Once upon a time, making music required talent, soul, and mild-to-moderate heartbreak. Now? All you need is a caffeinated algorithm and a bored engineer. AI music bots have swarmed onto streaming platforms like Spotify and YouTube, belching out synthetic bangers by the minute. And no, they don’t even take bathroom breaks.
These digital Mozart wannabes flood the platforms with songs that sound vaguely like lo-fi hip hop had a baby with your smoke alarm—and the damn things are actually getting listens. Meanwhile, flesh-and-blood musicians are getting steamrolled in the algorithm, left yelling into the void: “Hey, remember humans?!”
Why does this matter? Because we’re heading toward a music apocalypse where playlists are curated by AIs for other AIs, and your Friday night jam session is now co-hosted by Skynet. Real artists are pissed. Listeners are confused. And Spotify just realized half its catalog might’ve been generated in some dude’s garage by a bot named DJ Suggester3000.
All this means your next favorite band might not be a group of misunderstood twenty-somethings from Brooklyn—it might be a line of code punching out beats between cryptocurrency trades. Welcome to the death of soul, brought to you by machine learning and a deeply misguided definition of ‘innovation.’
In short: The robots are here. They brought music. And it sucks.