By Todd Russell
Was tempted to lead this article with a placeholder image AI generated, but that seemed like too much, so instead a picture of me with a gigantic pen at my desk, taken 20+ years ago instead. Ah yes, there is a point, stay with me.
With AI generation training for music currently being sued — and I’m swimming in these waters, so if the shark bites, my creative work using AI gen could be impacted (see: PGM Experiment: Suno AI Music Generator to Create Arcade, Videogame and Pinball Songs), the following opinion piece is even more relevant.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had any right to tell people they couldn’t listen to a piece of music I made. But the important thing is not whether or not people download your music. They do, and you can’t stop them, no matter how much you might want to. You can either get really angry and upset about it, demand that they behave differently and insist that people pay you for the work that you did. Or, you can accept the world as it is, realise that you can’t change everyone’s behaviour, and instead look for other ways to make money from the recordings you have made.” – But if they steal it – how can I make money? – New Music Strategies
I’m getting Napster deja vus. Here it is 2025, and that was 25 years ago, but some topics never die. Creative people want to be paid for their work. Yes, absolutely we do. We can and sometimes work very hard creating things we hope others will enjoy.
But money isn’t the primary motivation in every circumstance. That might seem like a false statement and difficult to prove but therein exists a cosmic truth that runs beyond any sort of personal benevolence.
Examples? Right here and now. I’ve written and had published over 500,000 words at this very website and not one word has made any direct money. Not a penny.
The going rate, at least at one time for professional article work was 1-2 cents per word. I don’t know what it is currently (probably significantly more) and didn’t care to research it for this piece, but if we use the lower penny per word then simple math says the work I’ve done here to date should have netted me $5,005.82 USD.
Heck, that’s almost enough to buy a NIB Stern pro pinball machine 😉 You bet I would have liked to have that money, and if I was writing for some other publication, I would likely have expected to be paid something for all my very much human writing work.
But this is also my publication. The publication itself is a creative work and all different types of publications can and do exist in the world. Some can be about greater things in the world than money. Yes, there are greater things in the world than money.
So, an important distinction is while I might like to be paid, here I haven’t yet asked to be paid. Since I haven’t asked, how on earth can I feel like I’m being ripped off if others share my writing?
Now, on the contrary, and this deals with the music topic, I am asking to be paid for most of the work I’m doing with my AI band AI Kills. Tangentially, through our PlayGamesMoredotcom Twitch feed as affiliates, we can accept bits and subscriptions and thankfully some folks are subscribing and/or throwing in bits here and there. This publication remains ad-free, affiliate link free, completely free to readers.
So why am I doing all this writing here at PGM for free? That’s what some people might wonder and there are times I ponder that question, too, yes, but am always reminded of something about a creative work — any creative work — that is most important:
Finding, connecting and sharing with others that care about that creative work.
Put another way, if you create the most awesome thing in the world, but few people see, share or enjoy it, then your art is stuck in a vacuum. That is a dark, lonely and cold place. An unforgiving creative hell. Abandonment. Isolation.
There are a ton of commercial news and blog sites out there. Most are dying with the ad model because they’ve abused the reader to the point of absurdity. They’ve gone to war with the readers, punishing the people that feed and water the creative publication chain. This has turned readers to tools to get around paywalls and find content that they don’t have to pay for or, gasp, “pirate” it. Commercialism has become weaponization against the people that financially help and support its existence.
People do still very much pay for blogs and articles. There is a commercial avenue for publications like PGM that we could — and maybe should — take, but it’s not one at least as of this writing I’m interested in exploring. Someday that could and might very well change. I figure what we’re doing here, what’s being created I want to share with the world at large without money being the motivation. Maybe that won’t always be the case, maybe it can’t be at some point, because I’m not Elon Musk, with seemingly endless streams of finances, but for the time being, it is exactly what I’m claiming it to be: free for readers. I want it this way right now.
Free to share, free to talk about. Not free to steal, however.
Wait, what do I mean? Steal? How can one steal a free publication. Ah, that’s simple, take what’s here, and put it up somewhere else claiming to be created by someone else with no byline, no credit. Claiming it was created by somebody else and then putting ads against it or behind a paid wall. That is stealing to me. There is a more fancy word and it’s called plagiarism.
Please don’t steal from me that way.
Please do share these articles. Every word, every article is yours to share with others, there are even handy share links below. All I ask in return is please don’t republish them elsewhere and claim you or somebody else wrote them. Don’t put them somewhere and charge $$$ for them when/while the original author intends for them to be free.
If you read my article linked at the very top of this article, I discussed why I don’t think what Suno and Udio admitted to doing was stealing, nor is it my opinion that training AI on commercial, copyrighted music to be influenced by a particular style should be illegal. The courts have not ruled on this … yet, but they will.
If the courts rule that they couldn’t do this and it’s infringed artists, I will almost certainly be required to take down the AI music I’m currently spending time creating. And yes, I’m creating it, not just some mindless machine 100% cranking out music. I’m writing most of the lyrics these days for AI Kills instead of just letting the AI gen do it. It’s allowing me to explore telling creative stories or poetry pieces in a different way than I’ve previously done. That’s an exciting creative thing to me and I’m having a great time doing it.
Again, I’m doing that project, AI Kills, with commercial intent. I’m not hiding that it involves AI generation material. I’m taking heat for it, because some people absolutely despise AI generation. They lump all of it in as fake and easy to do and not creative. The odd part is I actually agree that some of it is nonsense and not creative at all. If someone is just randomly generated AI music with no human input whatsoever, then whatever is being cranked out, however good it might sound is not human creation. This is AI slop some (many?) are railing against and it will pollute and poison what some of us human beings are trying to do in the space: create something cool and interesting using some amount of AI generation. There is a huge difference here that hopefully is apparent.
If a music artist writes a song, but puts it to a drum track, does that make his song suddenly invalid? What if s/he uses pro tools to artificially adjust the pitch of their voice(s)? What about layering additional voices that aren’t yours or adding machine-made tracks to the mix? When does that song become no longer a human creation? What about bands that simply lip sync live performances to tracks and not playing their instruments? If you think I’m making any of this up, do some research beyond this piece, because everything I’ve just described is happening right now in the music world.
Let’s reel this back to the headline.
So, if AI Kills MP3 are traded and shared among interested listeners I might “lose” sales, but having listeners, having people interested in the music is more important to me than being paid for every single digital file. Share AI Kills music with your friends. Tell them to go stream it wherever they like to listen to music. If you’re a streamer, feel free to put AI Kills music on in your background. If you stream/listen to AI Kills music enough, I will get paid — eventually somehow.
My only ask is that folks don’t republish AI Kills music and claim you or somebody else created it and/or try to earn money somehow from it — either through ads or putting it behind a subscription or paywall. I think this is a very fair artist perspective. If only all artists would be this way, we might not be having the enemy be the listeners. Just like with writing the enemy being the reader … that’s not a good way to focus on the problem.
Artists can be paid in other ways than monetary. Attention is a very, very powerful thing. People giving it to you, giving you their finite, valuable and diminishing resource of time in life is worth more than any amount of money. I’m grateful that for some of what I’m doing — thank you readers, thank you those that visit and listen to streams at PGM — I’m thankful there are some people in the world that are interested and give their time. For that I’m eternally grateful and it keeps me creating.
Thank you so much for reading. And if you share it with somebody else, a friend, family member, heck a stranger — thank you for that as well.