Artists Can Complain About AI Music All Day. It Still Won’t Disappear

AI music tools are no longer something artists can afford to ignore

I spent two hours playing around with Sonauto, throwing prompts, styles, genres, male vocals, female vocals, and a few deliberately strange ideas into it just to see what came back. I even tested Norwegian, and that got weird fast. AI music will not disappear, even if some results were rough. Some were funny. Some were so off that they became entertaining for the wrong reasons. Some were actually good, and some people will like it. Who decides what’s pop anyway? That’s interesting.

That is probably the part some people do not want to hear.

This is not a review. I am not writing this to score it, praise it, or pretend it is some polished answer to music creation. It has flaws, obvious ones. The sound quality can be bad. The vocals often feel overprocessed, hollow, or just plain trashy. At times it is genuinely hard on the ears. It can sound cheap, synthetic, and lifeless, like melody filtered through a machine that understands structure more than feeling.

One Sonauto example that caught my attention

This is exactly why I am not interested in pretending every result is useless. While testing Sonauto, I came across tracks that were rough, strange, or flat-out bad, but I also found genuinely decent songs. “Not About You” is one of them. I did not prompt this myself, and it is not really my genre, but it is good. I am not posting it here as an endorsement or a review. I am posting it because ignoring tools like this is not a serious response when they can already produce something people will actually listen to.

Listen to “Not About You” on Sonauto

Bad quality alone will not stop this from spreading

That is where some artists are going wrong with this conversation. They are treating AI music like something that can simply be hated into irrelevance. That is not how this works. Artists can hate AI music all they want, but pretending it will disappear is not a strategy. I hate plenty of shitty music too, and hating it has never stopped it from spreading. That’s a story for another time, but let’s just say it backfired badly. I rest my case.

The real problem is not whether AI music is good enough to replace real music. A lot of the time, it is not. The real problem is that it is already good enough for people who never cared that much in the first place. Good enough for placeholder tracks. Good enough for cheap trailers. Good enough for background music in a game prototype. Good enough for someone who wants fast, free, and easy without having to deal with musicians, producers, writers, or sound engineers.

That is where this starts getting ugly.

You can already see how tempting this is going to be for some developers and creators. Free music. Tuned and ready to go. No collaboration. No waiting. No contracts. No back and forth. No paying someone who has spent years learning how to make something meaningful. Just type a prompt, get a result, and move on. For some people, that probably feels like heaven. I do not think that is a good thing. I think that kind of shortcut will backfire hard if people lean on it too much. As I always say, what a mess.

We have seen this kind of mindset before, even if the technology is different now. Before Pirate Bay, there was Napster. Before one shortcut, there is always another. The names change, the systems get slicker, and the excuses get more polished, but the temptation stays the same: access without effort, output without respect, convenience without thinking too hard about who gets crushed underneath it.

The first people hit will not be the giants

I know some people will use tools like this for experimentation, inspiration, or simply messing around. I know some musicians will test it out just to see what it can do. I know some people will get ideas from it, twist them into something personal, and maybe even use the frustration it creates to write something better. Not every interaction with AI has to be framed like the end of the world.

Let’s not play dumb.

When technology like this lands, it does not hit the biggest names first. It hits the indies first. It hits the freelancers first. It hits the people already scraping together a living from music, audio work, writing, editing, and creative labour that is already undervalued. The established legends will still be legends. The biggest names will still have their audience. The first people squeezed are the smaller artists, the hungry ones, the talented ones who were already fighting uphill.

Artists need a better response than denial

You do not have to like that. I do not like parts of it either. But facing reality is better than performing outrage for an audience that already agrees with you. If artists want to respond properly, then respond properly. Learn what the tools do. Learn where they fail. Learn why they sound empty when they do. Learn where the cracks are. Test them. Criticise them honestly. Use them as inspiration if that gives you something. Or use the anger they create to make something sharper, more human, and more real.

Jimi Hendrix would have lost his mind with a tool like this. He experimented with everything and always pushed sound into new territory. That is a much deeper conversation worth having.

Jimi Hendrix and the spirit of experimentation

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Go play for people. Play live.
That, at least, is a response to AI and Spotify.

Pretending the whole thing will just vanish if enough people complain is not a strategy. I spend most of my time fact-checking because I run a games news outlet, and there are already a million things demanding attention. So instead of wasting time arguing with it, study it. Learn it. Use it carefully, with skill, with lived experience, and with all the things a machine still cannot fake.

Fight it if you want. Mock it if you want. But face it. This is a tool, and it is here to stay, no matter what anyone says.

Artists can hate AI music all they want, but pretending it will disappear is not a strategy. I hate plenty of shitty music too, and hating it has never stopped it from spreading. That’s a story for another time, but let’s just say it backfired badly. I rest my case.

Just a thought. Nothing more, nothing less. I just wanted it out there.

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