I Think AI Will Be Worse for Musicians than for Writers
Not saying it's great for writers, but wow.
There was a time, nearly 20 years gone now, when I lived for a couple of years as a musician playing primarily in cover bands. It was a lot of fun.
I didn’t make a lot of money but costs were low because I shared a house with 9 other people. For the most part, when we wanted to drink — which was nightly — we drank for free. My rent was $360 per month, all utilities included. I smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. The house cat once peed on my cymbals. Good times.
I was talking to a gentleman recently who runs a brewery tasting room and, because he regularly books cover bands, I got to talking to him about cover band musicians.
I said, “You’ll never believe this, but back in the day, I made a living on $100 per night playing just two or three nights a week.”
He blinked and said, “That’s still what they make.”
Wow.
Granted, we have much bigger problems. And a cover band setting up in any venue is a guarantee that I want to leave. But I still think it’s amazing that the pay hasn’t budged in nearly 20 years.
I did some reading up to try to get a sense of where the music industry is currently and where it might be heading. The answers appear to be, respectively, “in the toilet,” and, “toward an even less appealing toilet.”
I think that musicians, like we writers, face a coming armageddon at the hands of AI. As you know, I wrote about ChatGPT a while back.
In that piece I said that writers like myself don’t have much to fear from AI because, essentially, the industry buried our corpses in the foundations of Jeff Bezos’s empire long ago. To the extent that we’re still doing it, it’s thanks to the good will between us and our audience, a relationship into which AI can’t shoehorn.
Thank you, by the way, for being here. That said…
I Think AI Will Be Worse for Musicians than for Writers
It’s possible to enjoy a song indefinitely without ever being told who wrote it. Contrast that with writing.
Most likely, the only reason you are reading this is we already have some kind of tenuous relationship. Maybe you subscribed to this substack, or someone shared this with you, etc. (In either case, again, thank you). Also, unlike a song, my name is right at the top of this post.
Sure, songs have credits too, but if you’re listening to them in a playlist they easily go by unread.
In this way, though, musicians are much more vulnerable to AI because the AI writers not only have no rights but can instantly launder real people’s rights.
AI will be able to write endless “sound-alikes.” Just plug in an existing popular song and the AI can produce unlimited combinations and permutations of that song to circumvent copyright. Any real person who makes a popular song will see their work copied immediately.
In some cases, the real artists will be able to sue, but that costs money and takes a long time. By the time the courts are able to react — in the cases where the plaintiff can afford to sue — the damage will have been done many, many times over. And that will only be in cases where the plaintiff’s court has any jurisdiction over the defendant.
There are people out there acting as if this is somehow a good thing, and I think they have to either be insane or on the take. Regardless, like everything else that’s a terrible idea for people but makes a very few very rich, it will happen in the US.
Sad, but true. And the crappy thing is they can easily develop the coding that would tie back an AI creation to its source material and credit the originator. Maybe in only micro fractions of a cent, but at least that would be something.