Stop me if you’ve heard this before: musicians are urging people not to embrace new technology because it’s not real music and it’ll put real musicians out of work. This time the year is 2026 and the technology is AI, but it’s a song we’ve heard before. I remember hearing it back in 1982, when members of the UK Musicians’ Union wanted to ban synthesizers and drum machines to protect working musicians’ jobs.
There’s a long tradition of musicians going “nooooooo!” about new technology in music. In the 1960s there were calls to ban the Mellotron, fearing it would replace session string players. In the 1970s and 1980s disco and dance music’s use of synths and drum machines was derided. In the late 1990s and early 2000s Autotune was the enemy. And now many people are arguing against the use of generative AI.
Talkin’ ’bout AI generation
Whether it’s a synth, a sampler, Autotune or Ableton Live, tech can do great things in music. And you can say the same about AI. Many artists use AI-based mastering tools to make their songs sound better, and tools like AI stem separation and chord detection are incredible. But they’re musical helpers, not music creators.
Fans of generative AI say that artists will use the tech as they did drum machines and digital audio workstations, using new tools to reach new creative heights. And I’m sure many artists will: platforms such as Mozart.ai, which bill themselves as musical co-producers rather than music generators, which create parts of songs rather than complete tracks and which promise that their system wasn’t trained on stolen sounds, look very promising. But what worries me is that the music those musicians make won’t be heard, and won’t make them any money.
And that’s because right now generative AI isn’t really being used to help musicians. It’s being used to drown them out.
Slop, slop, slop music
Streaming services are experiencing a plague of AI slop: waves of AI-generated songs designed to sound like popular artists and in some cases, actually pretending to be real artists. They’re not so much songs as spam, and they can be generated in massive quantities with virtually zero effort. Slop can be created and uploaded far faster than any system can detect it and take it down, leading to the AI grey goo scenario where the volume of AI-generated content overwhelms everything.
That’s a problem for artists because every space on a playlist or page taken up by AI slop is a space a human artist doesn’t get to fill. So the more AI there is the harder it becomes for humans to stand out, and the harder it becomes for them make any money from their music. If they’re not being played in big enough numbers, they’re not being paid.
Recording musicians make money from copyright: they (or their record company) own the rights to their music, and if you want to play it, broadcast it or stream it you need to pay the copyright owner for the right to do that. Spotify alone paid over $11 billion to rights owners in 2025.
Generative AI threatens artists’ income in two ways. First of all, it’s largely based on stealing music from artists: Suno, the leading generative AI music platform, admits that it was trained on “essentially all music files on internet” and like other AI firms it argues that grabbing all that music for training data shouldn’t require permission or payment.
Secondly, as the law currently stands in the US and elsewhere you can’t copyright fully AI-generated music because it isn’t made by any humans; writing prompts isn’t currently considered the same as writing a melody or a lyric.
If you take those two things together (and if the AI firms’ arguments aren’t thrown out of court) you have a real nightmare for musicians: generative AI can take your music without paying for it, make music based on it, and then charge people to use or listen to that music without giving you a cent. All the money that would normally have gone to the music business and to artists goes to the platform owner instead.
Generative AI is offering platforms a magic musical money tree. Let’s say you’re a streamer who brings in around $16 billion a year in revenues and spends $11 billion on paying copyright owners for the rights to stream their songs. How sweet does fully AI-generated music sound right now?
And it’s not just streamers. Music soundtracks all kinds of things from blockbuster movies to YouTube ads. It’s played in stores, in waiting rooms, in receptions and in offices and on factory floors. All of these things pay human musicians. But for how much longer?
The song remains the same
That has the potential to affect all of us, musicians and music fans alike. If your favorite streaming service gets stuffed with AI slop and packs its playlists with AI performances, that’s going to make it so much harder for you to find great music by human artists.
Does that matter? I think it does.
I’m no “keep music real” reactionary who thinks music should only be played on bits of wood by people with beards; I’ve just published a book celebrating music including Hi-NRG, Chicago house, electronic pop and hyperpop. As a musician, I think simulations such as Breaking Rust and Xania Monet, and the music Suno can make in seconds, are technologically very impressive. But as a music fan their music leaves me completely cold.
The tech may be new but what they’re doing is very old: whenever there’s a genuinely good artist there will be imitators trying to copy them. Very few copycats turn out to be anywhere near as good as the people they’re copying.
And that’s the case with the fully AI artists I’ve heard so far. It’s music that’s been made to sound like other people’s music, and that means it’s been made without the passion and soul and personality that makes good music so great and that makes music matter so much to so many of us.
I have another worry, which is that humans will start copying AI music — because if that’s what the platforms prioritise, if that’s what social media rewards, then plenty of musicians will try to jump on the bandwagon because the algorithms will bury anything else.
That’s a future I’d hate to hear, a future where music becomes muzak and pop becomes slop.
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