Star Wars Lofi Blasts The Holiday Mood
The AT-AT of AI IP is on the march.
Music has always been part of the Star Wars IP galaxy — from John William’s timeless original score to the best-forgotten 1980 Christmas in the Stars album. Somewhere in the middle is the newly released Snowy Starkiller Base, an hour-long lofi video featuring a group of First Order Snowtroopers sitting around a fire in the woods adjacent to the planet-size weapon system’s main superlaser array.
And while these sort of Wookiepedia specifics don’t matter unless you’re the parent of a five-year-old who is demanding four-figures worth of Star Wars Legos this Hanukka, one seemingly relevant detail is absent from this holiday release — a music credit.
Of course, YouTube is full of copyright-free chill beats to study or relax to. The phenomenon has been covered extensively since it first landed half a decade ago. In the subsequent five years, playlist operators like Fruits Music have racked up billions of plays on copyright-free lofi beats and rain noises that outstream Lady Gaga.
Needless to say, quote-un-quote real musicians are unhappy with this situation, but things are only moving further in this direction. Last month, Fruit’s founder and CEO Stef van Vugt published an op-ed about the company’s plans to use AI-generated music to “dethrone” the decades-old major label model and “grow into one of the largest music companies ever created.”
Back to Star Wars Lofi, one has to wonder whether the music in the clip was created by humans at all. In just a few minutes spent on Japanese AI music generator app SOUNDRAW, I was able to summon a soundscape not unlike the one heard on Snowy Starkiller Base. One must assume that the intellectual property Jedis at Disney have something far more sophisticated in their arsenal to create good-enough music with a few clicks.
As of this writing, Snowy Starkiller Base has amassed a mere 125k streams on YouTube, which wouldn’t earn enough Earth dollars to fund five seconds of Andor. But making money in the streaming economy is a game of gathering snowflakes. Trillions of micro-payments that can turn into an avalanche of cash. The competitive edge could just mean building the most cost-effective shovel.
MEMEAWAYS
