Are musicians becoming vintage? More frequently the music world erupts with another debate about AI. Some people see it as the end of creativity, while others embrace it wholeheartedly. Some are somewhere in between, wondering what the future actually looks like. Personally, I’m not spending a huge amount of energy worrying about it. Perhaps I’m fortunate because I don’t rely on music to pay the bills. Like the vast majority of musicians, it’s something I do because I want to create, not because it’s ever been a guaranteed career.
The reality is that very few musicians have ever made a comfortable living solely from recording music, compared to all the musicians who have recorded music. If you want to earn money today, it’s largely the same advice it’s been for years: play live, build an audience, sell merchandise and create experiences that people can’t stream. That’s not easy. In fact, it’s incredibly hard.
But here’s a thought that might upset a few people. Do musicians have the right to assume we’ll always be able to earn good money from making music simply because previous generations could? History suggests otherwise.
Think about steam trains. There were millions of people whose entire livelihoods revolved around them. Drivers, firemen, engineers, factory workers, maintenance crews… whole industries disappeared or transformed as technology moved on. It wasn’t because they weren’t skilled or weren’t passionate. The world simply changed. I wonder if we’re witnessing something similar now. AI feels unstoppable. Whether we like it or not, it is changing industries at an astonishing pace, and many of the skills people once earned a living from are becoming less valuable commercially.
I’ve experienced that myself. For 25 years I built websites professionally. It was a career I thoroughly enjoyed however, today, I no longer build websites for clients because it simply doesn’t make financial sense. AI-assisted coding and website platforms can now do much of the work faster and, in most cases, more cheaply than I ever could.
So, was web design a bad profession to get into when it started?
Of course not. I was fortunate enough to spend a quarter of a century working in it. Perhaps musicians have simply been fortunate enough to spend the last hundred years in an era where recorded music became a viable way to earn money. Maybe that era has simply some to an end.
That doesn’t mean music disappears, far from it. People will always want live performances and they’ll always value authentic human connection. Maybe musicians will become a little like record players, valve amplifiers or preserved steam railways. Not obsolete, but appreciated for something different. Something uniquely human, something with character.
Maybe we become… vintage like cars, fashion and houses.
Whether AI turns out to be one of humanity’s greatest inventions or one of its biggest mistakes remains to be seen. Ask me again in 25 years. Right now, I think we’re simply standing on the edge of another great technological shift. History tells us that’s happened before. The only question is if, or how we’ll adapt this time.
