There is a bit of a buzz and consternation amongst creatives about the threat of AI on our jobs and industries, and for some parts of our sector... AI is most definitely a huge existential threat. Areas such as writing and anything to do with digital creation and distribution.
However, I am a musician... and despite my sympathy for those areas which are affected, I have been more involved in thinking about the impacts and threats to my area of expertise.
... and unlike many in my field, I think that the advent of AI in the music sector is a GOOD thing!
So, to explain my reasoning...
Firstly, I'm not an AI lover... Our ensemble uses MidJourney as a tool for image generation for our publicity material... and by meaning a tool, we walk through multiple iterations of creation and prompting to get what we want... and not as a shortcut prompt once and take whatever comes out. And I think that many people unfortunately use AI as an a complete answer oracle without trying to refine the output to be what they want. A quick and dirty solution... and often the initial solution is pretty damn dirty...
... and I don't trust the outputs. In my areas of knowledge, I know that AI tends to spout very confident crap.... and so, I just don't trust anything that it outputs on things that I know very little about. Plus, I ENJOY learning and researching... so, just getting an AI answer to things is quite disappointing as I lose the part of the knowledge journey that I actually enjoy!
Anyway back to music... music was ALWAYS supposed to be a live and ephemeral shared experience. The idea of recordings is and was a modern abomination that never really benefitted artists... it accrued money to recording companies and the non-artistic middlemen.... and often loaded artists with debts that would be paid off over time and sales. Sure, most people think that recordings are big money spinners... but that is only for the top 1 percent of highly marketed performers... and I use the word performers instead of musicians, as it is often more about the visual marketability of the performers rather than the musical ability... and trust me, I've heard some pretty jarring disconnects between live/real ability and the shiny magical stuff that is sold.
So, if AI "recordings" become indistinguishable from the heavily doctored "real" recordings... who cares. The recording companies do... they lose money in a big way from the recordings, which help fund stadium concerts that wipe out local events. Who wins... live concerts that have a local support base... small but real. And this was the way that music was ALWAYS supposed to be... local, small, and unique to the area.
I'm not going to shed tears for the big multinationals that have mutilated our art form in the name of money and greed. I welcome their demise, and the return back to the small local acts... in churches, small concert halls, and pubs and restaurants.
The price of going to these acts are much less than the blockbusters, and you get a much better experience... and if you are there, you can just buy a CD or a digital download DIRECT from the musician... for 5-10 dollars straight to the musician... instead of the 30-40 dollars for a mass-produced CD which gets at best a dollar (often much much less) to the musician.
Cheaper and better... what could be better?
Of course, the big guys and corporations will cry foul... and try to bamboozle the public into thinking that music is dying... but in reality it is their stranglehold on the revenue stream and the ability to enslave artists that is at risk. Boohoo...
Anyway, YES... I know that this is more to do with acoustic and live music... and that digital music creation occupies a different space and is under real threat by AI... and that I am very sympathetic to our digital creator friends... but I have no ideas for how to solve that. Other than to find a way to make yourself into an industry that is IMPOSSSIBLE to scale digitally... but that seems like a contradiction there.
But for a long time, that was the reason that people thought that live concerts were a dead dinosaur... because we couldn't scale productivity... a string quartet always requires 4 people... and you can't do it with 3 operating at better efficiency! But perhaps this is the core concept that will save industries in the future?
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