I’ve been thinking about music lately—specifically, about the strange new reality where anyone can conjure a song perfectly tailored to their exact mood, their specific moment, their singular taste. With AI music generation tools (suno.com, udio, boomy, Riffusion ) becoming increasingly sophisticated, we’re approaching a world where each of us might have our own personal soundtrack, algorithmically composed to match our heartbeat, our history, our hidden preferences we didn’t even know we had.
It sounds wonderful. And yet, something about it fills me with an unexpected melancholy.
The End of Shared Soundtrack
There’s a particular magic that happens when a song becomes ours—not mine, but ours. When an entire generation can reference the same lyric, when strangers at a bar can bond over a shared B-side, when you hear the opening notes of a song and are instantly transported back to a summer that millions of other people also remember through that same music.
But what happens when music becomes infinitely personalized? When your AI generates the perfect song for your Tuesday morning commute, and mine creates something entirely different for the same moment? We gain precision, but we lose the common language.
I think about how much of my identity has been shaped by discovering that someone else loved the same obscure album I did. The thrill of connection—”You listen to them too?”—might become a relic. If everyone has access to infinite custom music, perfectly optimized for their taste, why would anyone listen to the same thing? The concert t-shirt, the mixtape, the heated debate about the best track on an album—these rituals of musical communion might fade into quaint nostalgia.
We’re trading the imperfect-but-shared for the perfect-but-solitary. I’m not sure we’ve fully reckoned with that exchange.
Music Without a Face
There’s another dimension to this shift that troubles me: music without a human at its center. For all of human history, music has been inseparable from musicians. We didn’t just consume the sound—we consumed the story, the struggle, the person who bled into the microphone at 3 AM because they had something they needed to say.
But AI music is music without biography. It has no backstory, no journey, no face to put on a poster. It’s pure aesthetic experience, disconnected from human narrative. And I wonder: will that be enough for us? Can we fall in love with music the way we’ve always fallen in love with it—through parasocial relationships with artists, through imagining ourselves into their lives—when there’s no artist to imagine?
The Death of the Concert?
While its unlikely concerts of maintream artists will be afected…live music for up and coming musicians, vould be a different story. The concert has always been more than entertainment—it’s pilgrimage, communion, catharsis. It’s the place where recorded music becomes embodied again, where the distance between artist and audience collapses into a single, sweaty, ecstatic room.
If music becomes primarily AI-generated and hyper-personalized, what happens to this ritual? You can’t have a concert for music that only you have heard, that was generated this morning and might never be played again. The economics alone fall apart—no shared fandom means no crowd, no ticket sales, no reason for thousands of people to gather in a field or a stadium and lose themselves together.
I imagine a future where live music becomes a niche experience, something artisanal and expensive, like vinyl records or handwritten letters. The default becomes algorithmic, digital, solitary—and the live becomes the exception, the luxury, the thing we travel for because we’re hungry for something we can’t quite name.
Maybe we’ll find ourselves drawn to live performances precisely because they’re the antidote to AI music’s perfection. Maybe the appeal of seeing a human being make mistakes, sweat under lights, forget lyrics, interact unpredictably with a crowd—maybe all of that becomes more valuable, not less, in a world of algorithmic precision.
How Real Artists Might Answer Back
But here’s where my pessimism cracks open into possibility: artists have always been adapters, innovators, survivors. They’ve navigated every technological disruption from the printing press to the synthesizer to Napster. They’ll navigate this too, and probably in ways we can’t yet imagine.
I suspect the most interesting artists will use AI not as a replacement for human creativity but as a collaborator, a new instrument. Just as electric guitars didn’t kill music—they created entirely new genres—AI might become the tool that unlocks forms of expression we haven’t conceived of yet. Artists might use AI to generate raw material that they then sculpt, subvert, or dialogue with. The human becomes the curator, the editor, the one who decides what matters.
And perhaps artists will double down on the very things AI can’t replicate: presence, spontaneity, vulnerability, the unplannable moment. The album might become less important than the performance. The recording might become less valuable than the experience of being in a room with someone brave enough to stand in front of you and sing.
I also think we might see artists deliberately embrace imperfection, rawness, the lo-fi and the local. If AI music is frictionless and optimized, human-made music might become proudly rough-edged, a statement of values rather than just a product. “Made by humans” might become a genre unto itself.
What We Choose to Keep
Ultimately, I don’t think this is about AI versus humans in some zero-sum battle. It’s about what kind of musical culture we want to build. Technology doesn’t dictate our choices—it only expands them. We still get to decide what we value.
Do we want music to be primarily functional—a perfectly optimized background score for our individual lives? Or do we want it to remain a site of communion, surprise, shared experience, human connection?
Can we have both?
I don’t know. But I do know this: the songs that have mattered most to me in my life weren’t the ones that were perfectly tailored to my taste. They were the ones that challenged me, that I didn’t understand at first, that someone else insisted I needed to hear. They were the ones that came with stories, with context, with a human being on the other side saying, “This means something to me. Maybe it will mean something to you too.”
That’s the thing I’m afraid we’ll lose. Not music itself—we’ll have more music than ever. But the friction, the curation, the human hand that says: here, listen to this, trust me.
And maybe that’s what we’ll need to fight for—not against AI music, but for the preservation of shared musical experience. For concerts and album releases and songs that bring us together rather than algorithmic perfection that keeps us perfectly, individually satisfied, and quietly alone.
The future of music isn’t just about what we can create. It’s about what we choose to share, and with whom, and why.
I hope we choose each other.