What I remember most vividly about the night I heard my grandfather had passed away is running to my piano. My 10-year-old brain didn’t understand much of what happened that day, but I did understand a base emotion -- sadness -- and I also understood that music was my only real avenue for the expression of that emotion.
The notion of musical composition serving as a vital way for me to parse and understand my own emotions has guided me throughout my life. And that concept is something that has long been understood by humans.
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“Throughout history, music has been an important adjunct to ritual and drama and has been credited with the capacity to reflect and influence human emotion,” Gordon Epperson, a professor of music, wrote for Encyclopedia Britannica.
For me, it’s not just listening to or playing music. It’s specifically creating music -- even and especially when that process is difficult -- that is so profoundly important. An album is much more special when you take note of the countless hours that went into the writing, the arranging, the composing, the performing and even the mixing and mastering. It’s not something that was ever meant to be easy.
Now, though, music creation is facing dramatic changes, spurred on by the use and increasing availability of generative AI.
On April 17, the AI-generated track “Heart on my Sleeve,” an entirely artificial collaboration between Drake and The Weeknd, was pulled from streaming services, according to Billboard. As of that date, the track had been streamed more than 600,000 times on Spotify and had garnered hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and Youtube. It did this over the course of a single weekend.
“This is just the beginning,” the creator wrote under his Youtube post.
A new song, mashing up Bad Bunny and Rihanna, was uploaded -- apparently by the same user -- on April 25, according to Billboard. This time, though, the user uploaded the song only to Soundcloud, Youtube and TikTok, skipping the traditional streamers entirely.
Even as some parties -- like Universal Music Group -- publicly oppose the use of this kind of generative AI, some artists, such as Grimes, stand in support of it.
AI could be 'potentially huge for creativity'
Spotify (SPOT) CEO Daniel Ek has discussed the question of AI in music several times recently, calling it both “really cool and scary,” in the music streamer’s recent first-quarter earnings call.
From the copyright perspective, Ek said he has some “legitimate concerns. What is an actual copyright? Who owns the right to something, where you upload something and claim it to be Drake, and it's really not and so on.”
He went on to add that these are questions that “we're working with our partners on in trying to establish a position where we both allow innovation but at the same time, protect all of the creators that we have on our platform.”
Ek maintains, however, that AI could be “potentially huge for creativity.” He said on the earnings call that AI could “allow people that perhaps don't know anything about how to play music or even know these complex music production software tools to now create just using their voice.”
Maybe I’m just old-school, but I’ve spent quite a bit of time in those “complex music production software tools” -- also known as DAWs -- and I could not imagine handing that formative process over to an AI. It would just feel cheap.
Ek envisions AI being used as a tool to augment human creativity, something that he thinks will result in more music, which, of course, “benefits Spotify; the more creators we have on our service, the better it is, and the more opportunity we have to grow the engagement and grow the revenue.”
Daniel Lyon, the front man of Spirit Award -- an indie band focused on capturing the human spirit -- agrees with Ek on the potential profits of AI-generated music. But he doesn’t feel nearly as good about it as Ek does.
“You have on the one side people who stand to profit a ton off of it, because it's essentially endless songs. If you can make 100,000 songs, you're bound to have a bunch of hits,” Lyon said. “It's just, it's kind of scary. I feel like we already just devalue art and music and entertainment as a whole. And this feels like another step to devaluing that.”
To Lyon, music -- and the often painstaking (though intensely magical) processes that are involved in its creation and release -- is an art that, for centuries, has featured a powerfully human element. It has served as a method for emotional connection; it has furthered communities.
Adding a non-human element into that mix takes something indescribable away from it.
“Progress is not always great. It's not always good. And it's not always needed,” Lyon said. “It feels unnecessary. But as humans, I think we want to meddle in everything and try something even if it's to our detriment. It just feels like a lesson that we're continually not learning.”
AI Music Could Ramp Up Human Creativity
But Chad Clark, the lead singer and songwriter of the rock band Beauty Pill, isn’t worried yet.
“I don't feel particularly threatened by this because I don't think that I'm someone who can have their livelihood swiped from them by AI,” Clark said. “I think there are a lot of musicians out there who already kind of think like AI does, they already sort of take existing tropes and imitate popular things. And that's how they move forward in their work. I'm not one of those people.”
Clark thinks that AI’s rising prevalence in music composition and production is “good news for billionaires. I think it’s a more complicated and fraught situation for creative people.”
The way Clark looks at it, “the days are numbered” for people who create “formulaic” music; AI will be able to recreate popular formulas much better and much faster than any person could. His hope, however, is that this will force artists to be even more creative in their songwriting.
“Don't try to imitate what exists. Look inside your own soul for your ideas, look at your life. That's the one thing that no one can touch. And great art draws on that,” Clark said. “I think the people who will survive will be the genuine eccentrics, the genuine idiosyncratic, internally driven artists.”
The issue for Clark is that musicians are often and consistently encouraged by a whole host of parties -- from record labels to their audiences -- to copy existing formulas. The greater prevalence of AI is simply another component that carries the message of external imitation.
“Creative people, in general, are already not running the show. It's the Daniel Ek’s and Elon Musk's, those are the people who are going to really, really soar in a world where you can just bypass lower level creative thinking,” Clark said. “It's capitalists that're going to really reap the benefits immediately and in a pretty sinister way.
“But I think that one outcome may be that when it shakes out, you'll see that the genuine weirdos start surfacing. The people that are more difficult to imitate.”
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