I am not one of those 'music nowadays sucks' kinds of curmudgeonly old farts. On the contrary I have been blown away by the beauty and brilliance out there being churned out every day.
No, instead I lament how the actual legitimately wonderful music out there is rarely recognized. And when it is, it becomes so gentrified with autotune and basic, package-deal quantized drums thanks to the over-involvement of whichever producers and army of writers take over, its just collectively lowered down to the lowest common denominator - Taylor Swift variants.
And this, I think, spells the beginning of the end of humanity.
Such a statement sounds a bit ridiculously hyperbolic until you start adding AI into the mix - more on that soon.
Sick of hearing music - even world music, folk songs and the like - being mixed into autotune oblivion, I decided instead to seek out and binge on music that either came before the invent of autotune, or from artists who go out of their way to avoid its use.
Music that doesn't snap to a grid has a very wholesome feel about it, something the new world is no longer accustomed to. But the modern world's Perfection has a limit. The very meaning of perfection is an inability to become more perfect. It is the peak. The end.
So, if we can pitch a singer and quantize a drums accurately, down to the atomic level, then we have achieved a kind of technical perfection. This perfection is then unleashed like a torrent into the world. We as a society become accustomed to it, and we're no longer impressed. We don't even notice it. Thrill is gone..
All we know in a very abstract way in the back of our minds is that 'music is getting worse'. This really means 'less human', more economical. More of a product. And so we listen to it anyway, unconsciously learning that music kinda sucks and has no meaning as the years ago by.
The drive towards perfection is, at least in the arts, a terrible thing.
In the next few months or years when AI has inevitably perfected music creation (in some aspects it already has), we will have nothing to compete against it. We have our perfection vs theirs. Perfection has been established as your standard Beyonce or Sam Smith song:
The problem is, everything above, an AI can replicate and refine 10,000 times a second on each machine with a 100% success rate. In a few years, vocals will be perfected no problem, and the audience - us - will be welcomed into a world where our kids listen to a song, enjoy it, ask AI to generate 10 more songs like it, and voila. Thrill. Is. Gone.
The musician is now obsolete. And don't tell me gigs and concerts are the way because if Daft Punk has taught me anything, robots can put on just as good a show if not better than any human.
I feel like the degeneracy and scandal-clad culture of Western Music played all its cards way too soon. Like desperate establishment news networks fighting for their lives against independent YouTube creators and censor-free environments publishing their own views, the world of music needed their disgraceful behaviour and shock revelations and stupid clothing to give us plebs something to actually be engaged in their existences once AI has fully fucked their ability to keep up and stay relevant musically.
Now we're already so used to the limits of human depravity being on display for all our kids to enjoy, when AI finally pulls the trigger, the only place left for Sam Smith and Beyonce to go will be the gutter, AKA TikTok. At which point they'll have already aged out, replaced by computer-generated Gen-Z'ers.
There are of course many other paths. Infinite, perhaps. We as a society have just collectively decided to take this one path all at once, to hell with individuality.
Should we take another path, we enter a world without autotune and quantization (or at the very least tasteful usage) and our ears get bombarded with imperfections? An amazing singer who croaks a bit in one line, a guitarist who accidentally touches another string... these imperfections not only show the reality of who we are listening to, but it opens our mind to the amazing world of 'what could be'.
These human touches make the hairs on the back of our neck stick out, and we connect in ways that can't very well be described. Those subtle emotions which are either worn on the sleeve of the musician, or hidden deep within that just eek out 2-3 seconds over their entire career, can make a listener croak up in tears as they imagine the years, decades of difficulty and sorrow endured.
Why isn't he inside lol... He even made a little elevated snow platform
Some of the greatest potential musicians, say, Jeff Buckley or Mozart, who met their untimely end at strikingly young ages (30 & 35 years old respectively), will never be truly known to anything but our imagination and our memory. This gives the listening of what does exist a whole new level of context, a cherished scarcity.
The world of perfection and robotic replication I so deeply despise now takes on a new unreachable allure, always over the horizon, forever out of reach, and we each search with zeal and passion for that very personal, individual idea of what perfection is, written somewhere in a single song we may never find. A song not established by the industry, and not performed by some thong around a tub of lard. No, you dug it out of the dusty corners of Spotify. Something nobody else but your soulmate relates to in the way you do, because that is what it's like to be an individual.
AI cannot replicate the emotions you hold from the death of an artist you love. They cannot replicate cherished scarcity. AI has no death nor suffering, nor the millennia of disease, drought and abuse we have all sat through.
It can easily brute force its way into perfect renditions of such a thing though. And I guess that's good enough for the vast majority of people.
So the question of 'Can AI replace human music?', I would say absolutely not. But can it replace the humans for something... good enough for 95% of humans? Totally. Certainly for the pop genre specifically manufactured around simple templates by the billion.
But I'm just letting you know, there is another path. A path in which perfection doesn't exist, an infinity which lies ahead, and it's oh, so much more beautiful.
Note: All art generated by the amazing Stable Diffusion AI on 
