The point was never just the music

Something interesting is happening in music lately. 

Check it out, French streaming service Deezer recently announced that it’ll soon let listeners filter AI-generated music out of their listening experience. 

According to one of their studies, 45% of streaming users surveyed want the ability to exclude fully AI-generated music. 

Let’s… think about that for a sec. 

We’re entering an era where music can be generated in seconds, at virtually unlimited scale, and a significant portion of listeners are already asking for the ability to turn it off. 

Not necessarily because the music sounds bad, but perhaps because knowing WHO made something, and HOW it was made, matters more than we realized. And I think that points to something bigger. 

THE PROCESS IS THE POINT!! 

At a recent music publishing summit, songwriter Karen Poole made an observation that stuck with me. 

Computers became better at chess than humans a long time ago. And yet, millions of people still play chess. Why? 

Because the point was never just to find the best possible move. It was the experience of playing. The challenge. The discovery. The mistakes. The satisfaction of figuring something out for yourself. 

I don't think music isn’t all that different. 

We don’t pick up instruments because it’s the most efficient way to produce sound. Far from it! We spend years learning piano, drums, guitar, or synthesizers because something happens to us in the process. 

We become participants in creating something that didn’t exist before. And that experience has value, regardless of the result. 

I’ve spent most of my adult life working at the intersection of music and technology. I LOVE technology and what it makes possible. But I’ve also noticed how we tend to measure innovation by how much friction we can eliminate. 

How much faster can we make something? How many steps can we automate? How much effort can we remove? 

In most areas of life, that’s wonderful. 

But with art, I wonder if we’re confusing efficiency with improvement. 

Because sometimes the friction is where the magic happens. The wrong note that becomes the right one. The unexpected rhythm. The idea that emerges after hours of trying something that wasn’t working. 

These aren’t inefficiencies to engineer away. They’re often what makes creating worthwhile. 

This is a big part of why I’ve become so committed to performing electronic music live. 

My setup is complicated. It’s unpredictable. Sometimes shit goes wrong. 

I could eliminate that uncertainty by preparing everything in advance, pressing play, and delivering a perfectly consistent performance. But I don’t want to! 

I wanna make decisions in real time. Respond to what I’m hearing. Surprise myself. And I want the audience to experience those moments with me. 

There’s something powerful about witnessing something happen right in front of you, knowing it could have gone differently and will never happen quite the same way again. It’s not perfection that makes those moments special. 

It’s presence. 

Sooo... what are we actually valuing?

As AI-generated music gets better, here’s a question worth asking: If two songs sound equally beautiful, but one was generated in seconds and the other was written, performed, and recorded by a human over several months, does that change how we experience them? 

For some people, maybe not. And that’s cool. 

But for others, I suspect the story behind the music will become increasingly important. Not because effort automatically makes something good. It doesn’t. 

But because art has always been about more than the finished product. It’s about the person behind it. Their experiences, intentions, decisions, and willingness to put something of themselves into the world. 

When we connect with an artist, we’re not just connecting with a collection of sounds. We’re connecting with another human being. 

The zag? Keep fucking playing. 

I don’t know exactly what the future of AI music looks like. 

But I do know this:

Human artists don’t need to compete with machines on the machines’ terms. 

We don’t need to be faster. We don’t need to produce more. We don’t need to be flawless. We need to keep finding reasons to make things that matter to us. 

Because even if a machine can eventually create something indistinguishable from what we make, it cannot have OUR experience of making it. And that experience is worth protecting. 

Not just for the audience. For ourselves. 

The point was never just the music. 

It was what happened to us while we were making it.