Why AI Will Take Over the Music Industry... Maybe
The Uncomfortable Truth Nobody Wants to Say
Part 1 of a series on AI's impact on the music industry.
Most non-musicians don’t care about who made the music. There, I said it.
I know that stings. I know it goes against everything we want to believe about our craft. But watch someone using Spotify. They put on a playlist. Whatever comes on comes on. They either listen or press next.
They’re not checking liner notes. They’re not following artist journeys. They’re picking a vibe and letting the algorithm feed them.
And while there are artists they care about (sure, they’ll buy tickets to see Taylor or Kendrick if they roll through town), mostly they don’t. And if you live outside the major metros where touring bands actually come around? Even less so.
You know what bothers me most about the “AI can never replace real artists” argument? It’s not that it’s wrong. It’s that it’s only true for about 1% of the music that gets made and consumed.
The Genie Is Out of the Bottle
At 65, I wish things would return to the good old days. I really do.
But I’ve been around long enough to know how this story ends. I’ve watched technology disrupt music over and over, and every single time, the same pattern plays out.
I remember real studios. You know, the kind with one compressor per room and actual tape machines. You made decisions because you had to commit. You couldn’t undo. You couldn’t have seventeen plugins on every track because there weren’t seventeen of anything.
Then bedroom producers came along with their DAWs and their cracked software, and the old guard said, “This isn’t real music production.” Guess what? The world didn’t care. Good enough won.
Then streaming came along and crushed the album format, and everyone said, “People will never stop buying music they love.” Guess what? They did. Convenience won.
Now AI is here, and everyone’s saying, “But people want the human connection! They want the story!”
Do they though? Do they really?
The Story Argument Only Works for Superstars
Look, I get it. People fall in love with stories. They follow artists through their journey: the early struggles, the breakout moment, the evolution. That’s real.
But here’s what that argument conveniently ignores: that only applies to a fraction of the music people actually listen to.
Think about the last ten songs that played on your Spotify. How many of those artists could you name? How many of their “stories” do you know? How many do you actually care about?
For most people, music is functional. It’s the thing that makes the workout less boring. It’s the thing that fills the silence on the commute. It’s the thing playing in the background at the coffee shop while they’re trying to finish an email.
Nobody at that coffee shop is thinking, “Wow, I really connect with the artist’s journey on this lo-fi hip-hop beat.” They just don’t want to hear silence.
And that’s where AI is coming for the industry. Not for the artists who spent years playing dive bars and building a following one small venue at a time. Not for the ones with superfans who follow every Instagram story.
AI is coming for everything else. And “everything else” is most of the music that exists.
The Pattern: Convenience Always Wins
Here’s what I’ve learned watching technology eat the music business for forty-plus years: the mass market doesn’t optimize for quality. It optimizes for convenience and “good enough.”
MP3s sounded like garbage compared to CDs. Didn’t matter. People wanted 1,000 songs in their pocket, not perfect fidelity.
Early streaming was compressed to hell. Didn’t matter. People wanted access to everything without having to own anything.
Yeah, there are hi-fi streaming services now. Deezer, Tidal, Spotify’s adding a premium tier for better quality. You know who uses them? Audiophiles. Gearheads. People like us. The mass market is perfectly happy with the standard compressed stream because it’s good enough and it’s easy.
AI-generated music is going to follow the exact same trajectory.
It doesn’t have to be as good as a real artist pouring their soul into a track. It just has to be good enough to fill the playlist slot. Good enough to pass as background music. Good enough that the average listener doesn’t notice or care.
And here’s the kicker: it’s getting better fast. What sounded like obvious robot trash a year ago is starting to sound... fine. Not great. But fine.
Fine is all it needs to be.
The Geographic Reality Nobody Mentions
If you live in New York, LA, Nashville, or Austin, you’re in a bubble. You can see live music seven nights a week. You can catch touring acts. You can stumble into a club and discover your new favorite artist.
But most people don’t live in those cities.
Most people live in places where live music means a cover band at the brewery on Friday nights. Where “touring artists” means the county fair books a washed-up 80s act once a year. Where the connection between listener and artist was already tenuous at best.
In those places, the “story” of the artist was never part of the equation. Music was something that came through the speakers. That’s it.
AI doesn’t change that dynamic. It just makes it cheaper and easier to fill those speakers.
Your Future Will Involve AI
I’m not saying this to be a pessimist. Well, in this piece maybe I am. But I have hope that this, like all disruptive technologies, will just be another shift. The carriage makers didn’t disappear when Ford fired up the assembly line. They adapted, retrained, found new work. Some thrived. The industry changed, but people figured it out.
I’m saying this because I’ve lived through enough industry shifts to recognize the pattern.
The genie is out of the bottle. You can’t put it back. You can’t wish it away. You can’t regulate it into submission.
The question isn’t whether AI will take over parts of the music industry. It’s already happening. The question is how big those parts will be, and how fast.
If you lived in the big cities through the 90s, you remember cartage companies. They hauled gear to sessions. They made a shit ton of money doing it. Now? Home studios killed that business.
What about music copyists? Mostly gone since computer engraving took over. I remember many a night creating swindles1 and racing to get them reproduced by 11pm when the downbeat was at 9am the next morning. Had to copy the parts myself, by hand. No need anymore. Just print them from the computer.
Those jobs didn’t disappear because the work wasn’t valuable. They disappeared because technology made them obsolete.
Will AI replace the superstar artists with devoted fanbases and compelling stories? Probably not. Those people have something that’s hard to replicate: a genuine human connection with an audience that’s invested in them as people, not just content generators.
But will AI replace the thousands of working musicians cranking out production music, stock tracks, commercial jingles, background scores, and playlist filler?
Yeah. It will.
And the uncomfortable truth is: most listeners won’t notice. Because most listeners never knew those people existed in the first place.
What This Means
I don’t have a tidy conclusion for you. I don’t have a plan to save the music industry or protect musician jobs or turn back the clock.
What I do have is four decades of watching technology disrupt everything I thought was sacred about this business, and learning that resistance is pointless. Adaptation is the only option.
The romantic notion that “people will always want real human artists” is comforting. It’s also incomplete. People will always want real human artists for the 1% of music they actually care about.
For the other 99%? They just want something that sounds good enough while they’re folding laundry.
AI can do that. And it will.
Swindles: grouped parts with common sections that saved you from writing the same thing multiple times. An LA studio thing from the pre-Finale era. You probably won't find a definition in Wikipedia. I don't even know if they existed outside the LA music scene.