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this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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Music is a weird art form, because something sounding familiar is very important to our ear. Many people have a really hard time liking music that is too foreign to their taste and end up sticking with only a select few genres.
Where familiarity is important, AI can deliver easily. I would think as much as we hate the idea, there is a pretty significant market for AI-generated music, specifically because it's so predictable and follows convention to a tee.
There is indeed a market for people who don't care what is playing or who made it, and just want to hear the same familiar generic chords, rhythms, and vocals of whatever genre(s) they've grown up listening to. Not to be too blunt, but some people have no taste, and yes, they can eat slop and not notice the difference. Ok, good for them.
But those people are throwing fertilizer on AI weeds that will consume all the water and sunlight that nurtures actual music. That is really a problem.
There are also good reasons for people to use AI music. If you just want some music as background in a video you want to post somewhere, that totally is a legal nightmare here where I live. If you're some small business, that is even more nightmarish. Licensing songs is expensive and hard to do, so just generating some ok tune is the best way forward
There are music libraries dedicated to that like the YT Audio Library for YouTube.
And what is the fundamental difference between the background music styled songs from the YT Audio Library that were done for a small penny in a short time by some underpaid performer vs. something a computer created?
I think people should be very careful about how dependent they become on such things, because inevitably if adoption ever does creep up the spike in prices of accessing those models is going to be astronomically more than having some jingle writer slap something together. Right now they're desperate for adoption but those servers aren't free to run. If they're ever going to turn a profit the fees for accessing these tools are going to be orders of magnitude more than any small business owner can afford, and by then, there won't be any aspiring new artists to take a cash job; they'll have either starved to death or moved on. You're basically Wille E. Coyote-ing yourself off an advertising cliff using AI like that, and same for other similar uses.
And the sooner this happens, the better.
Music doesn't stay under copywrite, forever. You could use anything that's aged out of copywrite, too. And then you, as a business won't alienate people who choose not to consume ai for ethical reasons.
Yeah, about that: In most jurisdictions copyright lasts until 70 years after death. So that means in 2026 that both composer and all performers must have died before 1956. Using such old songs from old recordings is simply not feasible for most companies.
Music recorded before 1923 has a distinct vibe to it that most businesses probably dont want
Especially since thats before the microphone so its all acoustically recorded
I hear that, but it really depends on the service and prompt (including services' internal prompt that is hidden) and result, which are many times black boxes.
I personally think artists & labels will have a tough time proving infringement for non-infringing outputs based purely on training data. But there's really no way of being sure that the "generated" and "uncopyrightable" AI track that's distilled from unlicensed source music is not itself infringing as a pure substantial similarity (or whatever your locality's infringement legal test is) question.
Or someone trying to eek out a living with their music can get paid to do so. There's no shortage of music to suit people's tastes, the problem is discovering it because Spotify sucks at recommendations, and actively promotes AI slop to pad their profit margins while stiffing real musicians. So many mixes use AI instead of recommending actual artists specifically so they don't have to pay royalties.
There might be a market for talentless trash music generators, but it actively harms real people creating real music with their real talent, and I refuse to participate. Fuck AI music. Just because there's a market for something, doesn't automatically mean it's good, or the right thing to do.
I messed around with udio for a bit. What surprised me most is actually how easy it was to blend stuff together and have it sound fun. It does stuff that isn't cookie cutter pretty well.
I think where it's going to hit hard is in terms of personalisation. It's nice that I can turn a song with a unique style into essentially a whole album of it. I also had a lot of fun writing my own lyrics. It hits harder when I wrote it and it's specifically about my experiences, as well as listening to something close to professional quality, but it's basically only for me.
It's like having your own personal band waiting on you.
They are using DRM now. They clearly do not care.
Ya, right after getting bought out by a record company. Worst case scenario by far.