Is AI a fatal blow for the music industry or an unlikely shot in the arm?

If music be the food of love, play on”, so the famous aphorism goes. But what if the music didn’t come from a human?

- WILL ROGERS-COLTMAN

What if Daft Punk's Robot Rock came from an actual robot? Would that change music's unique ability to move us, transcend boundaries and cut through to our corporeal core?

Musicians are concerned about AI, and rightly so. Popular sites such as Suno and Udio give anyone with a laptop the ability to create a song through a simple prompt; Al tools and bots can artificially inflate artists’ streaming numbers; and fake artists can channel listeners away from actual musicians.

Earlier this year saw the great and the good of the music industry — from Sir Elton John to Dua Lipa — protest the Government's controversial Data (Use and Access) Bill, which makes it easier for big tech to access artists’ copyrighted material. In the end, the protest was in vain, and the bill was passed in June, leaving musicians in a vulnerable position.

When it comes to Al in music, aesthetics and creativity are not the problem, argues Baroness Kidron, an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in Al at the University of Oxford, who led the recent charge in the House of Lords against the Data (Use and Access) Bill.

For Kidron, it’s a question of authorship, training and government regulation. “The tech sector likes to think what comes out of their Al models is the only important factor, but creators are concerned about what goes into the models,” she says. “If I was a carpenter who makes a beautiful table and you steal it in the middle of the night and chop it up to make a window frame, it does not make the table yours.”