So far he’s found decent success with his channel Beat Flickers, reeling in around 1 million yen, or close to $7,000, since launching last August. The music is better than the vast heap of AI stock-shlock. The vocals, normally a dead giveaway, have a robotic sheen, but the way they’re buried in the mix sounds realistic. I could imagine passersby with no knowledge of Japanese nor any cultural investment falling for the fake. He’s clearly excited by the possibilities of the tech, slowly toying with other AI genres like chill-hop and ambient. “I think it can get as close as possible, but I don’t think it can surpass the indescribable charm that humans have,” he said. “But we don’t know what the future holds, the possibilities are endless.” Outside of the internet, Sho helps manage and plan house renovation jobs, but he hopes to one day make YouTube music his full-time gig. He dreams of enlisting a real city pop artist to sing on his tracks.
DSPs like Spotify and YouTube haven’t done much to stymie the flow of generative gunk. YouTube gives creators the option to disclose whether their videos use synthetic material, but doesn’t require it outside of things like politically sensitive deepfakes. The company recently announced a “minor update” to more accurately demonetize repetitive uploads, which could help curb the flood of multihour mixes.
I grabbed coffee with another gatekeeper the other day: Jake, a 32-year-old white guy with aviator glasses and a Pikachu t-shirt who created the main Reddit forum for city pop lovers, with close to 75,000 members. He seems cautiously optimistic about AI, thinking it’ll become seamlessly integrated while not fully annihilating something like city pop; the casuals might imbibe dogwater beats on YouTube, but the real connoisseurs will still seek carefully curated music on Reddit. He instituted a “no AI” rule on the forum, which is popular albeit not fully effective. “A lot of contemporary attempts to make city pop fail to capture the spirit of the thing, and get flagged as AI even if they’re really just middling attempts to recreate some of the energy,” he says. “It doesn’t help that a lot of city pop fans, myself included, barely know Japanese, so a lot of the fan-produced music is instrumental and has that kind of Muzak-esque quality that is similar to AI-generated stuff.”
Later that day, I speak with Jaime Lukini, a 52-year-old Peruvian-American living in Porto who says he got flamed on Jake’s Reddit forum for posting his own AI city pop. “People in Reddit are really mean,” he laughs. Out of everyone I talked to, he’s the most excited about AI, revering it as a new instrument: A “complex, unpredictable, flexible assistant. It doesn’t replace creativity. It actually challenges it because the emotion still comes from the human. The AI just expands the canvas.” A longtime musician, he’s been uploading AI city pop to YouTube for less than a year, slowly trying to master the game of prompt-writing. YouTube’s announcement about clamping down on spam has freaked him out. “It’s like going against technology,” he says, baffled. “Everything that we are gonna be making in the future is gonna be with AI: Graphics, videos, fonts. So if we’re gonna demonetize channels because of the use of AI… it doesn’t make any sense to me.” (The update isn’t targeting AI videos en masse, though it should.)
