Making Music in an Age of Infinite Output
A friend forwarded this excellent Financial Times (FT) piece, “The music industry’s cautious embrace of AI” this morning. It took me a while to process it. In the end, the analysis felt less like encountering a new argument and more like seeing my lived experience expertly articulated by someone outside the noise.
The piece cuts through the usual AI culture war and names the real source of industry unease: not that machines can make music, but that creation now scales faster than the systems built to support discovery, trust, and attribution.
When tens of thousands of AI-generated tracks are uploaded every day, the problem isn't artistic legitimacy. The problem is that signal collapses under sheer volume. Discovery systems break down. Fraud becomes easier to pull off. Listeners can't tell what's worth their attention. Artists, whether they're working with AI or not, disappear into the churn. We're not watching a creative crisis unfold. We're watching a systems failure, and the industry knows it.
What’s striking about the FT piece is how pragmatic it is. Labels and platforms aren’t seriously trying to ban AI. They know that path leads nowhere. Instead, they’re moving toward licensing, opt-in participation, provenance,* and monetizable frameworks that reintroduce structure and accountability. This is less about ideology than survival. Enforcement alone can’t manage infinite output, but incentives and infrastructure might.
Disclosure becomes a UX problem, not a moral one. Attribution becomes table stakes. And the unresolved fault line isn’t voice or likeness, which are comparatively easy to police, but style. Once style is in play, the old boundaries blur fast, and the law struggles to keep up. The article doesn’t resolve that tension, but it doesn’t pretend it isn’t there either.
As a creator who arrived at AI songwriting through curiosity, grief, reinvention, and a lifelong relationship with words, I don’t fit neatly into the industry’s old binaries. I tell my own life stories through lyrics. I collaborate transparently with AI. My work is deeply personal, with tools that are new. That hybrid reality is largely missing from the public debate, yet it’s where many creators actually live, including many in Nashville right now.
The real question isn’t whether AI should exist in music. It’s whether human intent, authorship, and story can still be seen and valued once output becomes effectively infinite. The fight ahead comes down to rebuilding signal. Without it, meaningful creative work just dissolves into noise. That's the work I want to protect and continue.
*Provenance is simply transparency about how a song came to be.