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Donna Ross-Jones
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The AI Music Crossroads — The Quiet Revolution Begins

ASCAP, BMI, and SOCAN just announced they’ll now register partially AI-generated works.
On the surface, it sounds progressive — a nod to innovation and artistic freedom.

But read between the lines, and a deeper truth emerges: this decision doesn’t just make it easier for independent artists to protect their work — it makes it easier for corporations to replace human creators at scale.

Here’s the part no press release will say out loud:

If the major music companies can now legally register and monetize songs that are partially AI-generated, what’s to stop them from hiring one “prompt engineer” to generate hundreds of tracks a day?

They don’t need to hire rooms full of songwriters anymore.

They don’t need session musicians, vocalists, or producers crafting each sound.

They can feed their own catalog into an AI engine — trained on the very songs you and your peers created — and start pumping out “new” content that technically meets the registration criteria.

It’s legal. It’s efficient.
And it’s devastating.

If “writing a prompt” now qualifies as “human contribution,” what happens when corporations hire a few prompt engineers and generate thousands of songs a day?

They won’t need songwriters.
They won’t need producers.
They won’t need musicians.
They’ll need data managers.

The creative process is being redefined — not around emotion or expression, but around output.

And that’s the crossroads we stand at today.
So when the industry calls this progress, who is it really progressing for?

The Cost for Real Creators

If that happens, here’s what we lose:
• Authenticity — real emotion that comes from lived experience, not predictive text.
• Livelihoods — fewer jobs for songwriters, musicians, engineers, and producers.
• Cultural diversity — when music becomes data-driven, it stops reflecting life and starts reflecting algorithms.
• Royalties — even if AI-generated songs earn billions of streams, those dollars will go to corporations, not communities of creators.

This is the quiet automation of artistry.

Experience so far shows that Artificial Intelligence creates the same bland content, overall, as Human Songwriters have for centuries, same 'mistakes', same 'forgettability' as opposed to 'memorability'.
Artificial Intelligence, like Human creatives, occasionally might do something right, and create a hit we all agree is a good product.
The men with money... let us call them... Oligarchs... are gonna do what their money enables them to do.
George Orwell, in his prescient novel, "1984" mentions Winston Smith observing a woman out in the back yard, hanging clothes on the line, humming the latest AI generated tune.
I say, keep on keeping on, creating, instilling your humanness in musical product. Yours will likely always be better listening fare than AI, and have some entree to the marketplace despite what the Oligarchs are selling in bulk.
I doubt you'll be able to block them by any Legislation.
Just keep writing, composing, creating, competing, as if nothing's changed.

Yes Gary, I'll continue to compose as they did hundreds of years ago - Ha, ha. They'll have to pry the pen out of my cold, dead hand.

John

It's a concern John, but tech has never cared about who it renders irrelevant.

The music business has slowly destroyed itself without the help of Ai, but through, precise recordings that no human coukd replicate live.

Auto tune, not to mention money making bands who can barely play an instrument.

Turning people who can't sing into decent singers in the studio.

Authenticity? Using auto tune, sampled instruments, drum software so good you cant even tell.

Amerucan idol making stars out of people who cant hold an audience, and cant write.

The shift went away from writing , to production, bad move.

But this is not even talking about Ai yet.

The one point you have there about. Authenticity
..

I think real emotion still sells the music, so Ai probably won't defeat real artists.

Odd saying emotion sells the music, but it really does.

Nobody ever said a word about songwriters sending their song, or just lyrics to a studio, to have it recorded.

They had less to do with the product than somebody using prompts.

Hey, I doubt I will ever hear an Ai generated sing that's anywhere close to my favorite music of all time.

I think is exceedingly good at being mediocre.

It just sounds akir better than it is

Nobody ever said a word about songwriters sending their song, or just lyrics to a studio, to have it recorded. Thats how it works . You do a work tape with melody and it done with pros , Always to pitch to publishers . It's still being done that way . Artist songs are using session players and sung by the artist. Suno songs are useless, and only used for forums. You are not the artist , the robots are . Old people don't give a shite about robots . Young people are , they're going to steal their livelihood , its happening now ..