If you’re making music and are concerned your creative efforts are being buried in an avalanche of rote AI-produced and AI-promoted competition, the bad news is you’re not wrong.
My inbox — and as someone who writes about music, I’m not alone in this — is full of stuff that strives to be taken seriously, but whether it’s bland press releases or even blander unconsidered automated music, it is taxing, and getting through it all takes time, and doing so is dispiriting.
Perhaps worst of all, the ongoing avalanche casts doubt about other, more ambiguous but equally unfamiliar things in my inbox, such as your music. The good news is there are some things you, as a musician, can begin to do to address the problem. Here are two that I find myself thinking about:
The first is don’t let anyone or anything, or anything acting like anyone, or anyone promoting anything, convince you that craft is outdated or will ever be outdated; you will only improve, only make the sounds you imagine in your mind’s ear and feel in yourself, by working steadily to achieve them. Also recognize that expected paths lead to unlikely ends the more patiently and curiously, guided by instinct and experience, you walk those paths. There is always an excuse to not put in the work. If you allow “AI” (I put it in quotes because it’s less a specific thing, in this context, than what is often cast as, to borrow a historical term, a specter) to become that excuse, well, it’s unfortunate, but there would have been other excuses. So, the best thing to do is put the threat you may perceive from AI in a tidy little box full of all those other excuses, don’t distinguish it from them, and get to work.
The second thing is this: you have an opportunity to stand out, which is simply by doing things, and doing them regularly and publicly. Perform live. Perform online. Post videos of yourself. Post information about your process. Interact with other musicians. Express the connections inherent in your work. Slowly build a timeline. Slowly build a network of collaborators. Right now the biggest potential distinguishing factor in all this music being promoted — all the stuff filling the inboxes, and the feeds, of people listening to and writing about music — is what might be termed “proof of life.” This isn’t in the hostage-taking sense (though that vibe may be correlative), but in the “here’s someone doing something interesting persistently” sense. It’s always been helpful, and it’s become nearly essential.
I’ll close now as I opened, with the bad news. These two suggestions, you may have noted, have something in common: they don’t happen instantly, at the push of a button. They take time. Put in the time.
