Can't it be enough? Do we have to endlessly repeat everything that worked once? Hasn't enough pop been made? I feel the same way about actors and movies: if actors or set designers never work again because of AI, shouldn't we just mourn them (or watch the millions of hours of film we already have) and move on?

Recorded music killed people playing music to entertain the rest of the family. You used to teach your kids how to play instruments so they could entertain your guests or have a good time during a boring day. We can still do that, playing music alone is fun, and playing music together can be transcendent. Singing in harmony or in unison is intimate.

There's an athletic element. I'll always want to see somebody, in person, playing music live. It's like watching a juggler. What we've done is isolated music to these horrible alienating mass consumption venues, rather than it coming out of every bar, and every other restaurant, and from the street, and in people's homes. It's a debasing and commoditization of music, helped by the introduction of artistically unintelligible lyrics in the 60's, and draconian, authoritarian intellectual property laws that demand that you never play any song that you hear, you have to create new product.

And as above, this goes for movie entertainment, too. People will always want to watch plays, they're assemblages of memorization, vocalization, and coordination of movement. They astound. You can do it yourself: you can memorize a poem and bring it to a party, or you can come up with a skit. This is how people entertained themselves before being colonized by the tyranny of mass-produced recordings.

I don't know if it's clear from the above, but I hope AI completely devalues recorded music, and ends the celebrity worship industry that is built up around it. Generated music will be everywhere, and it will feel like slop. Watching someone in front of you, showing you what they can do, will never be devalued. Joining in because you know the song will bring back the feeling of the Irish and English broadsides that we derived this pop stuff from, through the blues, and that we enjoyed together for centuries.

Going to a concert in an arena and sitting half a kilometer from a band to listen to them play is dystopian. People who lived through a time where the production of music was commonplace and pervasive, not just its consumption, if they were teleported to this era, with its paid streams through earbuds, would be depressed.

edit: was a professional touring musician for a number of years a long time ago.

The decline of the working musician