Industry Insights: AI Sparks Innovation and Fear in the Independent Artist

SXSW 2024 was bustling with music and tech panels, and AI dominated nearly every conversation. At the precipice of immense industry innovation, music business professionals presented mixed arguments for how AI can help and hurt independent artistry. 

Written by Janie Bickerton

Photo by Janie Bickerton

Whether you like it or not, AI is everywhere. Across all business sectors, artificial intelligence is streamlining tedious processes while exponentially rendering jobs obsolete. Music tech pioneers have embraced this nebulous new digital age, from SymphonyOS automating digital music marketing to Elf.Tech allowing anyone to have an AI version of Grimes feature on a song. As AI increasingly permeates the music industry, independent artists have found themselves in a strange in-between of endless opportunity and ominous creative drought. Leaders in the AI music space presented this mix of enthusiasm and fear at SXSW 2024.

Known for annually showcasing the latest in tech, SXSW offered a mostly positive approach to the unbridled enigma of AI. Featured panelist and CEO of music distribution company TuneCore, Andreea Gleeson, beamed on stage as she explained AI’s ability to help independent artists create music and cultivate their audiences, as long as it’s used “responsibly.” Her co-panelist — and Grimes’ manager — Daouda Leonard, eagerly screened a clip of him using his own Triniti AI platform to make his voice sound like Marvin Gaye, remarking that “listening is no longer enough” in the new age of music engagement. Leonard praised AI for allowing independent artists to “exploit their IP in a new way” and find unique success in an industry that has historically been “gatekept.” In their “AI and the Independent Artist” featured session at SXSW, Gleeson and Leonard urged unsigned artists to embrace AI at its early stages in the music industry.

Several panelists elucidated how AI holds a plethora of opportunities for independent artists to, if ironically, find their own voice. Chuka Chase, Co-Founder of SymphonyOS, acknowledged the many roles DIY artists have to assume to make a space for themselves in the competitive industry, a process beyond creating the music that is “often overlooked.” With AI, artists can “eliminate waste” in overwhelming datasets to find the most effective music marketing strategies — no high-level data analysis required. Chase’s co-panelist in the “How AI Is Changing the Way We Market + Promote Music” session, Big Cookie Founder Aaron Bogucki, lauded AI’s insight on how promotion strategies affect streams, making an exact science of where to put an artist’s budget with the most return on investment. From the marketing side, Chase also mentioned how artists can “reverse engineer” popular artists with JasperAI and Gemini, companies with tools that allow users to know precisely what other artists did well in their marketing campaigns.

AI also unlocks ways for independent artists to be their own team by giving artists the tools to make and market their music. “The New Normal: AI in Music Creation” panelist Diaa El All’s platform Soundful generates royalty-free music, allowing artists to leverage tools and be their own producers using sounds by musician-trained AI. “Every creator will become a super-creator,” El All asserted. Artists can prompt AI platforms for songwriting inspiration, backend music production assistance, social media copy for effective music marketing, and even video editing help for music videos, giving artists more time to hone their craft and overcome the obstacles that come with successfully standing out in the oversaturated industry. With more freedom in deciding when to promote and release music, independent artists can use their creative control, augmented by AI, to be more experimental in their sound and personas. Gleeson mentioned that AI can quickly change a recorded electric guitar to an acoustic guitar, for instance, truncating the production time by eliminating re-records in the creative process. Leonard emphasized not only the creative possibilities of AI from the artist’s side but also the fan’s, as the growing technology allows consumers to attach their own identities to songs and manipulate tracks to sound differently.

Independent artists currently using AI to streamline the creative and marketing processes (about 50% of the independent artist pool according to a TuneCore report) find themselves in a murky tech period. AI’s abilities are coming to light with each new start-up, but human input is required for the technology to reach its fullest potential. Sydney Lopes, VP of A&R and Marketing at record label Human Re Sources, admitted that AI "won't tell you how to disrupt authentically" when planning music rollouts. Therefore, many niches within the industry still rely on the “surprising shock value” only possible with the human lens. AI itself is based on human involvement since human prompters train its output. But as producers, songwriters, and marketers feed AI, the line between creator support and creator outsourcing becomes increasingly unclear. “There’s an education element [to AI] … There’s also a lot of fear,” remarked Evan Bogart, Grammy-winning producer and CEO of Seeker Music. As humans continue to train AI, Bogart fears that middle-class creators like independent artists are abetting AI into taking over their careers in the future. To add to the parasitic qualities of AI, one of the scariest aspects of technology’s current state is its complete self-governance and the untapped necessity of government regulation to protect artists.

Image courtesy of Getty Images

When it comes to AI using other artists’ voices, El All argued that regulation “should be very black and white” — either an artist agrees to share their voice and they receive royalties from it, or the artist doesn’t allow it and their voice isn’t exploited. Music licensing lawyer Jackson Abbeduto mentioned that no current legislation exists to protect artists’ names, images, likenesses, voices, and signatures. With this governmental protection gap, private companies like Amadea Choplin’s content identification company Pex are working to detect AI-generated songs to defend copyrighting. But AI songs have flooded the music space, putting Choplin “always one step behind” as she trains her software on output that has already been drowned in new AI input.

This dilution of the music industry raises more concerns about AI’s threat to the beauty and validity of true art. El All conceded that the royalty-free music his platform generates can have “perfect” production, but the “imperfect” aspect of the human touch in music is what makes music a connective, emotional, and impactful experience. Amidst all the noise created by AI, the human aspect of art is still key for artists to make music that is listened to and taken seriously. 

Leveraging AI tools effectively sets apart mere noise from true music. "You still have to be great at creating" when using AI, Bogart asserted. Beyond music production, using AI marketing tools still requires a certain savviness. Bugocki quipped that teasing a successful output from AI is "like having a calculator in math class," a helpful tool when you understand how to use it.

As the industry becomes flooded with noise, Sydney Lopes fears the dwindling of human connection. She argued that AI-generated playlists take the art out of curation that elicits real music connection. Using AI shortcuts takes away from the inimitable organic experience of finding a new artist, which suggests that independent artists’ reliance on AI-generated marketing strategies could backfire. The emergence of the AI artist, trained by human artists, also threatens the sanctity of human connection, as the dissonance grows between increasing streams and decreasing artist recognition. With the accessibility of inauthenticity via machine-learned lyrics and uninspired production, the authenticity of independent artists is more important than ever. DIY musicians, however, are put in a complicated limbo between using AI for its benefits and AI absorbing the essence of human expression through the artists’ inputs.

Should independent artists avoid AI like the plague, or should they leverage its expansive opportunities to help their voices be heard? SXSW panelists presented more positive than skeptical perspectives on AI in music, but the festival-conference hybrid is inherently biased as a seasoned promoter of new technologies. Even so, some of these AI music entrepreneurs did not hide their uncertainties surrounding AI’s impact on aspiring artists. Chuka Chase acknowledged the “‘Black Mirror’ Land” aspect of his platform's ability to put an artist’s audience “in a bottle” for them. As Andreea Gleeson mentioned, the key is to use AI “responsibly” in this elusive age where making music is now less time-consuming and less expensive in a way that could threaten creators’ careers.

Even the panelist with the most doomsday approach to AI, Sydney Lopes, conceded that independent artists live in a golden age of opportunity: "If you want to be an artist … you have to know your way around [AI].” For the independent artist, adaptation to AI is necessary, but it still takes the human touch to make a song, a beat, or an artist worthy of the recognition. AI makes noise that only the artist can make into music.