this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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There is indeed a market for people who don't care what is playing or who made it, and just want to hear the same familiar generic chords, rhythms, and vocals of whatever genre(s) they've grown up listening to. Not to be too blunt, but some people have no taste, and yes, they can eat slop and not notice the difference. Ok, good for them.
But those people are throwing fertilizer on AI weeds that will consume all the water and sunlight that nurtures actual music. That is really a problem.
There are also good reasons for people to use AI music. If you just want some music as background in a video you want to post somewhere, that totally is a legal nightmare here where I live. If you're some small business, that is even more nightmarish. Licensing songs is expensive and hard to do, so just generating some ok tune is the best way forward
There are music libraries dedicated to that like the YT Audio Library for YouTube.
And what is the fundamental difference between the background music styled songs from the YT Audio Library that were done for a small penny in a short time by some underpaid performer vs. something a computer created?
I think people should be very careful about how dependent they become on such things, because inevitably if adoption ever does creep up the spike in prices of accessing those models is going to be astronomically more than having some jingle writer slap something together. Right now they're desperate for adoption but those servers aren't free to run. If they're ever going to turn a profit the fees for accessing these tools are going to be orders of magnitude more than any small business owner can afford, and by then, there won't be any aspiring new artists to take a cash job; they'll have either starved to death or moved on. You're basically Wille E. Coyote-ing yourself off an advertising cliff using AI like that, and same for other similar uses.
And the sooner this happens, the better.
Music doesn't stay under copywrite, forever. You could use anything that's aged out of copywrite, too. And then you, as a business won't alienate people who choose not to consume ai for ethical reasons.
Yeah, about that: In most jurisdictions copyright lasts until 70 years after death. So that means in 2026 that both composer and all performers must have died before 1956. Using such old songs from old recordings is simply not feasible for most companies.
Music recorded before 1923 has a distinct vibe to it that most businesses probably dont want
Especially since thats before the microphone so its all acoustically recorded
I hear that, but it really depends on the service and prompt (including services' internal prompt that is hidden) and result, which are many times black boxes.
I personally think artists & labels will have a tough time proving infringement for non-infringing outputs based purely on training data. But there's really no way of being sure that the "generated" and "uncopyrightable" AI track that's distilled from unlicensed source music is not itself infringing as a pure substantial similarity (or whatever your locality's infringement legal test is) question.