On The State Of AI Artists, AI Music and The New Music Business.
It’s almost the last quarter of 2026, and an “AI artist’s” audience, family, friends and supporters can genuinely call that project their favorite music project.
I don’t find that particularly strange anymore, specifically not after Goathead’s mascot or better put creative and financial experiment “Lil Skeleton” sold more direct to consumer album units than any human and signed artists under our roaster.
The conversation around AI music still spends too much time asking whether something is “real,” when the public has always made its decisions based on something much simpler: whether they connect with it.
If the music works, the story makes sense and people develop a relationship with the project, the technology behind it quickly becomes only one part of the conversation.
The important word is always the same: narrative.
The general public is increasingly accepting AI as a creative tool, matter of fact, they are becoming the artists….but acceptance usually comes when two things are present: people understand what they are looking at, and they have some reason to care about it. Even if for just 25 seconds.
You can have the most technically impressive AI project in the world, but if there is no story, no identity and no relationship with an audience you’re working very hard to funnel in your artist’s ethos and box, it is just technology and AI Slop.
The same is true of a human artist with an expensive microphone and no human point of reach.
I think some traditional artists misunderstand this because they have spent their entire lives looking at the music business primarily through music.
If you have never worked inside a creative office, a corporation, finance, advertising, branding or another environment where ideas have to be packaged, positioned and eventually presented and sold, there are parts of the equation you may never have needed to think about.
Making music is one discipline. Building something around that music that another person can immediately understand is another.
Take someone like Chris, who comes from finance. He may not have twenty years of experience playing guitar, but he may understand capital, organization, investor psychology and how to turn a group of supporters into financing for an AI artist venture.
Selena may come from branding and positioning or even a fashion retail store…and yet understand exactly how to give that same project a visual language, a personality and a stream of content that people recognize immediately. If that content reaches millions of people, it would be strange to dismiss what she built simply because AI was somewhere in the production process.
Those skills have always mattered in entertainment. Music has never existed by itself. The record matters, the photograph matters, the cover art matters, the interview matters, the clothes matters, the video matters, the release strategy matters…and the story somebody repeats when they tell a friend about an artist matters.
The industry has always created context around music. AI did not invent that. It simply gave more people access to tools that used to require larger teams, more money and more time.
That change is going to make certain things more important, not less important. When creating an acceptable image, record, video or campaign becomes easier, access to production stops being as meaningful of an advantage. Taste becomes more important. Judgment becomes more important. Positioning becomes more important. The ability to understand why one thing feels interesting and another thing feels disposable becomes extremely important.
There is also an enormous mistake in assuming that because part of a project is artificial, the audience’s relationship with it must also be artificial.
Those are two different things. If somebody listens to a song for six months because it meant something to them during a breakup, you cannot seriously tell that person their experience did not happen because software participated in making the record. Software has been involved in most records since the 1970s and even before then, technology was still involved.
If somebody follows an AI artist, waits for every release, shares the music with friends and considers that project one of their favorites, the relationship exists whether another human musician approves of it or not.
That is also why I think transparency and narrative matter. I would rather see someone explain exactly what they are building than construct an entire project around trying to convince people that AI was never involved. There is nothing particularly interesting about hiding the process.
If AI is part of the artist, make it part of the story. Give people the context, give them the music and let them decide whether they care.
Human artists should probably pay attention to that rather than assuming that being human by itself is some permanent competitive advantage. It isn’t.
There are millions of human artists. Being human does not automatically make somebody interesting, strategic, memorable or culturally relevant.
You still need taste. You still need an identity. You still need an audience. Most importantly, you still need to give people a reason to care about what you are doing.
Eventually the novelty around AI artists will disappear, and I think that will actually be good for the space. Projects whose entire proposition is “look, this was made with AI” will have very little left to say.
Projects that used the technology to build good music, a recognizable world, an audience and a business will have something much more durable.
At that point, the conversation becomes considerably less complicated. People will listen to what they like, follow what interests them and support the projects they feel connected to. That has always been the business. The tools change. The psychology doesn’t.
