AI Music Courses Are Bagged Lettuce transcript

Woo. All right. So, I got this email. [music] It was a nice email. It was polite, professional. It wasn't formatted weird or didn't have any like grammatical errors. It wasn't from the Prince of Synthesizer offering me a free Super Gemini, like if I wired them the shipping fees. It was a real enough email for me to go back and forth a few times with them. And what they wanted to do with me was turn my YouTube channel into a course.

They weren't going to help me make the course or [music] teach me how to make the course. I've had emails like that over the years. They were going to make it themselves [music] using my already made videos. The hundreds and hundreds of hours of me talking about synthesizers and mixing [music] and music theory and history. They were going to scrape the YouTube data, feed it to an LLM, and [music] out the other end comes a paid course.

Uh would use the Redmi Recording brand. [music] It would use my words and most importantly it would use my voice. That is something that they assured me. I would approve it. Uh it would go out into the world and it would make us both money. And literally all I had to do was say yes. Honestly, at first I was a little intrigued. I was like, "Okay, maybe it is finally time for me to make a [music] course like all of the 10,000 other YouTubers who seem to only make videos to get you to buy their course these days." >> [music] >> But after I asked them for more information about how the course would be structured, I got an email that was completely written by Claude as [music] a response.

Claude is uh one of the uh popular LLM coding things. [music] If you don't know what it is, like chat GBT, Claude is anthropic version of it. And I am deathly allergic to Claude [music] speak. The way that Claude talks, it makes my skin crawl. It makes me instantly angry if I see it. So, I told him I was no longer interested in the project. Um, I can't trust a project where the people running it respond to a prospective client completely with AI.

But later on in the day on a jog with my dogs, something hit me like a [music] ton of bricks. Something that made me stop my run right then and email them again. And it wasn't that what they were doing was a scam. It was legit. It was frictionless. And anybody could do it. And that is what scared me. Hi everyone, my name is Jeremy. This is Redm Recording and today I want to talk to you about why I think the music course, like the whole thing a generation of us were told was a smart [music] way to make money online as a creator and the thing that so many people trusted to go from like zero to knowledgeable about music from a trusted professional is basically dead.

And why this very polite email is the thing that finally convinced me. It is first thing in the morning. I have not even had a full cupa and I'm already getting into this. So, I might be a little rough around the edges. So, I'm going to talk about this company, but I don't want to be a jerk about it and I don't want anybody to harass anybody. Okay. Okay. Okay. Uh, the company is called Tri Tribaloom. Tribaloom. Tri Tribum.

T R I B E L L U M E. Maybe it's supposed to be like Tribune. I'm not sure. The company is called Tribu. Tribal. Uh, they are out of Berlin. They are real. They're not like a shell company. They are real people behind it, as far as I can tell. And their whole pitch is that they turn a YouTube channel's knowledge into a [music] course. They produce it. They sell it. They handle support. And they take a cut. The creator, of course, gets [music] royalties, or what we love to call in the business passive income.

They actually have a demo that they've built to prove it. Uh they invented a fake woodworking [music] channel. They made up a guy and they wrote some scripts and then ran the whole thing through the exact pipeline that they would use on me or you. Stop creaking. Jesus. Uh, [snorts] trying to scoot forward a little bit. [cough] Anyways, yeah. So, they ran the whole thing through the exact same pipeline they would use on me or you us, the royal we, you know.

They built knowledge exercises, little flip cards, all kinds of stuff, all hosted by a guy who doesn't [music] really exist. Yeah. Like I said, it's it's not technically a scam. Not in that it's not real or is completely made up. Uh it's all opt-in, you know, all consensual and legal. They offered me money. And honestly, like I said, it's [music] the best kind of money. The money I don't need to do anything for. That's what it really feels like courses are about [music] once you get past the initial labor investment.

It's free money, right? And this whole thing makes it even freer because it's all done with almost no work with AI. And that is what stopped me in my tracks while I was on my run. And what I emailed them at that point was the realization that if they could do this thing [music] that easily with my permission, imagine what could be happening without my permission. Imagine what a company or person could do right now to any channel or body of work in like a day.

They could build the same professional course and make passive income. And they could iterate. It could be an entire website full of courses all from different people, all looking professional and real and ready to teach you. And this is why I'm making this video because I'm pretty sure it's already happening. [music] It made me realize something about courses. And that is if a company can take my videos, stuff that's already free and publicly available, and turn it into a course that you would pay for, then the course isn't actually selling you the information.

The information [music] is free. It's been free. I gave it away. Sometimes I ask you to support on patreon.com means recording. And sometimes I ask you to donate to charity. [music] Sometimes I have ads on my videos to make a little AdSense money. And sometimes I use affiliate links. But you don't have to pay for the information [music] with anything other than your time and attention. So if it's not selling information, what is [music] the course selling?

