30 years of Crap Music... Why Not AI?

Someone in the comments on our last post (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/guess-who-never-have-profile-getngigs-band-paul-tollefson-lyivc) made an argument worth taking seriously. He said "the smart musician of the future will integrate every technology available, and that the definition of "musician" is what needs to be examined, given the distinct lack of real creativity and musicianship that the public has been subjected to for the last 30 years.."

I want to take that claim apart, because there are actually two arguments hiding inside it, and only one of them is doing any real work.

The first argument is a complaint about quality. Music has gotten worse, or at least more homogenized, more manufactured, more optimized for algorithms than for anything true. That's a fair opinion. People have been making some version of that complaint since Tin Pan Alley started churning out songs by formula, and there's real evidence for it in the streaming era specifically. Songs are getting shorter because attention spans got shorter. Choruses move earlier because skip rates punish anything that takes too long to hook you. A huge amount of what gets pushed to the top of playlists was built by committee to hit a formula, not to say something.

The second argument is a proposed solution: since musicianship has already been diluted, we should widen the definition of musician to include people who type a prompt into a text box and let a model generate the result.

Those two arguments don't actually connect. The first one is a diagnosis. The second one is a different disease dressed up as a cure.

If the problem with the last 30 years is that music got more manufactured, more focus-grouped, more designed to perform rather than to mean something, then AI generated music is the furthest possible extension of that problem, not the escape from it. A model trained to produce whatever pattern statistically resembles a hit song is not less manufactured than a pop song written by committee. It's more manufactured. It has no taste, no doubt, no bad night that becomes a great lyric. It has a training set and a probability distribution. If you're worried that music lost its soul to commercial optimization, handing the entire creative act to a system built entirely on optimization is not an argument for expanding the definition of musician. It's the argument's own evidence working against it.

Here's where I'll draw the actual line, because I think this is where the real disagreement lives. A musician is someone who has technical command over the making of sound. Someone who can play an instrument, arrange a part, write a melody they can defend note by note, or shape a vocal take through actual repetition and actual failure.

A person who writes a good prompt has done something. I'm not going to pretend that skill doesn't exist. But the skill is writing. It's editing. It's having taste about outcomes. None of that is the same skill as musicianship, and calling it the same thing doesn't examine the definition, it erases it.

Somebody brought up the conductor comparison in the same conversation, and it's worth addressing here because it's the best version of the counterargument. A conductor doesn't play an instrument during a performance, and nobody questions whether a conductor is a real musician. But a conductor spent years learning to read a full orchestral score, understanding harmony, voicing, the technical range and behavior of every instrument in that room. They can tell a violin section exactly what's wrong with their intonation because they know the instrument's mechanics well enough to hear the error. That's not the same gap as typing "sad indie song, female vocals, minor key" into a text box. One is decades of specific technical fluency applied through a different physical interface. The other is having an idea and asking a machine to execute it. Those aren't points on the same scale. They're different categories of act.

None of this means AI has no place near music. A musician who uses AI to clean up a rough mix, generate a reference track to write against, or speed up a tedious technical step is still the one who wrote the song, played the part, and made the decisions that mattered. The tool didn't replace the musician. It assisted one who already existed. That's the difference between a conductor directing real players and a program generating a band that was never real to begin with, with a hometown and a childhood that never happened.

The last 30 years didn't prove that musicianship is an outdated idea. They proved that an industry built around what performs, rather than what's true, eventually produces exactly the kind of shortcut that AI bands represent. That's not an argument for redefining the word. It's a warning about what happens when you stop protecting it.

getNgigs.com exists for the people who still do the actual work. Real musicians, playing real instruments, taking real risks in front of real audiences. That standard isn't up for renegotiation because an algorithm found a faster way to fake it.

By the way, if you want examples of new music that is EXTRAORDINARY, leave a message below and I'll build you a mixed tape of music produced (the old fashioned way) in just the past year.

Keep it REAL friends.

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