There definitely seems to be a double standard from musicians and people who complain about AI in music and about AI in general. If you are really anti AI why are you using a smartphone or a computer? You should be using a piece of paper or hold public speaking events to voice your opinion on this issue after reading about it a physical newspaper rather than posting on social media 😉

I am sure that a lot of people think that AI is a recent invention when in fact it got started around 1966 when a guy called Jospeh Weizenbaum

created a Chatbot called ELIZA which ran a very basic computer script called DOCTOR. The Psychotherapy program would ask you a question and you would input a reply via keyboard and it would reply with another question and so on.

There is a strong argument the reason why songs from the 70s, and 80s still sound so great today is that artists used real instruments, pedals, vocal effects, drum machines, keyboards and drum kits. These were recorded in a real recording studio with an engineer twiddling knobs. The multi-track recordings ended up being mixed onto a analog 2” magnetic tape reel master which would be used to produce vinyl and cassette tapes. Things started to change with the arrival of DAT and DASH in the 80s.

By the mid 80s the Cassette tape was the most popular format due to its portability in Walkmans and Ghetto blasters. I still have found memories of replicating the nutty boy walk to One Step Beyond by Madness with some friends from college on the streets of Harrogate with my ghetto blaster in my hand 😉

A good example of where this didn’t make a great recording would be the Fields oF The Nephilim which sounds quite muddy in the sound mix compared to their epic live performances. At the time this  was accepted wherever the records were played. 
In the 70s and 80s it was about living the moment as no smart phones, digital cameras, home computers and social media to waste your life on 😉
Listening to a lot of old and new music from the 70s to the current day it’s possible to discover patterns or repetition between artists. In music there are there are 12 notes, as well as chords and scales. So whether by accident or design there are several songs which feature repeated patterns like Killing Joke’s Eighties and Nirvana’s Come As You Are of example.

Making music has never been cheap and that’s why just getting your first instrument is a major financial investment let alone the whole process of recording and releasing music.
Cost is one of the reasons AI started appearing in music. With programs like Logic, Ableton, Fl Studio, and Cubase this gave more affordability and empowerment to more artists along with digital plugins for effects or instruments. If you use these you are using AI. Cut and paste is AI 😉

From my observation from the early use in Goth electronic music from the 90s onwards as it progressed to the end of the decade a lot of bands starting to sound similar due to using the same programs either by accident or by design.
Not only could these programs be used for creation and recording but bands started to deploy laptops to sequence or even replacing live keyboards. The best example was VNV in Sheffield a few years ago where the Vox were live and all four keyboard players were clapping at the front of the stage while the music played on its own. The people loved it.
Electronic bands when playing live will sometimes introduce a live drummer to add something to the performance.

A lot of guitar bands also started using AI via laptop for live drums or bass over the last 20 years.
I see a lot of bands complain that their music is real and are anti AI, but they use computer programs for recording, plugins and their drums are from their laptop. So that is AI.
Postpunk is an overused revisionist term for music in my opinion, but one thing is for sure most of these bands sound very samey in the modern Goth scene as they use the same plugins, recording software and fake drum machines from AI.

So the argument that AI is a threat to music is just not true, it makes it more accessible for those who do not have the resources to buy instruments, to wait to find the right people to form a band with or to record music. Ideas or creativity, innovation are important for music as is accessibility for all.
I don’t support bandcamp banning AI music as people should have the freedom to buy and listen to what they like. Yes perhaps for the clueless it could be badged AI but does it matter if you like a song? The funny part this is they probably used AI to check for AI music 😉
I have used an AI to create a demo song with my own lyrics, I got angry about the constant killing of civilians in Ukraine and wanted to find and outlet for my anger. A friend heard the punk demo I made and liked it and suggested we should play it live and record it with real guitars and bass and my Vox which we did. So an idea using AI lead to a real song being recorded how is that anti music?

So how popular is AI music? is there a demand for it? The best place to check this is YouTube. There is a band sings in Ukraine with quite catchy postpunk sound. If vocals and lyrics and created and sung using AI in English at least you can hear unnatural patterns in the words and singing. However it will be more convincing in a different language. Two Lithuanian guys learnt Ukrainian and then used AI to create the band Transportna with their biggest song Holodni stiny(cold walls) having 501k views, 24k likes in less than 5 months. It’s sounds better than a lot of so called postpunk. If people love the music and it makes them escape from the stress of life that should be acceptable.

The old 70s.80s and 90s a band would be judged on the quality of the live performance compared to a recording. If the sound was bad it was more than likely the sound guy or the PA in the venue. A couple of times I saw poor sound engineers kill the performance of live bands. Once when Nosferatu played Josephs Well in Leeds when their set was turned into aural mud, and worse still Death In June at Slimelight in London where the sound engineer destroyed the sound of an acoustic guitar I had to hold myself back from giving the sound engineer a piece of my mind ;).

Now when you have bad sound at a concert people will say what a great concert, maybe they have poor hearing or just don’t care as its all about being there for social media. If it’s playback or half live nobody seems to care. 

Personally I think live streaming and streaming music on Spotify/ Tik Tok damages live music more than AI as the convenience makes young people lazy andless likely to seek out new music or old classics not on streaming services. Also apparently Deezer gets 21k AI songs daily and it would appear that some people then use bots to try and get paid for plays which Deezer are cracking down on. They also badge all AI songs as being AI. So users have a choice wether to listen to them or not.

There are those who will argue AI is not real music but what is real music? Is it just acoustic instruments or a full band playing just instruments played live today?