We Need Disruption, But Make It Human

This is an extended version of my somewhat extemporised talk on “AI and Music: Threats and Opportunities” for the Scottish Parliament’s Cross Party Group for Music (March 2025)

Disruption is good for the soul. It can be bad for business. But it gets people going. I think that’s a good thing. Actually, it might be bad for certain (set in their ways) businesses, but it can sweep aside the gatekeepers and open up new opportunities for upstarts. And I’ll always welcome the challenge.

AI is having its moment as the biggest disruptive technology since… what? Many examples are carelessly banded about. The internet (I think so), the Industrial Revolution (well, OK, maybe), the printing press (step aside Gutenberg, for goodness sake, how many times?), the wheel (OK, stop it now).

AI is amazing, powerful and, used in the right way, can be a massive enabler. It’s been a long time in development. The rapid acceleration we are experiencing now is the result of an incredible collective effort over many decades. For the music business, AI is definitely a game-changer. Like all disrupters it brings opportunities and threats. I personally think the opportunities far outweigh the threats. But there is one significant threat to music and all technology that the Big Tech companies behind AI have caused that I am worried about. Not because of what it means for the future, but because it threatens where we are now.

My first experience of disruptive technology was streaming media. When my friend Tom Lousada and I founded Inner Ear and launched our first project, the underground electronic music internet radio station, Radio Magnetic, in 2001, we pioneered the use of digital distribution technologies like live streaming and what became podcasting — something we were doing before it was called podcasting (as several people keep pointing out to me). We've always utilised and innovated on new and emerging technologies. We use them to help us create, to get our creative work out there and to engage our audiences.

I'm a massive fan of progressive technology. But we've got to balance innovation and development with protecting what makes us human. Because technological development must be aligned to the interests of humanity. Otherwise, what’s the point? Just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should. But we usually do; because we can. We see this most, I think, in the relentless development of new technology.

Culture is the way we live in the world. And it is the culture in all of us, the music, the art and storytelling innate in all of us, that makes us human. It fires our creativity and our innovation. And is has done since our the early days of our species. That’s obvious to creative people, right? Of course it is. But I will make the case for culture time and time again because I know that it incredible manifold value. It brings joy to people, enables us to communicate and it is a supercatalyst for the economy. So let’s keep that in mind.

We must absolutely strive to achieve the massive potential offered by AI, but we must do it for the good of humanity. And we mustn't lose what makes us human in the process.

I'm reading a thought provoking book, Genesis: AI, Hope and the Human Spirit. It was the last book that Henry Kissinger collaborated on before he died; written with Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie. It's fascinating; eye-opening about politics, scary on security and enlightening on medicine. There are a multitude of game-changing applications of AI; good and bad.

Let’s approach AI’s potential with optimism, but temper it with caution. With every major technological disruption comes a cycle of fear, idealism, rejection, frustration, acceptance and eventual mass-utilisation. We’re currently experiencing overlapping fear, rejection and idealism (sometimes all at the same time, by the same sections of society). In the 1980s, tape cassettes were going to kill music. In the 1990s, CDs were the saviour of the recording industry, replaced tapes and challenged vinyl. Then minidisks had their moment, briefly. (Which was tremendously useful for those of us making music, DJ mixes and radio programmes.)

And then we get to the 2000s and the dot com boom and bust (when we started Inner Ear). In music, Napster disrupted everything and disrupted the dominance big labels had over the music economy. Napster’s founders (Sean and Shawn) were big time chancers (as if you could really claim P2P was “fair use”) but the shake up was exciting, monumental and irreversible. Did I use it? (Of course I did!) Anytime a big change in the way we do something comes along (a paradigm shift, if you must… but, really, must you?), there's a disruptive element to it. That upsets the status quo, unsettles the market, shocks the economic ecosystem. Napster, and peer-to-peer file sharing more widely, decimated the way that the recording industry had operated until then.

That disruption hurt the major labels most. But, you know, so what? They had been ripping off artists and consumers for several decades by then. Napster was disruptive in a very interesting manner. And it eventually paved the way for what became music streaming. But let’s not skip over the launch of the iMac, iTunes and the iPod, the Apple Computer vs. Apple Corps. (aka The Beatles), the Disney dispute over Jobs n Co’s “rip, mix, burn” slogan and Apple’s landmark deal with the majors to enable him to launch iTunes Music, alongside the rise of iconoclastic platforms like Last.fm and rise of YouTube as a major music sharing platform, which is really what made Spotify viable. There’s a load more to it than that, of course. Buy me a coffee, or a pint, or more likely a lot of tea or bottle of whisky and we can discuss it for hours.

During the peer-to-peer years, the music industry lost a lot of ground, but gained a game-changing method of distribution — one we’ve all but forgotten about. File sharing was a social media prototype; a revolution in reaching new audiences and enabling those audiences to access new music. Then the same thing happened to film and TV. Music and film both suffered from lost monetisation in the explosion of widespread access to, and piracy of, the recordings that we have come to call content. The games industry stood back, watched, then got it right by introducing a subscription model. Software followed that and solved their piracy issues. It’s easy to forget just how disruptive, exciting, terrifying and full of promises — made and broken — that period (2000s–2010s) was.

