A few nights ago, I heard a song by ABBA. Instantly, I was transported. Not in theory, not as a metaphor, but physically somewhere deep in my memory, in a feeling I had forgotten I carried. That’s the power of music. Some songs don’t just play in the background. They are wired into us. They shape our adolescence, soundtrack our heartbreak, fill our silences, and sometimes make the loudness of the world feel manageable.
That experience triggered a deeper question. How does a song do that. How can a collection of synchronized sounds, sometimes recorded decades ago, hit so precisely that it feels personal. What exactly is happening in our minds.
A song, at its core, is nothing more than a curated sequence of vibrations, soundwaves arranged in time. But it becomes something more through familiarity, repetition, memory. The first time we hear a track, we may like it. By the fifth or tenth time, it starts to belong to us. The brain latches onto the rhythm, the melody, and the emotion that surrounds when and how we first heard it.
What happens, then, when music, once a reflection of human experience, becomes another product of artificial intelligence.
We are closer to that reality than most people think.
There are already AI tools like Sumo that can generate complex compositions in seconds. Some can mimic the style of Mozart. Others can recreate the tonality of 90s R&B. With simple prompts, you can now create an entirely new track, complete with lyrics, chord progressions, and layered instrumentation. These are not amateur outputs. Some are indistinguishable from human-made compositions.
Historically, hit songs were tied to deeply human moments. Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You sold over 20 million copies worldwide. Elton John’s Candle in the Wind 1997, written in tribute to Princess Diana, became the best-selling single since chart records began, with over 33 million units sold. These songs were connected not just to melody, but to meaning like social, emotional, sometimes even political.
The question now is not whether AI can generate a song that sounds good. It absolutely can. The question is what happens when everything sounds good.
Just like the rise of streaming changed the way we value albums, from something we bought to something we now rent emotionally, AI may change the way we perceive music altogether. When every person has access to infinite, perfectly customized music at the tap of a finger, what happens to waiting for a song. What happens to treasuring it.
Today, my children can play anything they want at any time. I had to wait for my favorite TV program once a week. They stream an entire season before dinner. That ease is convenient, but something is lost in the process. Anticipation. Gratitude. Memory.
In a future where your AI twin can generate a playlist based not just on mood, but on biometric signals, we may enter an era of musical abundance without appreciation. Songs will be more beautiful than ever. But they may also become disposable. Melodies will be generated faster than the mind can remember them.
That brings us to a crossroads in the music industry.
Traditional songwriters draw from lived experience. They sit at pianos, scribble on napkins, wrestle with words. That struggle is often part of the final product. There is imperfection, soul, timing. If AI removes that struggle and replaces it with output, on demand the economics and emotional core of music will change.
Major artists today still pull millions from licensing, tours, and royalties. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has reportedly generated over one billion dollars in ticket sales alone. But if AI begins creating similar auditory pleasure at zero marginal cost, the top end of the market may shrink. The middle tier, already suffering from streaming-era economics, may collapse entirely.
And yet, not all is lost.
In fact, we may soon see a counter-movement. Imperfect music. Raw human songs. Lo-fi, emotional, flawed, but real. Listeners may start seeking proof of personhood in the music they consume, the same way some readers now seek hand-written essays, not AI-generated summaries. The scarcity of human struggle may become a luxury.
We are not facing the death of music. But we are witnessing the end of music as we knew it. Songwriting, once an art of pain, memory, and insight, may become a prompt-and-generate process. It will be efficient. It will be beautiful. But it may no longer be yours.
Still, the heart wants what it remembers. And I suspect, no matter how powerful the machines become, a part of us will still choose that one ABBA song, scratched into the past, because of how it made us feel. Not just what it made us hear.
Leave a Reply