AI isn’t killing music. It’s killing cheap, disposable music.
It’s about to flood the world with songs you don’t feel. Jingles for ad spots, meme songs. Brands won’t pay humans for that anymore because AI can make it faster, cheaper, and good enough. That’s bad news for artists’ pockets on the commercial side.
But the music we actually care about? Those moments become more premium. Because when the world is drowning in automation, we place a higher value on things that feel human.
This isn’t new. In the late 1800s, industrial machines made it easy to mass-produce. What happened? We started labeling things “handmade”, telling the creator’s origin story, and charging extra for it. Fast-forward to today and we have massive marketplaces like Etsy absolutely crushing it because of this.
AI music is just the next wave. It will own the soundtracks to our ads and TikTok trends. But the stuff that touches our souls will still belong to humans. And I think we will pay more for it, not less.
This principle drives everything we do in content creator marketing — the human voice is irreplaceable. We’ve built entire strategies around this conviction, which is why the ABCT framework emphasizes authenticity as a foundation. When we worked with Pandora, the breakthrough moment came when we stopped trying to compete with automated playlists and instead doubled down on curator authenticity — the voice that only a real person could provide.
For more on how authenticity shapes competitive advantage, read our deep-dive on why authenticity beats AI content — it’s the same dynamic playing out across every creator-driven platform.