Let me paint a picture for you. You are a 20 year veteran of the music industry, a known figure with many accolades to your name. A kid, perhaps about 14 years old, comes up to you and wants to talk about music. Being the nice senior you are, you try to help him: “So, you want to make music? It’s not that simple. You have to spend a lot of time learning theory, practicing and–” You are interrupted by the young guy, his face transforms into a grimace filled with disgust as he responds with something along the lines of: “Get with the times old man, unc over here thinks he’s Mozart.” He didn’t want to learn to make music through those tedious and arduous means, studying is boring after all. He… makes AI music.
It’s inescapable nowadays, artificial intelligence, everyone knows what it is by now. AI here, AI there, AI everywhere! AI chatbots, AI Gift ideas, AI nsfw… roleplay bots? (yeah, that’s a real thing) And of course the crux for this article, AI music generators. A good example is Suno. Using Suno, in just about 3 minutes you can choose a theme, lyrics and a singer to generate a song that sounds… scarily real. Naturally the songs it generates are still relatively unimaginative, stale, boring, sloppy, etc. but it’s only going to keep getting better.
AI is something every industry has to think about, and for creative, artistic industries like the music industry, that’s even more so. If rules and agreements aren’t established, human artists might just get drowned by the flood of AI songs that will inevitably stream in. There’s numerous concerns regarding this, including copyright issues, loss of royalties, concerns around creativity and the loss of some specialized jobs (The Role Of AI in Modern Music Production ? LCCM Blog, 2025).
To quickly expand on those points: AI music is trained on many different pieces of music, all belonging to different artists. That means AI models are indirectly “copying” thousands of artists. The current copyright laws aren’t really too clear on this, is it copyright or not (Berger, 2025)? The second point relates to how cheap and easy AI is to use. When companies are faced with the question of getting an artist or an AI to make a tune for them, AI is faster, cheaper and easier to work with (Berger, 2025). Royalty streams shrink as a result. On top of that, when a tsunami of new songs flood the market, it will inevitably dilute the uniqueness and value of each individual song, making it harder for artists to stand out and be heard (How AI Is Transforming The Creative Economy And Music Industry, 2025).
AI isn’t necessarily all bad though, AI tools can be used by artists to speed up their work, gain some inspiration or tips and to reduce the barrier-to-entry of creating music (The Role Of AI in Modern Music Production ? LCCM Blog, 2025). All we have to do is not fall into the trap of complacency and let AI do all the work. This way we can use AI for the amazingly useful tool it is, without completely losing our own voice and creativity.
References:
The Role of AI in Modern Music Production ? LCCM Blog. (2025, 24 juli). London College Of Contemporary Music | LCCM. https://www.lccm.org.uk/blog/the-role-of-ai-in-modern-music-production/
Berger, V. (2025, 3 januari). AI’s Impact on music in 2025: Licensing, creativity and industry survival. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/virginieberger/2024/12/30/ais-impact-on-music-in-2025-licensing-creativity-and-industry-survival/
How AI is transforming the creative economy and music industry. (2025, 4 februari). OHIO Today. https://www.ohio.edu/news/2024/04/how-ai-transforming-creative-economy-music-industry