Being a professional musician is already a fraught career with low rates of success. This is even more true if you exclude people that are working with modern digital systems. Not a lot of jobs available for orchestral musicians, for example.
But there still are people making art with older techniques. There is a greater variety of art being made today than ever before in history. The development of new techniques has made art richer rather than poorer. Yes, the most commercially focused art chooses techniques based on price (far cheaper for a single person to stack synths than to pay a full orchestra) but that's okay.
Hip hop and electronic music have been creating totally new things for decades without ever touching a physical instrument. Music didn't die, it flourished.
This is different though, because the end game of AI music isn't better music technology for musicians, but replacing musicians.
I'm worried we're going to go into a dark age where society forgets how to make truly creative new art due to lack of incentives, and the AIs won't make anything new due to lack of anything creative to train on. We'll just regurgitate the pre-AI stuff forever.
If we're fast-forwarding the tape, why not directly go to the ultimate conclusion that the end game is AI replacing humans, period?
This is not a slippery slope; new art will be created regardless of incentives and skilled people who learn to augment their craft with AI will probably create better works of art.
Because previously if you honed your skills as a musician there was a chance that you could do it for a living, so there was another incentive to get better. Electronic tools just facilitated human creativity, but the random listener couldn't sit down with a synth or a DAW and just press a button to get music out. But if all the money drops out of the music industry because the consumers can auto-generate unlimited music, how will that work?
Furthermore, generate music based on music you created. They're alienating the labor of the musician then using it to drive that musician ut of their livelihoods. I feel like pro-AI people constantly miss this point with inane quips about the printing press. Artists created all the value and get none of the reward.
But there still are people making art with older techniques. There is a greater variety of art being made today than ever before in history. The development of new techniques has made art richer rather than poorer. Yes, the most commercially focused art chooses techniques based on price (far cheaper for a single person to stack synths than to pay a full orchestra) but that's okay.
Hip hop and electronic music have been creating totally new things for decades without ever touching a physical instrument. Music didn't die, it flourished.