In the April 9 issue, I wrote about how AI is invading the music industry at a rate and to a degree that, even accounting for my alarmist feelings about AI, is shocking. Since then, I’ve been spending a bit of my reading/research time each day checking out what’s new in AI music. And there’s quite a bit.

One of the things we discussed at the Cigar Bar on Friday was a story I’d read in The Free Press. It was about Murphy Campbell, a singer-songwriter and banjo player from North Carolina who was eking out a modest living videotaping herself sitting on a log or a rocking chair and performing her original compositions. Her fan base was steadily increasing when, a few months ago, she noticed that songs were appearing on her Spotify page that were attributed to her, but were not hers. She hadn’t written them. She hadn’t performed them. And yet, they sounded eerily familiar.
 
She eventually realized that they were AI-generated, probably created by someone who was feeding an AI with snippets of her published songs and asking it to create other songs that were similar.
 
Understandably, this irked her. But when she received a notice that she was “sharing” royalties for these counterfeits that were being played on platforms all over the world, she was flummoxed. Who was selling this music? And what, if anything, could she do about it?
 
A few of the people in our little group on Friday had heard of this scam going on in the music industry. “It’s a new thing,” said B, “so it’s not well known. But it isn’t rare either. It’s not a huge issue right now, but it could easily become one.”
 
The problem, B explained, is that if you know what you are doing, you can feed in any sort of music you want and generate a troop of AI singer-songwriters producing and performing “original” music for you. And all you have to do is a bit of video cutting and pasting and using an AI to create a royalty-sharing contract, either with the Murphy Campbells of the world or even with your own AI avatars.
 
The conversation moved on to the potential of this – good and bad.
 
On the good side is the possibility that the music industry could grow geometrically as millions of kinda-like songs and singers are produced and promoted by thousands of AI agents working in their basements or kitchens. 
 
On the bad side is the eventual (but not that eventual) collapse of the music culture we enjoy now, with human-generated music becoming, at best, a personal hobby with very little monetizable value, and where 80% to 90% of the money made will go to musicians and dealmakers that insert themselves into the AI music industry now and figure out what needs to be done.
 
I know a few musicians and would-be musicians that either make a living or hope to make a living composing and performing their own music. Most of them are hanging on to the hope that AI will never be able to capture a large swath of the marketplace by selling fake music to real people. 
 
And maybe they will be proven right. 
 
But what if they are wrong? What will they be left with? 
 
If you are in the music industry now or would like to be in the future, you need to hedge your bet by continuing to do your own thing while learning about and even testing out AI music. You’ve got nothing but a bit of time to lose… and you’ve got an exciting and remunerative future to win.

And Eventually Replace Human Musicians? 

Since I’m on this subject for the second time in a month, I thought I would give you some outside perspectives on the questions I’ve been indirectly asking.

Four Articles Worth Reading 

* The Atlantic on how AI, algorithms, and streaming are reshaping music

* The Economist on how AI systems are generating music at scale

* The New Yorker on how major labels are experimenting with AI while trying to protect artists

* Time magazine on how AI could undermine authenticity and replace human artists if unchecked

Four Video Commentaries Worth Watching

* “AI Will Destroy the Music Industry.”

* “The Music Industry Is Turning on AI Producers.”

* “The Music Industry’s AI Takeover.”

* “Is AI music going to overshadow human music?” 

KK Isn’t Worried About AI… Here’s Why 

After reading my April 9 post on the AI music debate, KK, a longtime friend and regular reader, wrote to cheer me up with this positive take on it:

“Nice to see you writing about music, a subject near and dear to my ear. My take on AI is it will not have a formative effect on the industry. Why? Because most bands today make the bulk of their money from live shows, especially touring, ticket sales, and merchandise sold at concerts. Streaming, royalties, and licensing can add income, but they usually pay less than performances for most active bands. Gone are the days of gold records creating fortunes.

“I think of AI as an invasive plant, needing herbicides only when it’s encroached to the point of intolerance. How things eventually level out will most likely be seen by people other than you and me.

“Still, my biggest concern is AI’s use by the criminally intent. I believe the combination of Quantum computing and AI will render encryption and the blockchain obsolete (bitcoin).

