Reconstructing the music artist identity in the age of AI
The most controversial technologies challenge social norms by upending how we understand ourselves. Tech breakthroughs shift - even obliterate - our landmarks for identity: status, belonging, work, and self-worth. When our identities feel threatened, we instinctively get defensive. We draw moral battle lines. (Humans: we're predictable like that.)
“AI generated content isn't real art.”
This sentiment is familiar. Back in 1982, the Musicians Union in the UK banned synthesisers and drum machines. Singer Barry Manilow had replaced several orchestral players with synth players for his tour; the union saw this as taking away musicians' jobs. They were particularly concerned about West End theatrical productions, imagining orchestra pits full of 'technicians' instead of musicians.
They saw synth players—twiddling knobs, pushing buttons, using electronic circuitry to make sound—as not 'real' musicians, the way orchestral players were. In the same way, many view images and music created with generative AI tools as 'fake'.
"Where do you draw the line between what's real art and what's not?" a journalist asked me recently while interviewing me about AI's disruption of the music industry.
The reach for moral language—human vs algorithm—is an attempt to defend the old coordinates. But generative AI is more than another tool; it rearranges the very pillars many music artists build their identity on.
The Cracking Foundation
For centuries, mastery has been the bedrock of artistic work—the slow accrual of rare motor skills and aesthetic judgment. When a model conjures a convincing melody in seconds, that bedrock feels suddenly porous, and years of investment can seem retroactively devalued.
The romantic myth of singular authorship unravels too. AI outputs are woven from statistical echoes of collective data, so ownership grows murky, blurring the boundary between "my genius" and "the model's mix of everyone's voice." Even process—long cherished as an intimate, tactile journey that proves devotion— risks collapsing into an invisible series of prompts and probability curves.
Added to this is the economic shock of abundance. Once, releasing music required a record-label gatekeeper, but digital distribution services have made worldwide release a routine upload for anyone. AI now promises to multiply that oversupply exponentially, pulverising scarcity.
Finally, AI stirs ontological doubt: if creativity was the last domain that confirmed human exceptionalism, watching an algorithm improvise chips away at the conviction that art is evidence of a unique spark within us.
If you've spent your whole life believing you're special because of your talent and your ability to conjure what we call 'art', AI has basically come along to say, "Actually, maybe you're not" by doing it in 30 seconds. While you were sleeping.
Ouch.
The Ego Death
Look, I get it. I grew up as a 'gifted' child and apprenticed as a classical musician under tutelage from a lineage that traces back to Beethoven himself. Trust me, the pipeline from 'gifted' child to burnt out adult is real. (The gifted-to-therapy pipeline is also thriving, but that's another essay.)
I've decided that I needed to let my ego die. Or at least, be willing to dance on it a little.
To do this, I made the mental pivot from "maker of amazing music and player of instruments with great technical skill" to "designer of context."
Let's face it, the audience doesn't give a shit if I can play arpeggios flawlessly on the piano when I can do that with my computer. All those years at the piano, practicing every scale combination with the metronome—the only person who cared was my piano teacher in her 70s with arthritis. (Bless her, she meant well.) When audiences come to a live show of mine or listen to my music, they're not there to see me flex that technical skill. They're there to feel the music move them.
Why? Context.
As someone making underground dance music, I've learned that the magic isn't in the difficulty of the parts—it's in the way every element is placed, layered, and timed to hit at just the right emotional moment. They want the visuals on the screen to tell them the story, they want to feel that connection as I make eye contact, and they want to feel the bass reverberate through their bodies.
That's where the artistry lives now: in curation, in decision-making, in emotional architecture. Context becomes the medium. A song is no longer just vibrations in air but a node of meaning—connecting place, memory, ritual, and collective intention.
Seen this way, curation says: "Of all the possible combinations the machine can generate, I bear responsibility for which realities I allow to materialise." Technique still matters, but as a servant of discernment, not as a spectacle in itself. The audience senses the presence of an organising human mind and feels oriented inside a field that could otherwise be overwhelming.
Learning from Luxury
This realisation led me to consider how artists can build rich, meaningful context around their music. I began to apply the idea of luxury to music, in opposition to the degrading worth of instantly generated content that bypasses the creative struggle.
In luxury fashion houses, their allure isn't just in fabric or cut, but in the stories that thread yesterday's atelier into today's runway. Take Glenn Martens' recent Margiela debut for Paris Couture 2025. He framed his collection like an archivist storyteller: translucent PVC gowns nodded to the layered, see-through plastics of his own 2008 graduate show, folding his personal origin story into the maison's lexicon. Every mask on the runway revived Martin Margiela's own seminal 1989 debut trick of veiling the face. And he staged it all in the former Paris municipal morgue that hosted Martin's final show in 2009, turning location itself into a document of endings and beginnings. (Only in fashion would "let's have the show in a morgue" be considered inspired storytelling.)
What emerges is "context as couture": the garments become luxurious not merely because of craftsmanship, but because they stitch self-history, house-heritage, and site-memory into one live narrative.
Music artists can do the same. While most songwriters inevitably fold personal history into lyrics, we need to think broader—release arcs beyond just concept albums, multimedia storylines, meaning behind imagery—so that each song feels like an archival piece reissued with new relevance.
Ritualising the Audience
The luxury houses that thrive don't just sell products; they ritualise their publics into miniature cultures. When Prada convenes literary salons instead of product launches, the brand positions itself as an intellectual custodian of conversation. When Aesop installs a fleeting Queer Library during Pride Month, the company reaffirms that its value lies in the atmosphere it curates, not just the products it sells. (Nothing says "our hand cream is better" like a carefully curated book collection.)
Music artists can claim the same territory by treating every release cycle as a season of hosted rituals—beyond the usual live performance or tour. After all, at least in Australia, touring is largely unsustainable for artists with smaller fanbases. (Thanks, geography!) We need to think of other ways to create opportunities for real-world participation for audiences.
And the key words here are "real-world participation"—to connect with others within the fanbase and with the artist, and to contribute and experience. Real world only makes sense if attendees do more than witness. While many bigger artists rely on magnitude to make money, artists without large fanbases need to create deeper, more meaningful exchanges with their audiences while also embracing the reality of commodification by transparently linking those rituals to viable revenue streams. (We live within the capitalist structure, after all.)
The artist's task is to choreograph meanings so that listeners encounter themselves, each other, and the world in a slightly altered state. What moves the audience, then, is not the arithmetic of the machine, but the recognition that someone has shaped chaos into something coherent and emotionally legible.
In the end, maybe AI isn't stealing our jobs—maybe it's forcing us to remember what our jobs actually were all along. (And maybe forcing us to be better at them, which is inconvenient but ultimately fair.)