Government shutdown fallout, price floors, and AI slop against the machine

And I'm Adrienne Ma.

What do you smell in there? Pumpkin spice.

Indicators of the week.

China and a strange trend infiltrating the music business. After the break, Indicators of the week. Darian, you're up.

And as far as where the money is going, what kinds of projects are we talking about here that are getting their funding cut?

I mean, that seems like a plausible explanation if President Trump had not just kind of given up the whole rationale already. Yeah, there's a difference.

Yes.

Price controls, price ceilings, price floors. So when government officials start throwing around these terms, that kind of gets our economic spidey senses going.

So what would price floor on rare earths actually look like?

Well, it looks like the government has opened up another potential front in the trade war with China. I mean, I guess you could say that there's no ceiling to how much this can escalate.

Who doesn't love a pun? I know this. Actually, my indicator of the week involves a pun, too, which we'll get to.

My indicator is actually inspired by a good friend of mine who is always recommending new music to me. And this week, he said, you gotta check out this artist called the Professor, Nick Harrison. He does these really awesome cover songs. And, for example, there is this Rage against the Machine song. Okay, so this is the original. It's called Bulls on Parade, this really hard, gritty rock song.

And here is the Professor, Nick Harrison's version.

Yeah.

Yes.

I don't wanna like this. I want to hate it, but I kind of enjoyed it. This vibe is, like, right up my alley. This sort of, like, soul gospel thing. And it turns out the professor recently released an entire album of covers called Artificial Soul. You can find it on Spotify and Apple Music. And the name Artificial Soul is actually a pun on the word artificial, because it turns out all the songs are made using A.I.

It's the present.

Whoa.

My friend was so bummed out to hear this, he didn't realize that this was, like, a whole AI Generated album. And, you know, the thing is that AI Music is actually flooding streaming services right now. So, like, who could be blamed? So a couple of interesting indicators that show the scope of this. There's a French music streaming service called Deezer, which recently estimated that over 30,000 fully AI generated tracks are uploaded to its site every day. Wow. And then Spotify says that the flood of AI Slop is a big reason why it removed a lot of what it calls spam tracks from its platform last year. About 75 million of them.

This is not just a issue for music platforms, of course. It's also an issue for musicians. And while some musicians will undoubtedly find AI Useful, there is an interesting study from a nonprofit that represents artists, where they estimate that AI will result in musicians seeing a 24% decline in their revenue over just the next few years.

Still goes.

I mean, the irony of that being the name of the ban that's being covered by AI.

This episode was produced by Angel Carreras and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. It was fact checked by Corey Bridges. Cake and Cannon is our editor and the indicator to production of npr.