if music fades, will we survive?

 My relationship with music is one of the longest-standing relationships I have had in my life. I cannot remember a time when music was not part of my everyday existence. Music has been there through every version of me. It has soundtracked long drives, short walks, heartbreaks, celebrations, sport days and spring-cleaning Saturdays. It has transcribed feelings I couldn’t quite put into words. It has been my journal too, committing to memory people, events and eras I would otherwise have forgotten. Most importantly, music has introduced me to a plethora of people. Living, breathing people, and that is something I’m not quite ready to let go of yet… or ever.

The introduction or penetration of AI into the world of music has me pondering on the relationship I have with music, and I’ve found that it has never been skin-deep.

During the era of CDs, I frequented some music stores so often that I was essentially part of the furniture. The salespeople knew me by name, and I knew theirs. They would let me in on what was coming into stock so I would not miss out on a unit I desperately wanted.

I loved those shops.

There was something almost ceremonial about walking through rows of CDs, picking one up, turning it over and reading everything on the sleeve. I would discover artists I had never heard of simply because something about the cover caught my attention.

And that was part of the joy of it.

I wasn’t just buying a collection of songs. I was buying into a vision, an artist’s world. From the sleeve, I could meet the people who came together to bring that world to life.

The music had a face.

It had a story.

It had a home.

Music has never existed in a vacuum. It’s deeply woven into our social lives. It is connected to people, places, politics, language, memory, and even identity.

The life and context from which music emerges matters.

It is a collection of lived experiences translated into chord progressions, melodies and words.

It is the medium through which we see and are seen. Thus, the life and context from which music emerges matters, and it does. It’s the reason we care about the backstory of the artist. We want to know where they came from. We want to know what happened to them. We want to understand what they were thinking when they penned a song because we care. We care about them, we care about the process, we care about how we fit into their world as much as we care about how they fit into ours.

Artists have played the vital role of holding space and speaking truth for centuries.

Sometimes they tell us what we already know but have been afraid to say.

Sometimes they introduce us to an experience we have never had.

Sometimes they make us dance when we are grieving.

Sometimes they make us uncomfortable.

Sometimes they give a generation language for its frustrations.

And sometimes they simply give us somewhere to put our feelings.

That is what draws us towards them.

It is also what repels us from them.

It is what makes us care enough to have an opinion.

It is what makes us argue about musicians we have never met.

It is what makes us spend grocery money on concert tickets.

I don’t know whether a meaningful relationship between AI and humans can exist through music. I don’t know if I want it to. I don’t know whether it should. It feels rather disrespectful to the artists who have devoted their lives to this craft. Not because every AI-generated song is inherently bad. Some of it will undoubtedly be technically impressive. Some of it may even be beautiful.

The problem is not necessarily whether the music sounds good.

The problem is what we are losing when sounding good becomes the only measure that matters.

If all we require from music is a pleasing arrangement of sounds, then perhaps AI has already solved the problem.

But if we expect music to carry memory, identity, struggle, joy, longing, humour, grief, politics, community and human experience, then I think the question becomes much more complicated.

Because a machine can imitate the expression of an emotion, but it cannot have the experience that produces that emotion. And that sentimentality is the breaking point.

An artist spends years developing a voice. A musician practises the same instrument until their fingers know what their conscious mind no longer needs to instruct. A songwriter rewrites a verse because the first version is technically correct but emotionally false. Those imperfections become part of the work. And perhaps that is what I am reluctant to surrender. The evidence of human presence.

Music has always evolved alongside technology.

The question is not whether technology belongs in music.

It does.

The question is who benefits, who gets credited, who gets paid and whose humanity remains visible in the process.

If AI-generated music begins competing directly with human artists for streams, playlists, gigs and attention, we should be asking serious questions about what happens to the people whose livelihoods depend on creating music. And we should be asking them before the technology becomes so normal that we stop questioning it.

Maybe the future isn’t about choosing humans over machines. Perhaps the future will not be as binary as that. Maybe AI will become another instrument. Maybe entirely new forms of music will emerge that artists will use it creatively, just as they have used every other technological development. Maybe entirely new forms of music will emerge that we cannot yet imagine.

I am open to that possibility.

What I am not ready to accept is a future in which we become so satisfied with technically perfect music that we stop caring whether there was a human being behind it.

Because then something much bigger than an industry will have changed.

We will have changed our expectations of art.

And perhaps, in doing so, we will have changed our expectations of ourselves.

There is still a long way to go before we reach a point where human musical craft becomes scarce.

I hope we never get there.

I hope there will always be someone somewhere writing a song at three in the morning because they cannot sleep.

I hope there will always be a kid saving pocket money for an album.

I hope there will always be musicians playing to a tiny crowd in a venue nobody has heard of, slowly building a following.

I hope there will always be someone hearing a song for the first time and thinking, How did this person know exactly what I was feeling?

And I hope we continue to value the person behind that feeling.

Because music has always been more than just sound and entertainment; it has been a reminder that someone had lived, felt, imagined, struggled, celebrated, loved, and lost, and somehow managed to turn all of that into something we could hear and understand, creating a conducive space for connection.

And if we are going to invite machines into that space, I hope we do so without forgetting why we loved the space in the first place.