While AI dominated the scene on my blog, certain boilerplate topics of RPA, Business Processes, and Customer Journeys still did well for people. Below are the topics of greatest interest to my followers, along with the countries where curiosity is most intense (beyond the US & China).
Topics of High Interest
As a creative, I enjoy writing songs and creating art. As a music producer, songwriter, and vocalist, I found myself with a catalog of songs our team created with an audience of friends, family, and business associates. Well, this is fine, but I wanted to reach out and promote the stories in my songs as I start with the story and lyrics. My team and I then craft music to match and/or alter the lyrics. While streaming helps a bit, you have to actively market your songs because every day, thousands of songs are created by folks today, and tomorrow, AI will add to the mix. So, how can I encourage my audience to grow? Well, AI now plays a role.
AI to the Rescue
My co-producer and genius partner, Ethan Foxx was using AI videos to promote his songs. So Ethan taught me how to create AI videos synchronized with the songs we both produced. I went on my own after a couple of collaborative videos Ethan and I created. I learned how to script for Kaiber AI and create my own AI music videos. It's been a blast waiting overnight for AI to render a video, and now I see the results. It usually takes me two or three times before I get a Video I like. I figured the best way to expand my audience was to post the videos on YouTube and TikTok, targeting a younger demographic. Well, the results have been pretty impressive, as you can see above in the image from TikTok. Over 11K likes and over 200K views. You can find me on TikTok, or click here for YouTube access. The most popular videos are "Forgive" and "Dark Star Love". The best video is "Cry for Creation"
There was a definite shift in topics from a myopic AI driven interest to a more balanced approach as we are in an AI bubble about to burst for the AI vendor sector. There will be vender consolidation and more pragmatic approcah to applying AI to customer experiences and business processes in most industtries. This leaves exotic agentic AI for specific insutries that have distributed infrastructure that can act on it's own behalf. Below is a chart indicating hot topics for the 3Q 2025 and the countries other than the US, China and Russia that are active on my blog. It was an active quarter for reading my blog.
Hot Topics for the 3rd Quarter 2025
Country Activity for My Blog
Good news for my team and me. We are officially balloted for the 68th Grammys. It's a key step, but now we need nominations. If you know anyone who is a Grammy voter, please consider recommending us. Wish us luck
With a new song coming out in January 2025, my art focused on an image that projects the theme of the song and an AI-generated music video. Dark Star Love is about an exciting and scary chance meeting with a kindred soul. Will it last or will they move on? It's like plunging into a black hole of sorts. Click on this link for the full video
Gen AI created all of the art for the third quarter. I retrofitted my first album, Amazing Journey, with images to create art associated with each song. I did this for my second album, Ready or Not (click here), so it was time to equalize the whole music catalog. I expect to work on the Gen AI videos in the fourth quarter while new songs are in the hopper for 2025 to be released as singles if all goes well. While hand-created art will not be abandoned by me, I enjoy guiding AI to create images to match the themes of my songs. You can listen to my songs on popular streaming services right now. I'm up to 172K streams on Spotify and have qualified for "Discovery Mode" on Spotify for almost the whole catalog. Currently, my songs are on over a dozen playlists. I hope you like the music and the images.
Love and Acceptance
Nobody Knows Me
I See Your Heart
Perfect Love
Coming Up Sevens
Siren Song
The Next Time I See You
I continued experiments with Gen AI, leveraging Kaiber to create more music videos. These videos coincided with my new album, "Ready or Not." Please click here for an album summary. For a quick preview of each song, click here. I generated more AI videos for multiple songs. I started with a storyboard to tell the story of each song. Click here for my song videos so far. Please comment or subscribe as I deliver more in the future. I also created a few more fractals this quarter, as shown below. Visit my art website by Clicking here
Most of my friends and family know about our new album, "Ready or Not," but its reach has surprised all of us. The numbers are encouraging, and the comments about the quality really excited us. We reached a worldwide audience and 62K streams on Spotify alone. See the charts below for the last 28 days' worth of activity on Spotify. Just search for Jim Sinur on your favorite streaming service. If you don't stream much, click here for the new album. The most popular songs are Forgive, Mercy Me, and Kinder, according to the numbers (see below). My favorites are Cry for Creation and Restoration.