“Soon to be entering my 77th year, I can only say maybe we will see it.”

My Response: KK, I understand how you feel about AI music and how it may inform your hopes for the future. I used to have the same feelings and thoughts about AI writing.

Your point about the economics of the music industry is a good one. But consider the success of The Sphere in Las Vegas, and the fact that AI music producers will be able to generate and own all the rights to their creations. All that is missing is the emotional attachment.

I was feeling something for that second AI avatar I mentioned in the April 9 issue: Morgan Luna. In my future vision, I’ll be able to send her fan mail, which she’ll respond to, letting me know that she’d like to have a chat with me online. That will become a several-weeks-long (or several-months-long) romance, if I am so inclined. And then finally – if she becomes as popular as I think she might – I’ll be able to order a robotic version of her through Amazon and have her delivered to my hotel room in 24 hours!

The downside, of course, could be unimaginably bad…

I’ve been writing a lot about AI lately.

One of the many predictions I’ve made is that one of the first business sectors that would be smashed by AI would be anything and everything related to visual media, because AIs have proven to be very good at not only replicating complex images instantly, but editing and emending them so that the end product could look as good as an analog visual, but at a small fraction of the cost.

What I didn’t anticipate, however, is how good and how quickly AI was going to get in terms of creating creative content.

I saw the following news item online yesterday:

Is This the End of Music as We Know It?

The AI-generated song “How Was I Supposed to Know?” hit #20 on BillBoard’s Hot R&B Songs chart last year. It was made using Suno, an AI music-generator platform. The popularity of the platform has catapulted Suno’s 39-year-old CEO, Mikey Shulman, into the music industry’s elite – and made him enemy number one in some circles.

You can read more about it here.

“Really?” I thought. “It hit the charts?”

I could imagine – possibly – that AI could generate a decent hip-hop or rap number. Perhaps a corny Country Western ballad. But rhythm and blues?

So, I checked it out… and I was blown away.

You can see it for yourself here – a video of the song being performed by an AI avatar who goes by the name of Xania Monet.

Xania Monet

Well, what did you think?

You can’t honestly say that it is a bad song – i.e., that the music is lame, or the singing is not spirited, or the lyrics are not as good as 90% of other R&B lyrics. I’m hardly an aficionado of the genre, but I like it and have listened to a lot of it over the years. And my impression is that while this is not Whitney Houston or Luther Vandross, it’s certainly at least “pretty good.”

Is Xania Monet Just Another Hyped-Up One-Off? 

That’s a fair question. I did a bit of searching and, in less than 30 seconds, I came upon a music video featuring a woman named Morgan Luna that, once again, blew me away. Since I wasn’t specifically searching for AI singers, my first impression was that this woman and this song must be real.

Morgan Luna

I mean, her facial expressions and the sound of her voice – they just seemed so real to me. And I wanted her to be real, because, aside from her talent, she is stunningly beautiful. In a way that is reminiscent of other beautiful Black singers that flickered through my mind.

Again, you can see it for yourself here.

Here’s the thing – what’s keeping me up at night. Had you asked me if this was possible a year ago, I would have scoffed at the idea. Had you asked me six months ago, when I started looking into the AI story in earnest, I might have said, “It might be possible, but probably not in my lifetime.”

And now, here we are.

Yes, I do think the music industry will survive. But not like it is today. It will be transformed, like almost every other aspect of our lives, in a radical way that will leave the world divided between those that lock in an inside position on the transformation and everyone else – including future Whitney Houstons – forever.

Postscript: 

This is why AI is accelerating faster than it seems.

Here are some positive possibilities.

But this is why there’s cause for concern.

Notes from My Journal: 

The political event that, in 2016, sliced America into two political/social tribes, and has steadily widened and deepened in the past 10 years, is about to become an irreversible fact in our nation’s future. At least, that’s how I am feeling as I absorb the incredibly rapid expansion and progression of AI technology throughout every aspect of my life.

Last night at the Cigar Club, I took part in a “So-what-are-you-up to?” conversation with four friends and Number One Son (who was visiting with his family for a week and is in the process of inventing some sort of AI tool) that slid quickly into a succession of animated accounts about businesses started in minutes and millions of jobs being rendered redundant with every passing month.

