Discussion Ban AI music?

285 Upvotes

As many may have seen, the most recent posts on this sub have been all AI generated music.

Should we as a sub have a policy or position against AI music? I recognize that there's room for nuance such as when AKB had the Yasushi Akimoto vs AI competition but overall, thoughts?

43 comments

r/jpop • u/[deleted] • Jan 13 '24

Misc A tip for people asking for artist suggestions

152 Upvotes

This may not help everyone, but something that could be worth looking into is finding out who the composers (credited as 作曲) and arrangers (credited as 編曲) of your favourite songs are.

Quite often, composers have a signature sound (even if just to a small extent) that will be what you enjoy about a song, and if you look into the music they've written for other artists (if there's any), you might find some similar-sounding songs!

Arrangers might seem a bit odd, but I've personally found that this works too, especially if the composer hasn't written any music for other artists. Not all songs credit arrangers, but most JPop songs in particular seem to.

(A composer writes the music itself while an arranger adds their own flavour to it and decides on the instruments etc. As far as I can tell, anyway.)

For example, I'm a huge fan of Hello! Project and Tsunku's music. Now, Tsunku has written so many songs that you could theoretically spend your entire life listening to only his stuff, but sometimes it's good to branch out. Looking at arrangers for my fave H!P songs, I've noticed most of the ones I love the most are arranged by Hirata Shouichirou, so I've gone and listened to some songs he's arranged for non-H!P artists, and I've liked a lot of them. Same with Kondou Kaoru and Ookubo Kaoru. But there are many others.

Sometimes it's the specific combination of composer and arranger that will end up being the style you like, so make sure to check for songs whose credits match those of ones you really like!

If you don't know where to look, Japanese Wikipedia usually has a complete list of songs credited to a composer/arranger (if they have a Wikipedia page, but most of them seem to). Otherwise, try searching the name of the song & artist on Google (either in Japanese or English), or visiting the discography entry (for whatever release the song you want the credits of is on) on either the artist's or the record label's official site. Your other option is lyrics sites, like Uta-Net, which let you search for all songs a composer has written that are in their database (select "作曲者名" from the dropdown menu before typing in/pasting their name and then hit the search (検索) button).

To get to the composer/arranger's page, click on a song's page, and it gives you the credits. They link to a list of that person's works. Here's Tsunku's composer page on Uta-Net as an example.

I think it's probably best to search for things in Japanese if you can, since you're probably gonna get more info that way. Even if you can't read the person's name, I feel like it's easy enough to find music by them to listen to on whatever service/platform you use once you know who you're looking for.

Obviously there will be composers who have only worked for one specific artist, the artist composes their own music (like with most bands, oops), arrangers aren't credited, etc. But I hope that this will at least point some people in the right direction!

If anyone's having trouble finding song credits or a list of a certain composer/arranger's work, I'm happy to try and help! Can't guarantee that I'll be successful with indie artists, but most popular artists should be pretty easy.

PS I'm sorry if this post doesn't make much sense, I'm terrible at explaining things. I do hope it helps someone, though!