The history of recorded music is not long. There are records available from the very earliest days of sound reproduction, which in its familiar form was invented by some guy named Edison in New Jersey. If your favorite band is or was Bon Jovi, it’s possible that one of Bon Jovi’s great-grandparents was alive when recorded music was first made available to the public. Your terrible taste in music aside, the medium is relatively young, as media goes. If you take 1877 as the date for Edison’s invention of the phonograph, and the 1890’s as the same for the invention (not by Edison) of the gramophone disc, you’ve got a form of recorded entertainment that’s at best 150 years old, which is not as young as TikTok, but neither are you.
And now it’s dying. Oh well. And by “dying” I mean that it is no longer possible to make a living as a musician who makes recordings and sells them to the public — unless you are very lucky or incredibly good-looking (that I happen to be both should not prejudice my argument). To an extent, this has always been true, but it is more true now than ever, and most of this is the internet’s fault. Most of everything is the internet’s fault, but I’m not here to point fingers. If we didn’t have the internet, I wouldn’t have been able to instantly look up the dates that the gramophone and gramophone discs were respectively invented. I would have had to go to the library and spend half the day doing research. I fucking hate research. I also hate the internet. Go figure.
Like many (most?) innovations in the recording industry since its inception, AI scares the hell out of everyone who is used to one way of doing things, and excites a whole bunch of other people who never thought they’d be able to put words to music or vice versa, and for some reason enjoy doing so. That these people not so long ago likely sat through eight hours of Peter Jackson’s (AI-enhanced) Beatles documentary is not a coincidence. It looks like fun! You get together with your friends, make up stupid songs about JoJo, and go up on the roof and play them! In the cold!
Yeah, but that’s never been the way it works, not even for the Beatles, who spent years in seamy bars in Germany practicing for sixteen hours a day before they got any good. And who, after becoming good and learning how to write songs and (incidentally) being insanely talented, were in their brief recording career credited with several innovations in recording technology, including inadvertently inventing feedback (“Day Tripper”), the use of tape loops “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and what may or may not have been an early form of sampling.
Around the time of the gramophone’s invention came the player piano, which was supposed to put musicians out of a job. The widespread availability of high-quality long-playing records was supposed to destroy live music. The advent of cassettes and home taping was going, we were told, to destroy the music business. Napster was heralded as the death knell… okay they were right about that.
But those are just the macro trends. Synthesizers, drum machines, samplers, Pro Tools, autotune — these are all ways to automate things that musicians IRL used to have to spend hours doing in very expensive studios with no guarantee of success, either artistic or commercial. These older, labor- and time-intensive methods of doing things are not accessible to most people, because they cost money. There has always been a tension between the artists who like to use machines (Kraftwerk, Pet Shop Boys, Public Enemy) and the ones who consider anything more advanced than an acoustic guitar and the unadorned human voice some kind of musical cheat code (Pete Seeger, as portrayed by Ed Norton in the not-great Bob Dylan biopic from last year).
But artists have been using cheat codes for decades. We’ve been sweetening vocals with echo and reverb and all kinds of special effects and trickery since at least the ’60s, and using every technical innovation we can beg, borrow, or steal to make our stupid songs sound better. Sometimes it works! Sometimes it doesn’t! Neither approach is more legitimate than the other. A great song is a great song no matter how or who generated it, and if the machines turn out to be better at it than e.g. the Beatles, which for all I know they will, but I seriously doubt it, then everybody wins! Except musicians, but that’s always been the case. Being a musician is a horrible life choice, speaking as someone who once made that choice.
But let’s ask AI what it thinks! Hey, ChatGPT, write a paragraph about using AI in music.
Using AI in music is all fun and games until your love song starts serenading your toaster because it misunderstood what you meant by “hot.” One minute you’re asking for a smooth jazz beat, and the next, you’re trapped in a never-ending loop of saxophone solos that sound like a robot having an existential crisis. It’s all good until your AI DJ decides that Baby Shark is the peak of human musical achievement and puts it on repeat at your wedding.
Okay. Never mind. We have nothing to fear from AI.
