My take on AI Music & AI Artists.

Everyone’s got an opinion about AI bands and AI artists “ruining music.” Here’s mine: Who’s a real artist anyway?

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A lot of “real” artists are screaming about AI music right now. They’re worried an algorithm will replace them.

Here’s my question: replace what, exactly?

Is it replacing the kid who buys a guitar at Guitar Center, strums two chords, posts a shaky Instagram reel, and calls it a career? That kid was never an artist, just someone chasing a few likes before moving on to the next hobby.

Being an artist has never just been about making noise. Anyone can do that.

Being an artist means you build the whole machine around your noise and fans relate to the noise and the story behind and above it.

You write and sing songs, sure, but you also build the audience, the narrative, the moment and find that people see (and don't see) art in what you do. You shake hands. You do deals. You lose sleep over emails that get ignored. You knock on doors that slam in your face. And you knock again. You build catalogue over the years and when the doors finally open, you're not even that surprised they did. Being an artist means that you have been copied at least once.

Most people, "artists" won’t do that. AI or not. That’s why I don’t lose sleep over “AI bands.”

We get submissions from AI-based artists here and there. Some of them, truth be told, have better outreach, better narrative, and better visuals than a lot of so-called “real” artists. Some humans can’t even line up a decent graphic or get a mix that doesn’t sound like it was done by someone who has no idea on how to produce a record.

Even if you’re a “real” artist, 99.999% of what you make is influenced by someone who came before you, existing sounds, stories, ideas.

So is AI evil for doing the same? No. It’s just a tool. If an AI act can make people care, show up, stay loyal, then it’s done the same job as any flesh-and-blood act. Good for it. Compete like the rest of us.

What does make my blood boil regarding AI artists and how corporate is treating it?

Spotify pushing AI artists over real ones. Shocking? Not really. If you know me, or if you’ve survived one of my “quotes of the day” without quitting music all along... you already know I’ve been telling you to stop begging Spotify for validation since forever.

My first reaction when a few artists sent me that article about the now-famous AI band (with its magical 300k monthly listeners, that somehow nobody’s ever actually heard in real life until Rolling Stone and Billboard decided it’s news):

“Oh, they did that? I told you that Spotify does not care about artists, didn’t I?”

Funny how you can have 300k monthly listeners and still be a ghost. Maybe it’s not the AI that’s scary maybe it’s the people still waiting for Spotify to hand them a backbone.

I do have another major problem with it, and it is AI companies scraping years of sweat from real artists to train their models, then pushing out music that wouldn’t exist without that stolen sweat, and doing it without paying a dime. That’s not innovation. That’s theft.

You want the data? License it. Pay up.

You want to be an “AI artist”? Then be one, put in the same grind any human would. Tour. Build a story. Stand behind the work. Prove you can hold an audience when the hype dies off. Music has always had ghosts and parasites.

The tech just looks different now. Real artists, the ones who do the full job, will always outlast whatever shortcut is trending.

Doesn’t matter if you’re human or code. If you’re building something real, intriguing, story-telling and impactful, you will eventually find an audience that will recognize that. The real ones, human or AI, will stick around. The rest, as usual, get cleared out.