Anonymous and mild sensibilities have currency because today’s music — whether created and curated by humans or machines — is so often used to make people feel nothing instead of something. […] This music is not meant to be listened to directly; it’s used to drown out everything else.

Ian Bogost
The Atlantic

Ian reflects on the small success of Velvet Sundown, a band made by artificial intelligence that was already approaching 1 million streams on Spotify. “This is second-order music listening, in which you experience the idea of listening to music. What better band to provide that service than one that doesn’t even exist?”