The AI Nashville songwriter

Here comes a robot with a drawl and a hat

AI has officially made it onto my “Scary” radar. Many years ago I took a photography class and the teacher insisted that digital could never replace the quality of film. Today, the amount of cameras using film is around the same number as flat earthers, though flat earthers probably win out. The threat of AI everyone talks about seemed pretty abstract and far away to me - by the time the robots are overtaking the earth I’d be gone, non-local, just a wave function smeared across the universe, waiting to collapse and incarnate again, not here, anywhere but here. And for the present, who cares if an AI program can write a table of contents for a self-help book or churn out lifeless boilerplate for corporate usage - no AI program is going to write fiction and come up with a novel’s first sentence as full of depth of meaning as “Call me Ishmael.”

But when it comes to country songs, it’s a whole different thing. YouTube vlogger Rick Beato, who is a great musician and encyclopedic student of every style of music you can imagine, has a video out, where one of the AI songwriting platforms, Suno, has a bunch of streaming tunes that were 100% AI generated - not just the song itself, but the singing, the instruments, the arrangements, orchestration, everything. And damn, that’s all I can say. If I was a waiter in Nashville trying to make it as a songwriter right now, and this applies to several thousand folks at least, I’d advise quitting, go back home and see how much college cash the parents are willing to spring for, because brother, sister, it ain’t pretty. Probably should anyhow, start a local band, play for folks who’ll appreciate you. Acoustic music, so you can keep going when the grid breaks down. And keep a cache of a whole bunch of sets of strings. That’s a different story, though.

Here’s the link below.

Will These New AI Tools Make Songwriters Irrelevant In 2025?

New copyright law forbids copyright on 100% AI generated music, but if there’s a human hand involved, then there is a copyright. That’s all the language says. So, if you generate a song, all you need to do is throw in an extension to the bridge, change a chord here or there, rewrite some lyrics and you’re in business.

The songs themselves sound a lot like most country songs these days, which is why the AI can do such a bang-up job of it. Country is so corporatized and robotic already, it’s not much of a stretch to for AI to match it. The AI vocals actually sound just about as fake, homogenized, stripped of actual emotion as truckloads of country vocals do.

Now, there’s great artists out there alongside the drivel, of course, who are springing up and getting recognized, like Billy Strings, Chris Stapleton, Larkin Poe, (who have this special awesome southern country-blues-rock-gospelly thing going on) and others, there’s a lot of them who are excellent, as good as it’s ever been, just not on the great big radar now. It isn’t a wasteland, it never will be, but the rising tide of faceless soulless creativity striding over the horizon like H.G. Well’s Martian pods, with their red eyes ready to blast away all that’s human, well, don’t know about you, but for me, it’s truly a scary thing to see arrive.