train models, personal use is free game, LAION datasets FTW). He posts about AI slop, about theft, about real artists, about ten thousand hours never put in to becoming LeBron James level at his craft because joining the discourse is easier. He frames it, as everyone in his tier frames it, as a generational crime: the machine ate our work and is selling it back to us and if it weren’t for the machine I would have blown up by now. Here lies the fact that the framing can’t survive: this machine actually didn’t eat his work. He is below the line. The training sets that the lawsuits fight over are major-label catalogs and indie artists with registered copyrights and streaming footprints worth scraping. A man with 1,400 monthly listeners and eleven years of SoundCloud plates was never in the corpus. There is nothing of his to steal, because at his scale, to the machine, he does not exist. He might show up in a LAION set if he’s lucky, but there’s no proof that generators like Suno train on all rows of the set (and likely go through a dataset filtering process to produce better results with less compute/time dedication). His grievance is real and his account of it is wrong, and the problem diagnostics are wrong, and the gap between the two is the whole story. Sometimes people spend their entire lives in this gap. Those people, the 40+ year old “local DJs”, genuinely scare the hell out of me and a just society would produce some sort of coordinated re-education for them that starts with someone loudly yelling at them that it’s never going to happen.
The local scene is not a community in the sentimental sense. It’s a recruitment pyramid which is reasonable for people in their mid-20s, especially if locked out of elite spaces for socialization like universities and large college campuses, and the product is the dream that participation pays. Take a look at any local music scene and you will find people generally on the bottom half of society’s bell curve and not the top half. If people come from the top half, they’re usually downwardly mobile upper-middle classmen who are there to provide economic resources to others — the guy who owns a house somehow which we can blast amplifiers in, the dude who owns CDJs because his parents bought them for him. The economics only close if there is a constant inflow of believers at the very bottom — the eighteen-year-olds who just got a cracked copy of Ableton, who will buy the ticket block, fill the room, run the sound (if it’s not being run by an older member with a completely ruined life), share the flyer, and prop up the slightly-more-established acts one tier above them on the explicit understanding that this is how you climb. The guy who has been at it ten years is not at the bottom of the pyramid anymore. He is middle management. He’s probably starting a collective which recruits people some years his former. This collective will never produce any works worth writing about. His audience is not fans; it is an 80/20 ground beef mix of recruits and friends who kinda sometimes feel bad that it’s gone on this long. What he gets from them is not money, which barely ever moves, but the thing that keeps the whole apparatus from being visibly absurd: other people, in the room, treating the climb as real. The myth is false, but the myth making is always true.
Now you can see what companies like Suno actually threaten, and it is not his masters. It is his downline. Suno is an off-ramp for the eighteen-year-old. The person who is just behind becoming a starter producer who, last year, would have paid his dues — bought the ticket, filled the room, believed the ladder — can now type a prompt and get back something competent enough to satisfy the itch that drove him to the basement in the first place, often posting nonsensical music We Are Charlie Kirk to social media for several orders of magnitude more impressions than another Splice-sample saturated dubstep or hyperpop or electro-house song. The itch was never be canonized as an author. The itch was make a thing that sounds like the thing I love and have someone hear it, or even make enough from creating that it allows me to work a traditional job less or not at all and the machine satisfies that itch in nine seconds for far less money. So the recruit doesn’t show up anymore. The recruit now makes Tung Tung Tung Sahur brainrot videos for Instagram and has 30 million impressions a month. And the man who has been running the scene’s middle tier for a decade never loses a song to the machine. He loses the unpaid labor force and the audience-of-peers whose belief was the only thing converting his door deals into a narrative of ascent. His rage is not the rage of a robbed artist. It is the rage of a franchise operator watching the recruits stop walking in the door. This is completely understandable, totally rational. It’s just aimed at a horizontal or lateral target, because the right target — the recruitment model itself — is the thing he has organized his identity around defending. He’s The Guy. Support Local Music. Without this there may not be anything that sets him apart from anyone, and this is the crisis of being that many people are going through and the root reason why GenAI or not — it likely wouldn’t have happened for them.
The standard defense of the scene is that it produces culture, that it is the R&D lab of music, that Seattle and Athens and Memphis came out of exactly these rooms, that you can’t have the breakout without the ecosystem that feeds it. This used to be true. Howard Becker was right that art is collective action and never the solitary genius; Will Straw was right that the scene, not the lone author, is the real unit. The basement really was the lab. But holy shit, everything is different now. Things were even totally different in 2020. Back then, today’s Anti-AI artists were collaborating with people who literally invented the methods used to generate long-form music from text prompts. The comments read like something from an alternate dimension: almost all of them are hopeful and positive.
Our defense of local scenes against the onslaught of Suno describes a machine that was already breaking before the machine he hates ever shipped. The thing that broke it wasn’t Suno, or any model for that matter.
It was, like most things, damaged beyond repair by a global virus.
2020 is the turning point. That’s where the corpse actually died two years before Suno was anything. When the venues closed, the United States spent $16.25 billion through the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant to keep the buildings standing, and it worked: the real estate survived. The bailout saved buildings, not circuit logic. The connective tissue — the secondary and tertiary markets, the regional touring lattice that let a local act ladder up town by town — thinned to a few metropolitan nodes and never grew back. In the UK, where no comparable rescue existed, the Music Venue Trust watched grassroots rooms close at two a week and the average tour collapse from twenty-two dates across twenty-eight towns in the nineties to eleven dates across twelve cities, all of them major. The ladder lost more than just a few rungs, it basically lost the entire middle of the country.