The AI Gen videos are also drawing folks into the music. In fact, we have had some fortune with longer songs because of the compelling nature of the videos. Click here for all the videos completed to date. The two newest are Mercy Me and Restoration. My favorites are Cry for Creation and Forgive. The core team of Ethan Foxx, Jimmy Caterine, Pete Crane, and I hope you enjoy the creativity, core stories, and professional engineering. Primarily, we hope to see you dancing to some of these tunes someday.
All of the art for the first quarter resulted from experiments with Gen AI. I used Kaiber for the videos and Microsoft Image Creator. These art projects coincided with my new album, "Ready or Not." Please click here for a summary. For a quick preview of each song, click here. I generated four videos, as listed below, but I started the videos with the following images to give the AI tool a starting point and a storyboard to tell the story of each song. Overall, I liked the experience as an artist, but it won't keep me from doing art by hand or fractals, which also require computer assistance. Here are the art pieces for each song in the order they are on the album.
Are You Ready for Me?
Spiritual Treasure
Judge Not
Mercy Me
Cry for Creation
Spiritual Treasure is the second song on the album(see below) that speaks about some of the distractions that take us all away from being the true spiritual creatures we are under the veneer of our carbon-based presence. We asked AI to show a busy city where many of us hustle for our existence as the opening of this video. Next, AI helped depict people seeking attention online to expand their digital presence. AI depicts the spiritual aspects of us represented by a cathedral and the family tribe in various activities of love and community. Click here for a short video generated by AI for our song.
Sitting in the middle of arts mixed with science, I get to have fun with the mixology of some of the ingredients. In the past, I've published posts about art and AI and written white papers on AI and processes. This time the mixology includes generative AI and Music where AI matches my music with a script I've written. The Script lays the basic storyline, and AI fills in the details, creating marketing music videos. I have one link below pointing to one of my experiments. I hope you like it. Comments are welcome.
Click here for a short AI-generated video designed to match the music.
“Ready or Not” is the name of my second album, which is about being a better human being, which we all struggle with on a daily basis. Ethan Foxx is my co-writer/creative producer/guitar/drums, and Jimmy (CAT) Caterine is our creative engineer and lead guitarist, both of whom are my mentors on my musical journey. Our team was ably assisted with great bass playing by Pete Crane. Wonderful strings by Cathie King. Lead vocals by me. If you want to be notified when the album starts streaming, send me your email at jim.sinur@gmail.com. If you want in on a CD when they arrive, add your snail mail address, and I’ll take care of the rest of the pre-order process. Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy the music.
Another year of posting blogs for me. Though the frequency of posting new blogs has gone down, the activity has been ramping up. The number of hits is north of 900K; I expect to hit nearly a million this year. As you might guess, AI is getting a lot of attention as well as Customer Journeys. The surprises were previously popular topics, such as digital business platforms (DBP). The one topic that shows maturity in applying digital is the interest in coping with legacy while progressing with digital and now AI. The interest in RPA tanked, and the interest in processes resurged. The topic of ransomware also came on strong as the vulnerabilities that more digital brings interest to the bad actors. There has been a shift in offshore interest to Asia and Northern Europe. It will be fun in 2024 to predict business and technical trends. I will take a shot at that in February. Meanwhile, here are a couple of graphs to help you see what happened last year and the last quarter. Enjoy. Click on the graphic if you want to see a bigger version. If there is a topic you think I should address, please post a comment or hit me up on LinkedIn.
Recently, I've been working with Generative AI to create music videos for the songs on my upcoming album. You can expect my new music to roll out in the first quarter of 2024, and you will hear and see more about the new music soon. While working with Kaiber to help me deliver music videos, I thought it might be a nice experiment to take some of my art portfolios and make videos out of static 2D art. Here are the results of some of my recent experiments. They are pretty short, so I hope you take some time to enjoy them. To be honest, there were some failures, but most were successful. Enjoy !!
