A lot of people are talking around this. I’d rather just say it directly. If you make beats for income, or want to, you need to understand what’s happening right now.
The Warning Some Didn’t Want to Hear
AI is going to replace a lot of us in music. Not slow us down. Not force us to adapt. Replace us.
To be clear, I’m a fan of generative AI. I use it regularly — for lyrics when I hit a wall, for fixing things around the house, even for tightening up my own writing. I used it to help me make this post more coherent. So this isn’t coming from a luddite; rather someone who is a technologist and hacker in the purest sense of the word. My provocative statement is a read on the signals and trends that have been occurring on the production side of music the last 18+ months.
Outside of music, I’m a technologist. It’s my job to understand emerging technology and know how to apply it. I was already aware of transformer architecture — the foundation behind ChatGPT — as early as 2019. So when ChatGPT launched in November 2022, I recognized it. What I didn’t anticipate was the speed of everything that followed. But the direction was never in question.
A couple of years ago, a notable internet DJ was giving people pain for saying AI would disrupt the industry. He was basically calling the notion of that happening delusional. I remember hearing his response and thinking “this guy has no idea what’s coming”. Some things you just have to let people figure it out for themselves. Today he’s selling his own AI-modeled products. He figured it out.
There’s a saying in corporate: “AI won’t replace you, but the person using AI will.” That’ll be true in most industries and disciplines. I believe music is different though. AI will replace producers and composers outright if the market allows it to happen, and it appears primed to do so.
If you listened to a beat made by AI two years ago, you probably laughed it off. I played with some of those tools. Then, it would give you maybe 30 seconds of audio at no more than 16-bit resolution. But that’s not what you’re dealing with today. Studio quality beats. What Suno.ai is producing right now is just the early version. The current output is already competitive with what most working producers are making. Just the other day I saw a post on IG from a multi-platinum producer who said he was vibing with a mixtape recently, thinking it was Future. He was fooled. It was AI.
So, the question of whether AI can match a human producer has already been answered. The answer is yes. The conversation really is what the market will do about it.
How Music Got Cheap
Before AI entered the picture though, the market was already heading in a different direction.
When beat platforms and streaming services took off in the mid-2000s, they essentially commoditized music. That’s the nice way to say it. The more direct way is that they made music feel disposable. Infinite access at a flat monthly rate trained people to expect music for almost nothing, and that expectation bled into how artists think about paying for production.
When I started producing, for a single beat, I was getting close to a thousand dollars. Now artists will message you offering $25. You’ll see producers with platinum credits trying to move beats for $300. The floor has dropped out for most people. This is why so many have essentially needed to become “beat pimps”, tricking out their beats under non-exclusives monikers and attempting to flip it as many times as they can to make decent money.
Sure, you’ll hear people say “I get $10K or $25K for a beat” and maybe some of them do, but that’s the music industry equivalent of making the NFL. Out of every high school football player in the country, 0.023% go to the NFL (study). The league is real but the odds of being in it are not. Same math applies here. I spoke to an OG producer in LA a few years back and he stated he got paid a hundred thousand for a single beat. I don’t know. Maybe. But I do know building your business model around that outcome is not a solid plan.
The point isn’t that those numbers don’t exist. The point is that the middle of the market (where most working producers actually live, myself included) has been hollowed out. And that happened before AI touched any of it. AI is just accelerating something that was already in motion.
The Scrape, the Sync, and What’s Left
Here’s why I don’t post my beats on BeatStars, Airbit, Soundcloud, or any of the major platforms. And it’s not about the Terms of Use. I’ve read those. I’ve also worked in technology long enough to know what “Ethical AI” commitments are worth when there’s money on the table, and with recent rulings on what AI is allowed to be trained on, I expect for this to get worse.
Your music will get scraped and it will be used to train models. If it can be heard, it will be copied. That’s not a theory, it’s just how the technology works. Keeping my beats off those platforms is Step 1 in a multi-step process. This is why I run my own site and require people to register just to hear my beats. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a deliberate one.
The sync world confirmed everything for me. I used to have my beats (for sync) on Getty Images before they exited that space. More recently I started rebuilding my sync catalog and I settled on the DISCO.ac (referral link) platform where I have my moodybeam catalog live now. While I was testing platforms before landing there, I got an offer from a major player in the sync space. They wanted to license my music to train AI, with quarterly payouts. (I think they were sending this to everyone on the platform). Read that again. A large sync company was already building a system where music supervisors could type a prompt and get a custom track generated on demand. Of course, they were doing it ethically (they were asking) but still, it’s another clear signal on what the market is saying.
I’m of the opinion that sync deals for small independents are in serious trouble. The economics are straightforward. An AI-generated track costs less and delivers faster. The only clients who won’t go that route are the ones who make a conscious decision not to. I know some of those clients exist but I fear they are the minority.
The Artist Who Still Wants a Human
So what does all of this mean for producers? Honestly, I’m still figuring it out. But the question isn’t whether AI is going to affect your business. It already has. The better question is what is your relationship to AI right now. Are you avoiding it entirely? Are you using it somewhere in your process? Every major DAW is already injecting AI into their toolset in some form, so the line is getting harder to hold.
What I do believe is that there will be a segment of artists who choose human producers on purpose. Not because they can’t afford AI, and not because they don’t know it exists. Because they don’t want it. Will artists eventually start asking producers to verify they used no AI anywhere in their process? I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s not far-fetched.
Think about vinyl. Vinyl didn’t survive the digital era because it was convenient. It survived because a specific type of music buyer decided that convenience wasn’t the point. They wanted something tangible. Something with a story behind it. The warmth you get when the needle traces the grooves. Streaming won the numbers game, but vinyl carved out a real, paying market for itself. That market is niche, but it’s real and it keeps growing.
I believe the same thing is going to happen in music production. Some will come to realize and appreciate the beat was never the product – the producer was.
As AI-generated beats flood the market, authenticity becomes scarce. And scarcity creates value. Some artists will wear “human-produced” the same way independent filmmakers wear “shot on film.” It becomes part of the identity, part of what they’re selling to their audience.
There’s also something AI genuinely cannot replicate, and that’s the relationship. When you work with a human producer, you’re not typing a prompt and downloading a file. You’re in a conversation. The producer hears something in your voice, pushes back on an idea, suggests a direction you didn’t see coming. That back-and-forth is where a lot of great music actually comes from. An artist who understands that will always want a human in the room.
So as a producer, this is my market. Truth is, it’s always been my market. Gen AI is just making it more visible. These are the artists who have decided the process matters as much as the product. The ones who were fine paying $25 for a non-exclusive beat were never really in play. They’ll shift to AI. Then the question will be why pay $25 for a non-exclusive when you can pay the same and get an AI-generated exclusive. Bookmark it.
At some point you have to decide what kind of artist you are. Not what kind you want to be seen as. What kind you actually are. Because the artists who are serious about that answer are already looking for producers who take the same question seriously. The ones who aren’t will have a prompt box ready for them.
Which one are you?