AI music is coming for your playlist. How are musicians coping?

“It’s a copyright nightmare and it’s disrespectful to artists”, says entertainment, media and tech legal advocate Sandhya Surendran. At Big Tech’s insistence, any material that is publicly available—whether it is protected by copyright or not—is fair game and can be used as training data for AI platforms to learn, under the guise of “fair use”. It is murkier in this regard because the resulting output is not “transformative,” although it is monetised without compensating the original composer or songwriter. Particularly problematic in an Indian context, where copyright and intellectual property are woefully ignored and rarely enforced. We are a land of remixes and remakes, mainly because composers do not own the rights to their music; production companies do.

Big Tech has plenty to gain from this, potentially the liquidation of certain human-driven departments since AI, requiring neither sleep nor sustenance, is the perfect inanimate workhorse. Meanwhile, it’s churn, churn, churn as some tech-bro feels the need to relive his college days without the nuisance of hiring an actual artist with a mouth to feed.

An ideal situation would have artificial intelligence manage the banalities within artistic expression. Manojna Yeluri of Artistik License adds, “We can safely lean on AI to assist with a lot of the mundane and administrative workload, especially if we’re indie or smaller creative projects.” Automate payments, generate invoices, help construct a stageplot, spit out suggestions for treating a recording space, navigate contracts, file taxes… artists are detracted from their main mission with these side quests and could use automation to eliminate them.

Doom and gloom aside, there is a much more hopeful counternarrative: the next step forward. The presence of such AI slop will only elevate art that is human-made. With AI art being based on what already is, making art that is unpredictable and counterintuitive is the next challenge that artists are being invited to embrace. There’s no better time to get really weird with it.

“Everybody’s going to find out that art and music are about the connection between human beings, not about the art itself. Welcome to the dawn of authenticity. Just hang tight,” reassures Josh Fernandez, frontman of our band The F16s. A real piece of work, but he’s real and that’s what matters.

Also read:

Why are Indian musicians at the top of everyone’s playlists? Actually, it’s about time they were

Gayathri Krishnan’s groovy classical-meets-R&B music will make you turn the volume up

French-Sri Lankan musician Nilusi’s butter-smooth voice will keep you up at night