Well, it's selling packaging. All right, [clears throat] voice, calm down. Uh, it's selling organization. It's selling a sense of completeness like [music] look at what I will learn. It sells structure, a feeling of intention and a feeling of prestige because it's selling me. The trust that little voice that goes, "Oh, Jeremy, yeah, I like that guy. He doesn't lie to me. He talks about VOR a little too much sometimes, but I trust him not to eat me.

I should take his course [music] on how to best marinate myself for some reason." Actually, you know what it's like? [music] It's like a bag of pre-washed salad. You know, you get the supermarket, you're not paying six [music] bucks for the lettuce. You can go get that for like a buck across the aisle in a ditch on the road or do the fox [clears throat] thing and break into Old McGregor's farm and steal it for yourself for free.

You are paying for someone to wash it, put it in a bag, and promise that if you eat it, you [music] won't be explosively yourself for 2 weeks. The course is that it's the bag. AI didn't learn how to grow lettuce better. It's learned to wash and bag it for next to nothing in a [music] day at a scale so much bigger than you can imagine. For real. [music] And then on that bag, it slaps my face on it. So you will eat it.

So you will eat me. Maybe I do talk about war too much. It used to cost something to make a course. [music] And the cost is what kept me from doing one. Well, I mean, to be fair, honestly, the thing that really kept me from doing one is that it felt like every single music YouTuber course always felt like like a gross scam to me. [music] But the real thing, the cost is the labor. The labor is what put me off. You have to script, shoot, edit, structure it, build the website, all of it.

That would take months. And that is months I could be spending on making genre history videos or pretending to be a crow in VR chat. Isn't that right? >> I'm a crow and I am in hell. >> Damn right. >> Help me. I am in hell. >> Damn right. So, I believe that cost, that friction, that's what kept the supply of courses low and the prices high. And that's what made selling a course a good option for a creator and why they sold because people believe they [music] were worth something.

And now, Okay, so it took me my whole lifetime to amass the knowledge that I have and then over 10 years to put it in a form that you can experience here on YouTube. And now it costs a company or a person a day and a clawed subscription to rip all of that, put it in a bag and sell it back to you. What took two months of hard labor to package institutional knowledge into something that might help people now that takes next to nothing to do.

And I promise you it's happening all over the music YouTuber space as we speak and of course beyond. But I have to focus on, you know, where I eat. And in case it wasn't insanely obvious, the only reason any of this works is trust. You trust the person selling the course. Maybe you like their music, you like their knowledge, you like their big bushy tail and sharp teeth, right? Whatever. There's a lot to like. But every AI course that goes out with a real person's face on it, every course that somebody spins up in a day because Claude made it the easiest thing in the world to do, every creator who realizes that with almost zero effort they cannibalize themselves or other creators or in the laziest sense just let Claude write the whole thing for them.

Every single one of those poisons the well for everybody. For me, that well was poisoned before AI got involved because of how scummy the music YouTuber course ecosystem has been. But now it's frankly radioactive. [music] So, does that mean that every course in 2026 is garbage? I don't know. Probably not. Maybe. I guess I can't say it's all garbage, but I can say it's all suspect as because [music] now there are at least three important things that you cannot check anymore. one, uh, you can't verify that the person actually made it.

Their face is on it, their voice is on it, but there's no longer any proof, right? Uh, in fact, I can almost guarantee that higher than 50% of all new [music] courses are going to be AI projects. Two, uh, you cannot verify that you're not just buying bagged lettuce. Now, to be fair, what a lot of these course selling YouTubers already do [music] is hook you with clickbait and neg you and your abilities and then try to sell you the course.

They don't really put a lot of lettuce out there to bag in the first place. [music] But now more than ever, you're probably just buying bag lettuce. You can't even know if it's the creator's lettuce or if they stole it from another creator or just used AI [music] lettuce. And this lettuce analogy is getting really tired, but just remember that bagged lettuce has a high probability of making you your soul out of your Three, you can't verify it's even really the creator themselves teaching.

You see, like hosted by creator. Well, that can and in most cases will mean that it's a synthetic host wearing the real person's skin to fool you. You can't check those things unless you ask the creator directly. And they're only incentivized to tell you the truth that keeps their courses selling and keeps their reputation looking pristine. So, yeah, suspect. Really, really suspect. I can't say 100% garbage because I obviously don't know, but in the darkest little part of my gross little heart, it feels like it's probably close to like 90%. based on what I've seen looking out there.

