Oh, no. The British band Silveroller, which I was so enthusiastic about, has lost three of the five members [View all]

Last edited Thu Aug 8, 2024, 10:51 AM - Edit history (1)

who've been together the last few years.

Lead singer Jonnie Hodson and drummer Joe Major are continuing as Silveroller with a new guitarist and bass player - no keyboardist yet. They're hoping to have a keyboardist before gigs scheduled later this year.

I didn't see anything on what guitarist Aaron Keylock, bassist Jake James Cornes, and keyboardist Ross Munro will be doing - whether they're staying together and forming a band, or just going their separate ways.

This was announced several days ago - https://rockposer.com/2024/08/02/silveroller-announce-their-line-up-change-just-push-play-festival-tour-dates-coming-up/ - but I didn't see it right away because I was so focused on political news I didn't check for any news about the band for the last week or so.

I was particularly sorry to hear about the split because although both Jonnie and Aaron have written very good songs on their own, earlier in their careers, the core of their sound, what made them decide to form a band, was cowriting songs that were even better.

It's been a very rough time for any new band to succeed. Silveroller was a slightly different lineup from the first version of the band, called Keylock, which had a change of keyboardists and bassists before changing their name to Silveroller. Keylock had released a couple of singles that got attention and played at a major festival just before Covid shut everything down.

They hadn't wanted to use the name Keylock then, but had to do so (as I understand it) because of pressure from the managers Aaron Keylock had, still, from his solo career earlier. The name change probably made it harder for the band.

And the economy and changes in the industry made it much harder to succeed. Between Covid, Brexit and inflation, lots of the smaller music venues in the UK have closed in recent years. Venues that helped launch the careers of lots of famous bands in the past. There have been organizations lobbying for more government assistance for the venues, arguing that even if superstar concerts and large festivals are still successful, the smaller venues that were an essential part of the pipeline for musicians to reach that level are disappearing.

And generative AI for music is very harmful for real musicians. There are indications that platforms like Spotify are filling up playlists with music at least partially created by AI, music that costs them almost nothing. The major record labels are now suing the two most successful AI music companies - which have admitted they used copyrighted music without permission for training their AI but claim it's "fair use" (it isn't) - but unless the labels can shut them down, we'll continue to see a lot of AI crap generated by no-talent wannabes, who don't want to bother acquiring skills, flooding the streaming platforms.

So it's been sort of a perfect storm for musicians to have to deal with.

I wish all these young musicians In Silveroller the best. They're incredibly talented. They deserved much more success than they've had so far.

Here at DU, most of the music we see posted is classic rock, from an era when it was easier for musicians to succeed. We will always have that music - at least as long as we own physical or digital copies of it and can play them. (Not sure we can continue to trust Spotify and similar platforms to continue making most of real music available if AI means more money and control for them.)

And I'm sure we will always have talented young musicians trying to succeed. But the odds against them are worse these days.

And they'll keep worsening if we don't reject AI music for the theft-based abomination it is. I've been seeing more and more about AI music - including soundalike covers of classic hits by what are apparently AI artists, nonexistent musicians with no discoverable history - popping up on streaming services. They're selling content, not art, trying to create something that costs them next to nothing and is just good enough that people won't stop listening immediately. Those creating and peddling AI music are betting that listeners/consumers don't really care if it's real music from real musicians with real lives and real struggles, just as long as it sounds kind of familiar. They don't give a damn about real musicians, and don't see listeners as anything but consumers to be manipulated as much as possible.

I don't know if the threat posed by AI music played any direct role in the five guys in Silveroller splitting up. But they have to have been aware of it, even if the harm done by AI to musicians isn't as obvious already as the harm done to artists and writers. The head of one of the most popular AI music companies said months ago that their goal was to put Spotify out of business - to have people stop listening to real music, giving that up in favor of playing with generative AI, using AI to pretend they're creative by giving the AI a few words as a prompt so it will churn out fake music in seconds, thanks to those companies having stolen all the copyrighted music they could steal. The AI companies' sales pitch is that they make everyone creative.

Which is BS.

Resist AI.

Especially if you care at all about real artists having any real chance of success in the future.