Music has just changed forever and we should be freaking out more about it

I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it.

Imagine that Oppenheimer successfully detonated the first atomic bomb and… the rest of the world had just shrugged its shoulders and carried on as normal.

Because that’s what seems to have just happened in the entire field of human culture known as “music”.

A couple of weeks ago, a company called Suno released a new version of its AI-generated music app to the public. It works much like ChatGPT: You type in a prompt describing the song you’d like… and it creates it.

The results are, in my view, absolutely astounding. So much so that I think it will be viewed by history as the end of one musical era, and the start of the next one. Just as The Bomb reshaped all of warfare, we’ve reached the point where AI is going to reshape all of music.

For some reason though, it hasn’t triggered an avalanche of think-pieces in the broadsheet press. It hasn’t had music writers raising the alarm. There are no panicked, viral tweets and Instagram from musicians worried about their livelihoods.

I think this is strange, as you only have to hear the results of what it can do to see why it matters.

For example, here’s what it came up with when I asked it to write an indie-rock song about Keir Starmer’s reforms of the Labour Party.

Or how about this? Given my post last week, here’s a track I call The Ballad of Owen Jones – based on his recent column where he announced he was leaving the Labour Party.

(Note: This was made using “Custom” mode, where you provide the lyrics manually, and specify the genre you’d like. My top tip is to use ChatGPT to write the lyrics, and then paste them into Suno to turn them into music.)

And one last one, because I know I have lots of Liberal Democrats who read my Substack. Here’s a special treat that speaks to your three major interests: It’s a passable Eurovision song about Doctor Who persuading the Daleks to reform their electoral system to use Proportional Representation.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Yes, these songs aren’t great. But here’s the thing: They’re not terrible either.

If you were to casually hear them on the radio, you might not even notice they’re AI generated, though you might roll your eyes at what the kids of today are listening to¹.

However, I can understand if you’re still unimpressed. If this was the limit of AI capabilities there wouldn’t be many reasons for ‘real’ musicians to lose any sleep over it.

But remember how there were complaints that the first AI image generators couldn’t get the number fingers right? Or when the first deepfakes wouldn’t blink? We don’t hear those complaints anymore because the technology very rapidly improved².

And there is every reason to believe the same is going to happen to AI-generated music.

I mean, forget my efforts above, if you listen to some of the “trending” tracks on the Suno homepage³, then you’ll really get a sense for just how good this technology can be. Check out this blues track, or this 1920s dubstep, or this gospel song about eating a burger.

What’s important is that this is just the beginning. All of these songs merely represent the worst this technology will ever be.

That’s why I think the bomb has just exploded. It’s another milestone moment like the one a year ago when we first tried ChatGPT and image generators like Midjourney and DALLE.

As a result, I can’t envisage any future where the music industry isn’t completely transformed, starting from this current moment, and despite this, no one really seems to be… freaking out about this?

So lets dig into what this transformation is going to look like – and how, for better or worse, it is going to change music.

Every musician is screwed

When ChatGPT was first released, a common critique was to point out what it couldn’t do. It couldn’t write poetry, it couldn’t report the news accurately – and so on.

In fact, just last week big-shot New York Times journalist Ezra Klein said “I can’t for the life of me figure out how to use it in my own day-to-day job,” regarding AI.