But I’m going to attempt to offer some personal insights and try and picture a musical landscape that I would personally prefer to see over any other. 

Technology has helped put the recording power into the hands of musicians and songwriters. The first consequence of the developments of softwares and plugins has made physically going to a studio for a lot of musicians and songwriters become obsolete. Anyone can now have a digital studio in their computer providing most of the needs a full-equipped one would, albeit digitally and not quite to the same quality of the actual studio, but the technologies are improving as we speak and the quality difference will become very negligible in the future. It is also way more cost effective: bedroom producers can make a record now at a fraction of the price it took to book a professional studio with an engineer and dedicated team.

But this technological boom for the aspiring songwriter/producer also has its pitfalls. I was watching a popular sound engineer talking about the choice producers have regarding the sound for a just the snare of a drum kit. He was saying 10 000 snare drum samples are available online to download now, which would take a whopping two months to go through! He goes on to say that he encourages his students to work with much less than is available, as scarcity encourages the creative mind over the confusion of too much choice. The digital utopia of the modern age has helped me of course in many ways, but I wholeheartedly agree with him: I keep my digital needs to an absolute minimum as I much prefer to be hands-on with actual hardware over the use of its digital counterpart as not only does it sound better, but you’re stuck with it and that turns out to actually be beneficial as the focus turns to the song and not the sound.

But this revolution has inevitably caused an explosion in the release of music across a broad spectrum of musical styles, and the outlets that are the giants of the streaming world (Spotify, Amazon and Apple Music) have welcomed this explosion with open arms to become the ever-increasing fat cats of the music industry. Yet The ongoing dichotomy with these streaming platforms is that on the one hand they have made any style of music discoverable in an instant, yet on the other they have depleted the importance of the songwriter in the process. The seemingly ridiculous payment per stream ($0.003 - $0.005 per stream on average) is just a reflection of the increasing unimportance of the songwriter in the modern world, and it’s showing no signs of stopping, and that is one thing I do worry about in the future.

But two developments in recent years that have been particularly noteworthy could be even more dooming for songwriters: the improvement of algorithms and in particular algorithmic playlists in the streaming world (replacing the old-fashioned hub of new-artist discovery: radio stations); and the explosion of AI. The algorithmic playlist matches similar artists to your favourite music taste on an everlasting search for your favourite new sound. This is just one part of the increasing digital learning age we are in, algorithms are getting more and more fine-tuned to reflect the needs of the consumer (the listener in our case), and there’s not just a handful of them to chose from, there are literally millions of them. In the songwriting department, AI can now even write songs based on style, genre and specific artists to please a certain demographic and taste, and it can sound surprisingly good… There are even dedicated websites that aim to aid songwriters in their endeavour with AI-assisted songwriting, like the AI Lyrics Generator that claims to help songwriters with writer’s block, in the same way Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s famed Oblique Strategies cards were designed to help the creative writing process back in the 70s. 

Maybe the definition of songwriter will radically change in the future, where coders for AI in all different aspects of art (painting, sculpture, music…) will become the “artist-making artist” where an indirect relationship between the person creating and the art-form emerges. People will be labelled as artistic geniuses in their ability to code the perfect AI songwriter, or image generator in visual arts.

Virtual Reality is yet another field where people may be able to attend live events from their bedroom at a fraction of a price of a live music ticket and meet other "virtual" friends and grab a pint. Even more scary for the performing artist is the development of holograms or “digital avatars" as some prefer to call them (because it sounds less "hollow" maybe?), as for example in the new hit ABBA experience "Voyage" which represents yet another field of technology that could potentially threaten the organic live music industry. 

Does this all mean that we’re being gradually replaced? It all sounds like an increasing call for arms between the artist and the growing voracious monster that’s AI and the algorithm… right? However, AI has no personal sensibility as of yet and cannot innovate in the myriad ways that a person can. Sure it can produce material based on taste etc., it can prove to be a powerful tool for songwriting and can even provide prime entertainment, but it can’t surprise us like a person or react unpredictably the way a human can… at least for now. 

The algorithm, AI and digital avatar age definitely sound like a threatening prospect for the songwriter, musician and potentially every form of art. I know I may sound old-    fashioned but there really is nothing better than human interaction, and that is what a lot of song creating/performing is about with all its flaws and imperfections. It would be sad to see a day where the “perfect” AI replace the “imperfect” human. On the other hand I acknowledge the myriad benefits it can have, but I would like to see a world where we keep this development in check: as long as technologies are there to aid and not replace I am personally all for it. Just as long as they don’t start saying “Hasta la vista, baby…”