Okay, let's pull back for a second. What it feels like we're actually watching right now is what happens to expertise itself when trust becomes something you can effortlessly scrape. For literally the entire history of humans knowing stuff if you wanted authority on a topic, the expert in a field, uh you had to either be one or hire one. And they had to be vetted. It had to be like really obvious that they knew what they were doing.

With that type of transaction, the face and knowledge came bundled because they lived in the same delicious brain inside that really annoying to get through skull. But AI, it's unbundled them. You can [music] rent a face now and knowledge is as easy to amass and repackage as like a few clawed prompts and like 2 days worth of tokens. It really feels like nothing is real anymore. Like there is no real authority left. Every person is more than happy to deploy a fake version of themselves in a fake voice with a fake product that looks real enough to get you to click.

And that's it. It's super fun, right? Fun. Colin, do you think it's fun? >> How did I get here? Please help. I am very afraid of this place. Where am I? Am I dead? Jeremy, please help. >> Yeah, >> Uh, I hate it here. [music] So, with that said, is any kind of teaching safe? [music] Is there any kind of teaching a machine can't wash and bag and sell back to us to make us for 2 weeks out of our I think so. [music] And all of it never really fell into like a course in the first place.

So, we have things like feedback. [music] A machine can scrape through my thoughts on EQ and compression, but it can't listen to your track and tell you how [music] to make it better. Not yet, at least, right? But I can and I can do it with a whole bunch of different kinds of music in different states of completion. There are very talented music educators on YouTube who are real musicians who know how to make real music.

[music] And if they offer feedback, then that's a great way to engage with them. Much better than a course. I think related uh there's taste, [music] right? Somebody who you actually trust saying, "No, don't use this. Use this on your track. Use this kick instead. [music] Try this reverb here." and them being right enough times that you keep coming back to get their take. You earn that live and in the public eye where people even get to see you be wrong sometimes.

[music] It could also be the room, right? Like a group setting where real people are all together learning at [music] the same time. All of them wanting to understand together, doing the homework, doing group projects, which is completely different than synthesizing a community that you can neg into signing up for your limited slot monthly course. So feedback, taste, and [music] community, not just information that has always been free if we're talking about YouTube videos.

[music] It's the human stuff that's left. And that's the exact stuff the company offering to make me a course needed for me to make it work. So, you know, I said no. Not because they were [music] villains. Like I said, they were respectful. They actually even acknowledged uh me and agreed to my terms that they would never use any Red Means recording content to [music] train anything without my permission. And I actually really really respect that.

So, uh, Triblum or however you say your name, thank you for [music] emailing me back. I did not expect you to do that and I really do appreciate it. [music] Uh, that's that's good on you. I said no because the whole value of what I do with you is that it's actually me, [music] right? And the second I let a pipeline wear my face, I've given away the one thing I can't get back. [music] So, now I guess we're at the part of the video where I try and give you like a nice tidy ending to all of this, [music] but there there is no one.

I can't tell you what courses are good and what are garbage. I can tell you that I feel 90% of all music tech YouTuber courses feel like a scam. And [music] honestly, that was even before AI got involved. There is just something weird that [music] happens to a YouTuber once they have a course to sell. A lot of the times, I don't know what [music] it is. There's a certain stink of manipulative tactics of predation. And look, I know how horny [music] the phrase the stink of predation sounds to some of you watching, and I love you for that.

But stop it just for a second. So, courses, yeah, uh, they can't all be garbage, right? Right. I don't know. [music] I can't know that. But what I can know is that the info dump course model is dead. [music] Like, it's it's dead dead. It's been dying since people started making highquality informative content on YouTube and giving it away. And now knowing how AI works and how these course companies operate, it's officially dead as a useful concept across the board.

Done. Useless. It never happened. This might sound a little like self-important, but I think the only thing left standing here is the only part I [music] actually cared about the whole time, and that is this right here. me sitting here talking to a camera that eventually talks to you. Uh talking to people in the Discord about the monthly challenge, talking to students [music] about their individual songs, their struggles, and their wins.

I think that the more that we interact with each other directly, the better things get and the more real things get. [music] And at this point, I feel like all of us should be fighting for more and more legitimate like proven reality. And that's it for me today. I would love to know what you think about this one because I have a very set mind on this if you can't tell. And it does help to get other perspectives. Um, do you have a course that actually truly helped you?

Uh, I guess let us know in the comments. If you like the video, consider giving it a thumbs up and sharing it. And if you want to support the channel, you can do so at patreon.com red meansrecording. Until next time, my name is Jeremy. This is Red Means Recording. And I hope you have a real unscrapable [music] human kind of day. You want to say goodbye, Colin? >> Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me.

Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. Help me. [music]