Music & AI: What Happens When Quality Is No Longer a Differentiator?
By Tatiana Cirisano of MIDiA Research Blog
For most of recorded music history, quality was scarce. Recording, producing, and distributing a song that sounded “good” required significant investments of time, money, and skill, along with access to gatekeepers, who carefully filtered what entered the system. The belief has long been that even in a saturated market like today’s, quality ultimately dictates success – hence the saying that:
“Marketing a great song is easy, but marketing a good song is impossible.”
While “quality” is slippery to define, one thing is inarguable: Generative and assistive AI tools are now making it much easier for more people to create music that is not only listenable, but catchy, repeatable, and – dare we say – sometimes even beautiful.
This is not just about casual consumers generating passable songs, but also serious artists using AI tools to write better lyrics, invent catchier hooks, and generally achieve their visions faster. For the first time, the industry is reckoning with the question: what does success look like when quality is no longer a scarce resource?
This question and others will be untangled at MIDiA’s April 28 webinar on The State of AI and Music. For now, here’s a glance into our crystal ball.
Squeezing the middle
In consumer products, the commoditization of quality tends to squeeze out the middle. The strategist Leland Maschmeyer recently detailed the impacts on the fashion industry in his excellent essay “Dollar Store or Dior.” In this environment, companies win by either scaling cheap products (often by owning the means of production and distribution) or by building enough cultural value to charge a premium (as in the case of luxury brands).
The most apt analogy to the music industry is the sync market, which is bifurcating between AI-generated production music and iconic catalogue – squeezing a middle traditionally occupied by smaller bands and work-for-hire artists. Meanwhile on streaming services, perhaps the two markets faring best are functional background music on the low end and superstar catalogue on the high end – again, squeezing the long tail and mid-tier.
Connection > Consumption
Yet even before the AI disruption, the hardest part about building a music career wasn’t making great music – it was getting heard. AI isn’t creating a new problem so much as deepening an existing one, and the path forward is the same as before: artists succeed by connecting to listeners on an identity level that goes beyond the sound of their music.
A growing number of acts (especially those in the squeezed middle) are eschewing the streaming volume game entirely, opting to build core fanbases through live shows and mp3 downloads. Hotline TNT, Sade Olutola, and Sturgill Simpson’s new moniker, Johnny Blue Skies, are just a few recent examples.
AI and bringing back “weird”
The impacts of technological developments on art aren’t always obvious or immediate. Music streaming may have helped more obscure, niche artists reach listeners – but at the same time, it has incentivized sounding like what is already popular, as this is the fastest way to ride the algorithmic wave. AI is often accused of making music overly formulaic, but streaming and the production line approach taken to building hits arguably did it first.
Yet AI could now shift the tide, in a way that makes music more diverse and interesting, not less. If popular music is easily imitable, artists are incentivised to constantly evolve and be as inimitable as possible. With “quality” no longer scarce, there may also come a new appetite for, well, weirdness (the peculiarly popular, polka-dotted math rock band Angine de Poitrine may be onto something after all).
Take writing as an example: With chatbots now on-hand to deliver expertly-written prose, people are beginning to include small imperfections in their emails and other writing on purpose as a way to signal that a human, not a language learning model, is at the other end. There is a potential future where AI makes music wonderfully weirder, and that may be just what music needs.
Register here for MIDiA’s April 28 webinar on The State of AI and Music, a free virtual event on April 28 at 4:00pm BST | 11:00am EST | 8:00am PST.
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