Recently, it’s felt like almost every major royalty-free music and music licensing platform has shifted away from spotlighting real artists and curating great music and has instead transformed into an AI tech company. The focus has shifted from discovering genuine artists and music to generating more content. The workflow is changing before our very eyes. Type some text, move a slider for mood and download your track.

Now that the line between AI-generated audio and human artistry has been blurred, video creators are standing at a crossroads. Let’s look at both sides of the generative AI music shift, and the massive questions it raises for the future of digital content.

The AI road

Video creators embracing the new tech isn’t a hard trend to figure out. It puts complete creative control at the creator’s fingertips.

  • Removal of editing friction: Editing video to the structure of existing music becomes a thing of the past. Now you can generate a track to the exact length you need, with whatever motifs and musical devices at whatever time you desire.
  • Budget buster: For small teams and solo creators pushing out high volumes of content, the ability to create large volumes of background music in seconds is not only a time-saving effort, but a money-saving practice as you usually get a bunch of generations for a monthly subscription.

Generative AI in this instance liberated the video maker to be the director of the sonic environment too.

The human road

As the internet fills up with AI-generated content, a distinctly counter-narrative is coming to the surface. Audiences are starting to show signs of “AI fatigue”.

Modern-day viewers, especially those in Gen Z and younger demographics, are developing a sensitive radar for synthetic assets. They can spot an AI script, an AI voiceover, and an AI-generated backing track almost instantly. This is leading to subtle disengagement and a craving for authentic content.

  • Lack of emotion: The AI algorithm operates on mathematical probability. It then analyses millions of existing data points to predict what note should follow the next. But jolting human emotion usually relies on unexpected moments, sudden changes in human velocity, subtle imperfections, or even the deliberate choices producers make to break the rules of music theory to convey something unique. A computer may be able to probabilistically mimic music, but can it genuinely convey emotion in the same way a human producer can?
  • Homogeneity of backing music: If creators are all typing similar prompts into the same models, background music will inevitably all start sounding the same.

When everything is mathematically generated, human imperfections become a premium asset. Songs with raw, human elements stand out like a pattern interrupt, forcing the viewer to stop and listen because it sounds alive.

What lies ahead

We are standing in the middle of a huge live experiment, with the rules being written in real time. Creators living through this paradigm shift should consider asking themselves these questions:

  • Legal uncertainty: There are ongoing legal battles between major labels and AI music companies over copyright boundaries and training data. Long-term monetisation of videos utilising early-generation AI tracks could be in jeopardy if court precedents or international copyright frameworks shift.
  • Viewer trust: Are you diluting your personal brand, authority and authenticity by removing the human connection? Audiences will subscribe because they value that human feeling.
  • Collaboration in the future: Will AI completely replace the need to have music collaborators involved in your video projects forever? Or will it become more of a tool that both the musician and video creator use to collaborate? Only the future will tell.

What do you think?

AI music is only just beginning and shows no signs of slowing down or disappearing anytime soon, but human musicians aren’t going to stop creating. It won’t be about one side winning over the other, it’ll be about the choices creators make to define their voice.

In this case, does the convenience of a prompt outweigh the time it takes to find soulful human-made music? Or is there still true value in the collaboration between your visuals and another artist’s music?

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