Waves of Color
Lightning
Additional Generative AI Posts
I took the 2nd quarter off from art. I relaxed in spring and early summer, only focusing on family events and my second album. So, I'm back on the horse with some new art. I hope you enjoy them. You can see my works by clicking here
Time Travel
Fire Storm
Emergence
Color Reef
It was not imagined that technology would significantly impact the arts and artists over a decade ago. However, technology is not only assisting the arts; it is starting to turn the arts on its head. The arts have traditionally used technology as an assistant for the creators, but there is a growing movement to have AI generate art as it learns from large bases of image and audio data. I plan on leveraging several of these emerging software capabilities this year, but I have successfully leveraged various technologies as a creator over the last decade. This post aims to give examples of several forms of tech that improved my art and music.
Art:
Traditional artists want an online sales presence to expand their impact and sales. I have used digital flatbed scanners to sell art in a limited copy series. The benefit to my customers is that I can lower the price of any one piece of art by spreading the creation costs over several copies. The benefit to me is that my art gets shared and appreciated in many households and business spaces. The resulting scans can be put online in online marketplaces with high-quality images of my art.
MY BEST SELLING HAND PAINTING REPLICATED DIGITALLY to CANVAS or METAL
Digital artists use technology to generate, alter and finish their art pieces. I have used algorithms to do all three to create and alter my most popular pieces that are considered fractals or digitally altered fractals. These pieces have helped me win or place in numerous art contests and placed in locations I could only dream of in the past. My pieces have appeared in the Muse De Lourve, Times Square, and Miami Scope. I used software to generate a starting point that I refined until it was properly colored, staged, and highlighted. In some cases, there were post-processing software tools that made these images even better. I expect to try some generative AI tools soon to see how to create pieces of beauty.
MY BEST SELLING DIGITAL PIECE REPLICATED DIGITALLY to METAL
Music:
All of my recent songs have been digitally engineered with software guided by the skills of a very experienced and successful engineer. Engineering helped shape many individual voice and instrument soundtracks into cohesive pieces of music. All of my music used software to capture sounds from real instruments and create sounds from midi keyboards. These sounds were often enhanced to add effects to make them impact the mood and feel of each song. These sounds were recorded on multiple tracks to be weaved into a song, along with multiple voice recordings that were comped into a cohesive soundtrack. While few of my soundtracks were generated by technology, technology added effects. None of my music would exist without the capable skills of musicians and co-producers supported by various technologies. Even my music promotion used technology to create compelling videos. Here are my top two most popular songs so far,
Net: Net:
Technology has been a clear collaborator in both my art and music, but the creators guided the overall outcomes. I suspect the balance of collaboration will lean more toward technology over time, but I don't see a day coming when the creators are phased out. I will be testing the bounds of technology uses in the arts and hope it will help the resulting works in a more positive way.
Additional Reading:
Here is another popular song from my recent Amazing Journey Album, co-produced by Ethan Foxx and engineered by Jimmy "Cat" Caterine. This song is about someone in a very dark place that gets rescued by love. Love can reach into the darkest corners and change lives. It describes someone painfully alone, probably hanging out on social media and watching the world move on without them. Thankfully love lifts this person to a hopeful plane again after they realize they need to change.
Click here for the lyric video.
What Others Have Said About Nobody Knows Me
Wonderful opening shooting into a tight Prog Rock style delivery with wicked Rush-like guitar work/drums throughout.
David McCoy, Former DJ, and Retired Digital Consultant,
Atlanta Georgia
“The
blistering guitar solo really captures you and is quite memorable,” Bryon Robke, Biochemist, Loveland CO
This
had some excellent lead guitar, and other background instrumentation, combining
to create a mysterious, ominous, foreboding sound. Bill Martin, Retired
Color Master, and Artist
Click Here For an Album Sampler
Click Here For the Album on YouTube
In late November 2022, I released my first album, "Amazing Journey" which I coproduced with Ethan Foxx and masterfully engineered by Jimmy "CAT" Caterine. There are a couple of songs that have leaped out as popular. To that end, we created a lyric video for "The Next Time I See You." This song is about reuniting with loved ones once we leave this blue marble. Click here for the Video
What Others Have Said About "The Next Time I See You"
Strings! Love it. David McCoy, Former DJ, and Retired Digital Consultant, Atlanta Georgia
I enjoyed the vocal on this on this most “melodious” song on the disc, in my opinion.
Bill Martin, Retired Color Master, and Artist
Click Here For an Album Sampler
Click Here For the Album on YouTube
