Can Digital Content Still be Precious?

I’ve released the “remixes” or alternative versions of many of the songs from my first music album on YouTube, called Algos in the Cave. I wrote the lyrics for these songs, and Suno.ai generated the music.

I put “remixes” in scare quotes because in the ongoing digital age, this word doesn’t have the same meaning it used to when bands of musicians were riding high. When grooveboxes or AI platforms like Suno generate millions of songs a day, the market is saturated with content, and the difference between the precious original and some odd variation doesn’t carry the same meaning. There are no precious originals anymore.

I remember buying albums and tapes in the 1980s and 1990s, before CDs, let alone AI content-generators. Remixing an original that existed on vinyl or tape would have been an arduous process, for which you’d need a whole music studio. Computerization put the music studio in your pocket, so now the difference between the original version you’d hear in music videos and the variations found in a re-release has to do merely with the content creator’s taste or whim.

For each version of the songs that found their way on my “main album,” there were a dozen or more variations done in different genres or with slightly different lyrics. So I just picked my favourites and called those the originals, and now I’ve released my second-favourites, or versions that I think are as good as the originals, but that didn’t fit as well with the other songs I chose for that first release.

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But again, the notion of “original” no longer makes sense when the content is digital. To be digital is to be easily copied and altered. Any “original,” “main” work of digital art is a keystroke away from being a “remix.”

Notice that this same undermining of preciousness is similar to our existential condition in which we know we’re made of atoms that are just as technically repeatable as digital ones and zeros, but we still insist on our individual preciousness. We posit immaterial souls to ground our attachment to our imagined identity. Yet when we’re gone, our atoms will have transformed into something else.

Anyway, I invite you to listen to the “remixes.” The second album is almost finished, so stay tuned for that one too.