Is there a productivity crisis in music?
The PR material put out by some software companies suggests so. Assistive AI tools are, they gush, helping producers work faster and generate more output than ever before. And in some ways, the music business is set up to reward this sort of efficiency. YouTube and social media algorithms can’t measure quality, so they reward content creators for quantity. Labels pressure their artists to deliver endless new material.
Yet there’s already far too much music in the world. More tracks are uploaded every day than anyone could listen to in a lifetime. Generative AI services are flooding the Internet with tunes created with minimal human involvement. At the most basic level, the idea that we can raise our chance of success by increasing our output level is daft, because to any reasonable approximation, our output will be exactly zero percent of what’s out there.
What’s more, the software companies who are trying to make us more productive find themselves in exactly the same situation. Developers are constantly churning out new processors or loop collections, creating a surfeit of plug‑ins and sample libraries that benefits no‑one. And the swamp will only grow as AI coding tools allow anyone to create their own plug‑ins from text prompts.
Some plug‑in developers, such as Universal Audio, deliver quantity without sacrificing quality. But if the emphasis has to be shifted one way or the other, I’ll back quality every time. Sustainable success rests on cultivating a reputation, and it’s easier to build brand loyalty by focusing on a small catalogue of truly special products. A new plug‑in from a company like Soundtoys, FabFilter, Oeksound, Soundtheory, Sound Radix or Liquidsonics is a major event, because we can be confident that it’ll be good, it’ll be genuinely original — and that we’ll have time to get to know it properly before the next one comes along. I wonder if it’s time to embrace a similar philosophy in music?
Human‑created music will retain its value only if we strive to deliver the best, rather than the most.
We don’t yet know whether generative AI can match the peaks of human creativity, but it’s already obvious that humans can’t compete when it comes to generating slop. If it’s been done before, AI will do it again, much more efficiently than we ever can. And as for assistive AI, I’ve nothing against it, but let’s not use it to make more stuff that no‑one wants or needs. Let’s use it to take music to places it’s not been before. Let’s use it to achieve something that would otherwise have been impossible. And above all, let’s retain pride in our work. Human‑created music will retain its value only if we strive to deliver the best, rather than the most.
Sam Inglis Editor In Chief