How AI Is Rapidly Changing the Music Industry

Artificial intelligence has evolved from something to either inspire or intimidate into a real and capable tool that can enhance or replace human efforts. While AI was once the stuff of science fiction, it now has a tangible impact on practically every industry. It has the potential to radically alter multiple fields, such as finance and logistics. Music might seem like it would be impossible for AI to affect — that humans are vital to the production of meaningful art. However, the music industry is still an industry, and AI is poised to transform it as well.

AI Is Revolutionizing Workplaces Across the Board

It seems as though the persistent invasion of AI into the workplace may be an inevitability at this point. Depending on who is asked, the introduction of AI into humanity’s work life will either result in cataclysmic job losses by AI outright replacing human workers or create a worker’s paradise by having AI assist workers and take on the mundane and trivial tasks that prevent workers and artists from reaching their full potential. Whatever the eventual outcome of AI in the workplace may be, there are certainly few industries that will be safe from its inexorable march forward.

AI isn’t just changing how work is done, either; it’s actually transforming how certain industries hire workers. AI in the IT job market serves mainly to assist human employees in catching errors in mountains of data, effectively filling in the gaps quickly where humans fall short. AI can also sort through job applicants according to a specific set of ramifications to find the perfect fit for a job. It would be rather interesting to see band tryouts simplified through the use of AI, so that no one had to sit through twelve different extended drum solos looking for the right percussionist.

Currently, the most common use of AI in the music industry comes in the form of curation of personalized music for listeners. This is either done through complex algorithms that pick out another song that a listener might enjoy on a streaming platform or the generation of a personalized playlist. This idea isn’t especially radical and seems to be widely embraced by both consumers and purveyors of music. Musicians that take umbrage with streaming services usually do so over monetary issues or perceived purposeful exclusion.

Machine Learning and AI Are Getting Creative

Most people wouldn’t expect an AI to write the next great hit adored by critics and fans alike. After seeing Microsoft’s Songsmith in action, a program with the supposed ability to write unique music to match with recorded human lyrics, the idea that AI isn’t particularly gifted at creating great music doesn’t seem like misrepresentation. However, as AI and software development evolves in tandem and programmers become more experimental with bots and coding languages, this disparity in quality between human and AI crafted music is becoming negligible.

In fact, AI has broken into the mainstream, with pop artists like Taryn Southern relying on AI-driven music creation platforms like Amper to assist in producing entire albums. Even tech giants like Sony are getting into the AI music production game with Flow Machines, a program that helped to produce a pretty decent album with the human composer Benoît Carré under the name SKYGGE. There is no shortage of competitors out there either, with Google’s NSynth Super, IBM’s Watson Beat, and Spotify’s Creator Technology Research Lab vying for a spot as a producer on major artists’ next big albums.

Data has become an invaluable resource to the music industry, and AI helps to process all of the collected data into something usable. Whether it is streaming companies using terabytes of user data in order to suss out what is popular within specific groups or the thousands of pages of sheet music fed into programs that allow them to create new music with a familiar but distinctive sound, data and AI go hand in hand. This makes AI an incredibly useful tool for those within the music industry, and while it can be tempting to think of AI as something else, it is only a tool.

Don’t Worry About a Robot Takeover Just Yet

Musicians shouldn’t be worried about AI putting them out of work just yet. After all, AI’s ability to function properly is dependent on humans feeding the AI with the information it needs to operate appropriately. Everyone if the music industry, from executives to artists, should look at AI the same way they look at cloud technology or digital distribution: It’s a disruptive tool that can change how the industry works — not one that should be passed over out of fear.

Though there will always be music purists that claim the use of AI isn’t an authentic creative endeavour, they are unable to see the forest for the trees. The use of AI to assist in song creation has been around for decades. Even the late, great David Bowie, musical auteur and hipster darling, used a program called Verbasizer that rearranged lyrics to create new and inventive meanings to write the 1995 album “Outside.” Though “Outside” isn’t one of David Bowie’s more iconic albums, it is very listenable, and at least a portion of the lyrics on the album was in effect created by an AI.

The main point here is that AI isn’t destroying the music industry; it’s enhancing and reshaping it. AI will never outright replace humans when it comes to the creation of music because humanity will never really stop making music. Music is about the expression of feelings and the conveyance of ideas. No matter how far AI comes, whether it replaces music executives, changes the way that artists produce music, or creates masterpieces of its own, humans will never cease the need to express themselves creatively through music.

AI is here to stay. Instead of seeing it as something that is poised to overthrow artists or create inauthentic art, we should welcome it as a tool that we can use to further express ourselves and create even more beautiful music.

Courtesy of Indiana Lee.

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