Music as a cultural infrastructure business

Suno is introducing deliberate friction to pump the brakes on the AI-powered superabundance it helped create. By implementing download caps (per Variety), the company is putting guardrails around how much music users can output.

Streaming services have removed millions of suspected ‘spam’ tracks, and TechRepublic reports Spotify is introducing AI persona labelling. With Suno also signing a licensing deal with BMG (according to Music Business Worldwide), all signs point to a world where AI is seen less as a bull in a china shop and more as an opportunity that can viably be integrated, governed, and monetised by the music industry. Ultimately, as the integration of AI unfolds, the industry will increasingly need to solve the cultural problems created by superabundance, alongside reaping the functional benefits AI can deliver.

The solution to these cultural problems, unsurprisingly, is not using AI to find ways to create more creators. Instead, the industry needs to think of itself less as a music business and more as a cultural infrastructure business. Rather than producing music and rights, the systemic infrastructure that produces culture through artists is the asset that has enduring value in the age of AI.

Function versus culture

What is indisputable about AI is its functional capacity. The ability to make a recording has evolved from a technically challenging, expert-enabled art form to being as simple as writing a prompt. 

When it comes to production in most industries, function is king and value is ultimately placed on the efficiency and capability in going from start to finish. Yet music is not a functional industry based on the production of raw materials. It is a cultural one that carries meaning and identity. And ironically, the better AI becomes at fulfilling music's functional requirements, the less value those functions hold in differentiating music as a cultural asset.

As the functional outputs of musical craft become abundant, craft itself becomes less legible in the finished recording. Music production can therefore become increasingly divorced from music culture (similar to the ongoing decoupling of music consumption from music culture).

From scarcity to superabundance

Music will always have cultural value in society because, as Warner Music CEO Robert Kynckl puts it, it is “the most distributed thing in the universe, maybe other than oxygen” (per Semafor). Music has also historically enjoyed an advantage that other cultural industries did not: the recording itself was a scarce cultural object. Even in the financial freefall of the download era, music’s cultural positioning was indisputable. 

However, with the ever-increasing superabundance of recordings, music has lost the unique cultural asset that only it could control. In the technological quest to solve the functional problems of music production, we have created a cultural one. 

The scarcity that once helped make the recording itself a cultural asset has been traded for superabundance. But cultural value hasn't disappeared; it has simply been redistributed. The craft and cultural power of music will increasingly reside in the places where trust is inherent. This puts power in the hands of artists who double down on performance, provenance, and personality. 

A Swedish solution to music’s culture problem

Music now has to compete in the same lane as entertainment as a whole. Athletes, podcasters, influencers, and celebrities all operate in the same attention economy as artists. But generating and releasing a recording doesn't provide an artist with achievement, an established audience, or cultural authority.

So how do artists compete in the modern culture of entertainment? If it’s not obvious, it is worth being clear that AI is not the solution to music’s culture problem. Culture is not powered by technological tools, but by social infrastructure. This is what cultivates the skills of elite performance, provides a provenance-rich environment, and develops distinct cultural personalities. 

Since Sweden has a good track record of solving the music industry’s problems, it’s worth turning to them again. Stockholm perhaps holds one of the best models for cultural development. Decades of investment across music education, subsidised studios, venues and public institutions have enabled scenes to flourish and talent to overperform and compete globally. The city is now applying this model to Stockholm’s Meatpacking district, explicitly using music as an “engine of urban renewal” (per Fast Company).

The craft of producing culture

The music business can no longer think of itself primarily as a recording business. It is increasingly a cultural infrastructure business, which means it is dependent on the craft of artists and their cultural standing in the world. AI will enable a functional revolution and, in doing so, reveal where the future value of musical craft lies.

Culture has never been more strategically important to the music business. What makes that exciting is that the industry's role in developing social infrastructure and creative clusters has never been more important. 

AI has commoditised the production of music. In doing so, it could make the production of culture the music industry's most valuable craft.