Google plunders music and you're paying for it

Google buys ProducerAI and you’re all sleeping right through it. Look at that press release. “Democratizing musical expression.” They’re strip-mining music the way Shell pumps oil and selling it back to you as freedom. Thirty seconds of musical slop that Lyria 3 spits out, not because Google kindly thought about your attention span, but because the system is simply incompetent. Pattern-matching. An expensive parrot regurgitating other people’s work and pretending it’s called composing.

But it works. Because Google owns the entire pipeline. YouTube where they grab your music. Gemini where they spit it out as product. Artists? They get to comply or disappear. No compensation, no transparency, not a damn about your permission. They call it consent but it’s blackmail with a smile.

And you? You’re going right along with it. Why learn guitar when a prompt does the same thing? Budgets shrink because “AI is cheaper”, so wages drop, but you’re happily typing in your wishes as if you’re creating something. Patience, listening skills, craftsmanship, all of that vanishes because you’ve gotten too lazy to make something instead of ordering it.

Musicians are suing. Unions are negotiating. Google’s laughing their ass off with their army of lawyers. “Mindful of copyright” the press release says. Translation: we’re stealing legally because the law lags behind and we get to set the standard in the meantime. Extraction without permission, wrapped up as innovation. You nod obediently and ask if it’s available in Spanish too.