Deep thoughts on shallow music - Acento en la O

I'm not one to judge AI music creators, I think it has its merits. Hiding the fact that your music is created with AI is, for me, a completely different topic.

I don't know about you, but lately finding good music that really changes things for me has been increasingly difficult. I now tend to go directly to music from my teenage years or I simply let the "For you" algorithm go nuts, which almost always ends up playing music from my teenage years. Some new bangers here and there—mostly from the same bands—but I'm usually listening to the same thing every day. It doesn't help that these days I honestly don't have the time and energy to spent looking for new music. Then again, where do you even start? You have to go to a different algorithm hoping that it shakes things up and throws you something new to your liking...

Out of nowhere, I found them

It was a weekend, and music had been playing for 5+ hours, which I think is why it started showing really different from the usual. Then I heard them. It was a really unusual play style—japanese glitch hardcore in spanish—with a female vocalist that could sing and do the screaming parts and, also, the songs had really interesting lyrics. Think of Flyleaf with faster rhythm, way more dynamic and hardcore guitar playing with really dirty distortion. I smiled, feeling like I struck gold, added the song to my watch later playlist and went about my life.

The next week I started chatting with Alan, a friend from work, with whom I exchange music everytime we talk. Of note, his style is really out there. He's a polyglot who's also always looking into indie music of the languages he learns, so one day he can throw russian ballads and portuguese pop punk the next one... Anyways, I mentioned to him that I've found an interesting band and when I went to look for the song in my playlist so I could share it with him I noticed it was there but couldn't be played anymore because the owner had removed it. Of course, I went ahead and looked for the band in Google and found their Bandcamp. They are called "todos mueren en abril", which is spanish for "everybody dies in april". I shared the profile with him and gave him a few minutes to listen to them.

He replied: "Dude, you've found my new favorite band".

Never meet your idols

Turns out they're from Mexico, too, so I started listening to the whole record and every song I heard was better than the one before. This band was growing on me at an incredible speed. I needed to know who was behind it, maybe I could even go see them live someday.

Then I saw it, the footnote of the album:

"This is the end. There's nothing more beyond these three albums. And there will never be.
Thanks for listening."

It was signed by the band, but included a couple of user handles. My first thought was looking the band in Instagram. I found a profile with no posts, other than the album artwork with no captions or details. So I looked for the couple of user handles. One was private, the other, luckily, wasn't. From the looks of it, it was a music producer, but I couldn't find much more than that from his posts. Stories it is.

Well, the multiple stories where long paragraphs telling a story... The summary is basically this:

Everything was created just for exploration, an art project, if you will. They weren't expecting the project to blow up, so they decided to keep everything about it a secret, to give the band a certain enigmatic aura.
The music for the 30 songs was written in a DAW and enhanced/modified with AI to fit the style, but the track files were lost in an old computer that got reformatted. So, basically, trust me bro.
The band has AI-generated vocals because they couldn't find a vocalist that matched the style they wanted—singing tone and screaming capacity. Lyrics are not AI-generated, they said.
They understood that not disclosing the use of AI in the band was bad, but, again, they didn't expect it to blow up. It was never meant to be a real band.
Now that it blew up, and only because people wanted it, they were going to form a real band and perform live.

20 minutes... And all day

All of than happened in a span of 20 to 30 minutes, while I chatted with Alan about our findings. We found the best band ever, then found out it was dead, then found out it was never real to begin with. But NOW it was real. I honestly don't know how I feel about the last part...

The feelings that journey triggered on me cannot be overstated. I cannot, for the life of me, tell you how invested I got in the whole affair. I don't think it was that much about the band in the end... I think I was honestly disappointed in myself. I'd been fooled by AI.

I will clear my stance on AI before it becomes an issue: I don't feel AI is inherently bad. I don't think I'm an AI hater. I know some parts of it have merit and can be genuinely useful. I also know it's not the general solution to all of humanity's issues as AI companies want us to believe.

The secondary effect of finding that band had on me was an internal processing of how I feel about AI created / assisted music. I honestly had never thought about it. I thought it would be a while before I found myself in the situation I was in.

Anyway, here it is...

My conclusion

They next day Alan pinged me in the chat. He wanted to talk about the band because the situation was interesting. Alan also spend the rest of the day thinking about it. That comforted me. It made me feel less crazy about this whole pointless situation.

What I came out with after all was these simple rules.

I honestly don't really care much about music created completely by AI:
The likes of the Jellectronica project that Google showed while people waited for I/O 2026 to start... It's okay, I guess. I don't think many musicians would say this puts at risk their careers. But...
AI creation or assistance in music should be disclosed:
If any part of your song was modified, enhanced or totally produced by AI, you should be upfront about it. Using AI doesn't really changes your creative process behind the music you're working on and not all AI assistance will have the same quality by all users, that by itself requires a skill. However, I feel that hiding or denying AI use can be perceived as malicious intent... You're being dishonest or intentionally misleading. At least until AI usage in music becomes the norm and you cannot do music without it anymore.
I can't decide if music without AI assistance will be considered higher quality:
My general feeling is that while some musicians and purists will of course consider the untouched or unassisted music more deserving of creative designation, the general public will probably not notice it or even care. Again, that's until AI becomes normalized. Maybe then we would come up with some kind of "artisan produced" music, where all modern digital means are avoided. Who knows?

In the end, everything is evolving all the time. DAWs were seen as negative not so long ago, but now have democratized the music creation and production process. Maybe AI will do the same for the masses. And that's not necessarily bad.

Maybe all it means is that there's going to be more shitty music in the world.

But you'll also be able to find incredible new artists and bands with higher standards and better body of works... With or without AI.