Personal music

Something happened today: I prompted a song for myself and I love it enough to listen to it in repeat. I knew it would happen eventually, but it did so in such a natural way that I’m split between amazement at the technology and a simple feeling of “oh, okay, well that’s possible now”

It seems so normal that writing this post feels like an unimportant task because I imagine everyone will feel the same, and it will become the new normal. But it’s not normal. For thousands of years, music was an intense, tasteful process that required many people to collaborate and perform. It shaped entire industries, made some people extremely prominent in history–Michael Jackson is said to be the most famous human ever after Jesus–and might be the biggest driver of emotions in our lives.

For thousands of years, it had never been challenged that one human would make music and many would listen to it. Even when the synthesizer was invented, which removed the need for a lot of instrumentalists, it was still one human producing for many.

Now, we’re about to get to one music per human. No more artists*. The most surprising is actually not the disappearance of the job (which won’t be completely gone), but maybe in how most humans relate to one another. It will be rarer to ask “do you listen to this artist”. Rarer to get a “omg I love David guetta you too?”. And the same might also happen in other forms of art, such as movies.

Or will it? Maybe we will discover that, all along, what art was truly about was at least in part, what brings us together to appreciate the human condition. After all, I still see more and more of the same stuff than my friends do on Instagram and X. And a particular AI slop mixing fruits and relative TV shows seems to gather everyone online even though we could very well each enjoy our own flavor of themed reality TV.

So maybe it’s never been so much about the artist, but about something deep inside an opus that would lead us to appreciate it together; and maybe AI will lead us faster to the ecstasy of the most exquisite art.

I should go back to work, this memo won’t write itself. And just like that, I will integrate that now, I can simply generate the kind of mood-inducing music I like, and never think too much about it again. The world will continue to revolve, and the future will have smoothly blended itself into the present.

*voluntarily exaggerating here, there will still be artists for I’m expecting the market of music consumption to shift to industrially generated AI music and some–maybe still wealthy–artisan music producers.