And in the same window, the actual breakouts arrived from nowhere geographic at all. Hyperpop came out of bedrooms in suburban St. Louis and a town south of Asheville, and its church was Discord. Phonk repackaged thirty-year-old Memphis tapes into a genre with no physical scene, no venue, no door deal, distributed entirely by recommendation algorithms and a fifteen-second clip. I know an 18 year old who secured a $12 million a year deal from UMG for ambient music and speed house, located far outside the United States with a fanbase spreading across 150+ different countries. The discovery function that the local club used to perform — the room where a scene decided who was real — migrated to a playlist and a feed and middle-Americans thrash and complain and refuse to adapt to having to compete with the Literal Rest of the Globe Now. Especially post-pandemic, culture entirely decoupled from geography and it did so on its own, years before generative longform audio, while the man in the basement was still saving his folder of tracks for the moment. The scene died because the function it performed left the building and moved onto the network, where its information could be transmitted faster and for cheaper, and the building stayed open out of inertia and grant money and the sunk costs of the people inside it until it would close and become a different type of business which doesn’t bend to network as easily (this is also why a lot of club venues tried to pivot to serving food, which somehow is less risky than just operating a bar that hosts music).
For fifteen years, every serious account of where culture went has described the same thing: the dissolution of the individual author into networked, collective, contextless production. Barthes killed the author in theory; the internet revived him as a brand and then dissolved the brand into the feed. Do Not Research theorized it; the dark-forest writers mapped culture’s retreat into private Discords and group chats where the real work now happens off the indexed web; controversial of an example as it is — Remilia/Milady and the post-authorship crowd turned anonymous collective posting into an explicit doctrine where the author is just a vessel and the egregore is the artist. Spotify filled its own playlists with ghost artists nobody authored, and an AI band reached over a million monthly listeners before anyone noticed there was no band, and an AI rapper collaborated with RXKNephew as the human feature, and the numbers only fell on the former when the press told people they should be embarrassed. The demand side was already post-author. Listeners wanted the vibe, not the name. They had wanted the vibe and not the name for years. Suno automated the supply side of a market that had gone post-author while the man in the basement was still printing his name on the flyer and demanding authorship.
I’m not planning on being one-sided about this. The scene still produces real things, real relationships, and a lot of people participate for fun or at least the pretend frame that they’re doing it for fun. Memphis right now is a genuinely local, genuinely physical pipeline throwing off national acts; Miami still supplies a huge and economically satiated amount of Latin music into the world very reliably, the basement still teaches by osmosis; the room is still where a kid learns to read a crowd and decode whether a song is honest or just flat out sucks. The social goods are real and the occasional breakout is real and anyone who tells you the local scene produces literally nothing is being dramatic or fabricating a more fictional story than the world supports. Regardless. The local-physical scene is no longer the primary engine of relevant culture, and propping it up as if it were is not production (and thus does not deserve to exist within the argument of ‘workers rights’) but is a form of cultural preservation. Enjoying the room as a social practice is fine and good and human. Confusing the social practice with a career ladder is a massive mistake with increasing penalty as time goes on, and the scene’s entire economy depends on the participants never drawing the distinction, because the moment they draw it, the ticket blocks stop selling.
Which returns us, finally, to why he hates the machine, and to why the hatred is the most revealing thing about him. He experiences Suno as the assassin of his culture. It’s an omen, and a coroner. The scene as a production engine was already dead when the virus emptied the rooms and the network took the discovery function with it; what remained after 2020 was a social club performing the rituals of an industry that had completely relocated. Suno’s only crime was also operating on the premise of the rules of the past — training commercial models off of gray-area data that would ultimately become a point of contention some years after COVID killed almost all the venues that sucked and a handful of great ones. Now, artists have to compete for the same amount of attention with a new contender (slop) and regardless of what they think about it, kids seem to love the AI-generated shark wearing shoes or the fake overproduced AI-pop music about Epstein Island.
The people sucked into this are talented. That’s where the @grok is this true? morons get it wrong. But that’s kind of what makes it unbearable, and that’s also what makes the scene’s use of it obscene. You can’t run a recruitment pyramid on people with nothing to offer; you need the genuinely good ones to stay visible at the middle tier, almost-making-it, forever, as a proof of concept for the kids beneath them. When you’re young and 18 or 19 you might look up to the 35 year old local DJ veteran as something you want to be and that’s valid. God forbid you become him. The man making dubstep in his hometown for ten years is not a failure of the scene. He’s the scene’s most important asset: the credible near-miss, the one whose almost keeps everyone else’s maybe alive. The machines he hates didn’t take that from him. The machines just told the kids the truth that the room was built to hide — that you do not have to pay a particular toll to make a particular sound — and the kids, who never wanted the toll, only the sound, walked out. That’s not the death of culture. The culture already left. The machine, hungry for electricity and attention, turned off the lights on the people still performing for an audience that had already gone home.