This is something I’ve been thinking about since I saw how AI had already and forever disrupted the commercial advertising industry in the summer of 2025, which I wrote about last month in the Feb. 28 issue. That’s when I introduced my “80/20” hypothesis about how AI is going to radically deflate the value of 80% of the highest-paying trades and professions, leaving workers unable to even earn a living without increasing their production 500% through the competent use of AI.

The conversation last night quickly mutated into a techno-pigeon form of English that I could not fully understand, but understood enough to recognize that, whatever subtle differences the others had between them about this or that future development, they all shared my view of how quickly and deeply AI is about to change the world and the probability of an 80/20 outcome.

And that gave me one more reason to get going with my $100 million 80/20 Club project. If only I knew what, exactly, that is going to be.

When I look at the world around me, I see so much in flux that I’m hesitant to make a lot of predictions. Well… that’s not true. I’m eager to make predictions that will in some way disturb or downright irritate 80+% of the people that read the following:

10 Ways the World Will Be Different in 10 Years

1. The current monetary system will be completely reinvented. Cash and cryptocurrencies will be illegal and the diehards that hold onto them, believing that they have safety in the “crypto,” will be in jail. The only legal currency will be digital, and the most dominant one will be – surprise, surprise – the digital dollar!

2. There will be no more annual filing for income taxes, or quarterly filing for corporate taxes, or filing for any sort of taxes at all. Taxes will be entirely controlled by governmental AI accounting systems. Every dollar that every citizen owes to the government, whether he or she knows it or not, will be determined and collected by this hugely more powerful taxing authority. All of it will be done without any input from individual income earners or corporations.

3. Serious crimes – including murder, kidnapping, rape, human trafficking, severe child abuse, armed robbery, carjacking, arson, larceny, arms dealing, large-scale manufacturing and/or distribution of controlled substances, embezzlement, money laundering, identity theft, tax evasion, forgery, insider trading, and terrorism – will have been nearly 100% eliminated, except for crimes committed by the really (not judicially determined) insane.

4. Most misdemeanor crimes – including simple assault, domestic violence, trespassing, possession of stolen property, public intoxication, traffic violations, littering, loitering, public inebriation, smoking and/or drinking in prohibited areas – will be extremely rare because the detection, prosecution, and punishment of them will be supervised and executed by advanced AI technology, including video and audio recording systems, as well as digitalized and AI-run judicial and prosecutorial systems.

5. There will be no more illegal migration, no more illegal voting, no more smuggling, people trafficking, or human slavery, except when permitted by governments.

6. Nation-states as they currently exist will be transformed into three or four “digital mega-states” that will each have their own laws, judicial protocols, and processes that will exist to reinforce the cultural values determined by AI algorithms that have already been designed.

7. Personal and financial privacy will cease to exist. Every action of every citizen will be recorded and embedded on blockchains that will be owned and controlled by the managers of the digital mega-states. There will be only minor and sporadic objections to these changes because the great percentage of the populations affected by them will welcome them with open arms.

8. Social credit scoring will be universal, with credits given for all actions in compliance with digital mega-state mandates and deductions given for all actions, including expressions of thought, that are contrary to the values and principles of the digital mega-states, which will have been permanently embedded in their algorithms. Again, these changes will be not only accepted by the majority of the citizenry, they will be embraced by them.

9. Drug addiction will no longer be treated as a threat to society, although people convicted as drug addicts will be incarcerated in open-air prisons that will provide them with enough nutrition to keep them alive, along with strong drugs that will keep them unable to leave the open-air prisons.

10. Having more than two children will be illegal in all digital mega-states and will be enforced through massive vaccination systems. As a result, the world population will fall precipitously each year, and eventually settle at three to five billion.

PostScript: 

Click here to watch a short film about AI and human labor.

* “The scary truth about how far behind American kids have fallen…” 
Center for Education Policy Research

* “America’s education system is a mess…”
Thomas Fordham Institute

* “US high school students continue to lose ground in math and reading…”
Public Broadcasting Service News