Pics & Tunes: You Press the Button, We Do the Rest
How a wooden box from Rochester and a rock band from New Orleans made the same enemies, a hundred years apart.
In April, a well-known rock band invited anyone, literally anyone, to co-write their next single, using AI. No instrument required. No music theory. No experience. Just a vibe and a button.
Many folks were not pleased. One music blog led its coverage with a sneering “Wah-hawww, this isn’t good” and concluded with a single word: “Gross!”
This reaction isn’t new. Journey back to the days when photography was so difficult that people who were arrested would sometimes buy their mugshots, just to have a selfie.
That was 1888. Then everything changed when a former bank clerk, George Eastman, introduced a wooden box the size of a loaf of bread. He called it the Kodak, and the establishment called it: unacceptable.
Everyone a Photographer
Prior to the twentieth century, taking pictures was hard. You had to mix chemicals, adjust lots of settings, work with a glass plate, print positive paper copy, and on and on. You needed a professional.
As an amateur, Eastman was frustrated. So, by 1885 he had created a revolutionary flexible roll of film to replace the cumbersome glass plates. He also began a mail-in-service that developed your finished roll into prints. But there was a problem. Photographers were an old-school bunch, and they wouldn’t switch from the plates to his film.
So, Eastman decided that “in order to make a large business we would have to reach the general public and create a new class of patrons.” He was going to take photography from the professionals and hand it to every vacationing dentist and bored aunt in America. And with the Kodak No. 1, in 1888, that’s exactly what he did.
The camera sold for $25, and Eastman promoted it with a slogan that still sounds like the future: “You press the button, we do the rest.” All you had to do was just mail the entire Kodak camera back to the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company, and they returned your prints.
Imagine the transformation: at the turn of the century, the average middle class family owned maybe 10 photos, total. Now they had 100 photo opportunities in their hands. It caught on quickly, and by 1899, the New York Tribune reported that “[a]mateur photography is rapidly approaching, if it has not already reached, the dignity of a ‘craze.’” And it only grew. The next year, Eastman introduced the “Brownie” camera with 6 exposures for the cost of $1. He sold over 150,000 of them in the first year.
Photography had gone mainstream, and the establishment naturally didn’t approve.
Camera Fiends: Act 1
In the 1890s, Alfred Stieglitz was Manhattan’s most serious photographer, and Eastman’s Kodak had just made his life very, very complicated. If anyone could just press a button and create a photo, could photography really be an art form?
Stieglitz was convinced it could be, because authentic photography was hard. He explained in Scribner’s Magazine in 1899, that developing a photo plate “requires a knowledge of and feeling for the comprehensive and beautiful tonality of nature.” It was more than mailing film to Eastman.
There’s a name for what Stieglitz was doing: sweat bias.
We tend to use effort as a proxy for quality. When it’s hard to evaluate the output, we often assume that more labor means more value. It’s why Jackson Pollock, whose work can look like someone assassinated a canvas with a paintball gun, made a point of emphasizing the “Herculean effort” behind every work. The sweat was the argument for the art.
In 1902, Stieglitz founded the Photo-Secession, a guild of photographers drawing a hard line between themselves and all of the “camera fiends.” This was a popular slander at the time to describe the Kodak-users who were snapping candid pictures of strangers on beaches and streets across America. The Photo-Secession embraced the term to besmirch these amateurs not because they were a risk to privacy, but because they were a risk to the good name of photography. The objection wasn’t the photos, it was the open invitation to be a photographer.
Camera Fiends: Act 2
Fast forward to another open invitation. In April 2026, the alt-rock band Better Than Ezra announced a contest inviting fans to co-write their next single using Soundbreak, an AI platform co-founded by frontman Kevin Griffin. Fans select a model trained on the band’s specific style, feed it lyrics, fragments, or just a general vibe, and the system builds on them. The winning track gets recorded and released as their next official single. You press the button. They do the rest.
The Needle Drop labeled participants as “non-musicians ‘desperately wanting’ to be songwriters.” (“Desperately Wanting” is a Better Than Ezra hit. Well played, sir.)
It’s the same sweat bias, just a different century. The objection isn’t to the output, no one had heard it yet. The objection is that the tool makes creativity too accessible, which makes it not creativity at all. Which is what Stieglitz thought of the Kodak.
Press the Button
Comedian Norm McDonald had a joke about how he only has one picture of his great grandfather. Meanwhile, his descendants will have 100,000 pictures of him and everything he did every day of his life.
Today, more than 2 trillion photographs are taken every year. They’re everywhere, taken by everyone, for every conceivable reason. And some of them are extraordinary.
Stieglitz was right that the Kodak changed photography forever. He was wrong that it was a crisis. The open gate didn’t destroy art, it multiplied the artists. Some of the people who walked though were tourists with Brownies. Some of them were Ansel Adams (yep, his first camera was a Brownie).
The fans using Soundbreak to co-write a Better Than Ezra single are pressing a button. So was every camera fiend on the beach in 1900. The establishment called both of them frauds.
But, when a new tool opens the gate, some of the people who come through will surprise us.
Press the button. See what happens.
Great piece with a great lesson!