The Muzak-ification of Everything
AI music promised a world of infinite creativity, but it's delivering an endless landfill of sonic sludge that's burying real artists.
by The Editors
The Great Sonic Landfill
Remember the promise? The internet was supposed to save musicians. It was going to smash the monolithic record labels and usher in a golden age of the “long tail.” Niche artists, weirdos, innovators—they’d all find their audience, their “1,000 True Fans,” and make a living. It was a beautiful dream.
Now, a new machine has arrived to kill that dream, and it’s humming a horribly generic tune.
AI music generators like Suno and Udio are the talk of Silicon Valley. With a simple text prompt, anyone can spit out a “song” in seconds. A country song about a pickup truck? Done. A 90s rock anthem about filing your taxes? Why not. An ambient synth track for your cat’s TikTok channel? It’s yours.
This isn’t creativity. It’s content production on a terrifying, industrial scale. And it’s creating a sonic landfill that is burying the very artists the internet was supposed to empower.
The Economics of Zero
Let’s be brutally honest about the economics of being a musician today. It was already a nightmare. Spotify pays something like $0.003 per stream. You need hundreds of thousands of plays just to earn minimum wage. For the vast majority of artists—the long tail—it was never about getting rich. It was about earning enough to keep going. A little from streaming, a little from touring, a little from selling merch.
One of the most vital, if unglamorous, income streams was licensing. That background music in a YouTube video, the jingle in a local car commercial, the hold music for a corporate phone line—that was a paying gig for a real person. A composer or a small band could make a few hundred, or even a few thousand, dollars. It was the kind of work that paid the rent and funded the next album.
AI is gutting that market completely.
Why would a small business or a YouTuber pay a human artist $200 for a unique track when an AI can generate a “good enough” one for free? They won’t. We saw this play out with AI image generators and stock photographers. An entire profession, hollowed out overnight. Now the algorithm is coming for the composers.
This flood of free, disposable, royalty-free audio doesn’t just compete with human artists; it devalues the very concept of music. The background noise of our lives is becoming a gray, algorithmic slurry. The infinite “long tail” has become an infinite content abyss, making it harder than ever for actual human artists to be discovered.
We’re trading songs born from heartbreak, joy, and struggle for audio wallpaper generated by a machine that has experienced none of it.
The Soul of the Song
But this isn’t just an economic argument. It’s a cultural one. A spiritual one.
Music isn’t just a pleasant arrangement of notes. It’s a transfer of emotion. It’s the sound of a human heart, filtered through experience and skill. When you listen to Nina Simone, you hear the weight of her history. When you listen to a punk rock band, you hear the raw energy of their frustration.
An AI has no history. It has no heart. It has no frustration.
It’s a statistical parrot. It has analyzed millions of human-made songs and learned to mimic the patterns. It can create something that sounds like a sad song, but it has never felt sadness. It can generate a track that sounds energetic, but it has no energy of its own. It is a perfect, soulless imitation.
We are rapidly creating a world soundtracked by nothing. A world where the music in our coffee shops, our social media feeds, and our video games is designed by a machine to be maximally pleasant and minimally challenging. This is the Muzak-ification of all culture. It’s a bland, beige, predictable future, and I want no part of it.
So what’s the fix? It’s not about stopping the technology. You can’t. The fix is a conscious, human choice.
It’s about turning off the algorithmic playlists and seeking out the weird stuff. It’s about going to see live music in a small, sweaty club. It’s about buying an album on Bandcamp, where more of your money actually reaches the artist. It’s about choosing to fill your life with the messy, imperfect, and glorious sounds of real people.
We have to decide if we want our world to be scored by human souls, or by a content machine.
Analog picks (yes, real things)
It's a brilliant look at how context, technology, and economics shape music, written by a legendary artist. It reminds you that music isn't just a product; it's a human process.
It's a brilliant look at how context, technology, and economics shape music, written by a legendary artist. It reminds you that music isn't just a product; it's a human process.
Stop listening to music through your tinny laptop speakers. Get a pair of decent, wired, over-ear headphones and actually *listen*. These are a fantastic entry point to high-quality audio without breaking the bank, forcing you to engage with music, not just consume it.