I think these cycles do tend to happen over and over again. But the biggest current threat is that posed by AI technology giants lobbying to governments to weaken existing copyright law. The UK Government recently proposed an exemption (to copyright law) for text and data mining by tech firms for AI training material. A debate between music industry and government has been ongoing for months. The UK Government launched a consultation (as governments like to do), which was completed in late February. In late January cross-bench peer Baroness Kidron proposed an amendment in the House of Lords, which countered the threat to copyright law. Her amendment passed comfortably.

I think it's very important that we remain vigilant about this issue and pay attention to these proposed changes to the law. Because we must carefully consider how to regulate and legislate advances in technology. We need to strike a balance between not stifling innovation — so we can helping propel the massive benefits of technologies like AI — with compromising what we already have by eroding existing copyright law. That is ludicrous. Let’s not let it happen.

Because weakening copyright law would slash the value of intellectual property. And that, in turn, undermines the incentive to create. And it could cause a crash in creative industries value (which is worth around £125B to the UK economy currently). Why invest your time and energy to create new work that others can exploit for profit? I don’t think this threat is so much about data mining or scraping artistic works, which has gone on for far longer than AI, or the internet, or even digital technology. I think it’s about safeguarding the existing laws which are in place to protect rights of creative people to realise the value of their work. I don’t think the real risks from that are in AI imitating art (or in art imitating AI). The real risks are in bad actors acting badly and ripping off creatives like us.

The music industry is often the canary in the coal mine. Cheap, cheap? As I said before, it's been through various disruptions over the years. But there are a couple of other threats, or rather concerns that people have, which are worth noting.

People worry that AI-generated music will lead to homogeneity. We’ve heard that concern with music, and indeed with all art and creativity every time there’s an advance in technology (probably from the good old printing press onwards). Whatever you think of AI-generated art — some of it is strong, some of it is weak — creatively this is the worst it'll ever be. It keeps on improving.

And all of the large language models (LLMs) are improved continually. It will be interesting to see how this creative concern plays out.

The other main concern people seem to have is the perceived threats to employment potential for composers, producers and musicians. That AI is going to compromise and threaten earning potential for session musicians, arrangers, mixing and mastering engineers, studio production, etc. Well, maybe. But that has been happening for decades. It’s the latest episode in the series of democratisation of music production by technology. And personally, I think democratisation, which is a product of disruption is a very good thing for humanity.

Amazing advancements in access to technology extend people’s ability to create. And every time this happens, it threatens the status quo. It's a challenge. And it's a difficult challenge at the moment because the music industry has been through a tough time. The live sector was decimated during the pandemic. I worked with my old friend and former colleague Robert Kilpatrick from the SMIA tirelessly (well we were exhausted for most of the time, but, you know, we kept going and tried to be tireless) to represent the industry in Scotland through our relationship across Parliament, Government and the industry to try to secure help and support.

As I have written and talked a lot about previously, rebuilding the creative economy takes investment, innovation and hard work. We need to build resilience. And we need to be aware of the past but look to the future.

It’s interesting that the current challenges are, interestingly enough, not to the live sector (which really has suffered too much recently) but to the recorded sector of the music industry. The massive amount of AI-generated music flooding the market does dilute market share as it fills prominent playlists on Spotify (e.g. relaxing music to study to, and so on). And Spotify may be quite happy about that because they don't need to pay royalties for AI-generated music.

Another challenge is to low lying, low value soundtrack music. Soundtracking web video, podcasts, advertising, games, etc. AI-generated music will impact the sync market. But I think that just means that the human creators have to work harder at building their own brand. And at accentuating their humanity; what it is that sets them apart from the machines.

Enter the opportunities. There are some very interesting AI tools in audio and video production. We've been using them at Inner Ear for years to enhance and restore and improve on audio and video productions. But I think generative AI is one relatively small aspect. The big opportunity is in utilising AI to enhance your productivity, efficiency and strategic business development. That, I think, is the real game-changer.

I'm interested in what we can do on a one-to-one basis, working with entrepreneurial people — in the music industry and across the creative industries — to help them with business development. Helping people use AI to grow and to trade, especially internationally. But I'm also extremely interested in what AI makes possible on a macroeconomic level. On what happens when you join the dots. When you look across society, across Scotland, and think, well, we've got all these creative people who can now amplify what they do. Using AI correctly, they can do potentially ten times as much with the same or less effort. (It’s been transformative for me, my company and others I’ve helped so far.) And the economic opportunity for Scotland of that aggregated accelerated effort and output is massive.

AI-driven analytics can identify new markets and engage new target audiences. Machine learning can personalise content and experiences and give fans more compelling ways to interact with artists. AI can be used to help build resilient, sustainable business models. So, if harnessed responsibly, AI can be a strategic accelerator for post-pandemic recovery. But it has to be done in the right way.

We have robust intellectual property laws. We need to uphold them and make sure that amendments to those are progressive and not regressive. We need smart, blockchain royalty mechanisms so that creators are compensated fairly and in a timely manner for their creative work. And we need ethical industry practice. That's where lawmakers and policy influencers have an important role to play. And we need an ongoing dialogue right across industry, society and politics to make sure that we're working together effectively.

There is a reason AI companies are striving to disrupt so quickly. Obviously, there's a massive capitalist imperative to be the best LLM and gain market dominance. The OpenAIs, Googles and Microsoft’s will tell you that they want to get there first with AI technology and get people using it so that bad actors don’t get to keep for nefarious use, especially when it comes to defence and security. That is true and we should all get behind it. But there's also a massive capitalist imperative to be the best in class and to capture as much attention as possible.

Businesses capture consumers’ attention by using art, entertainment and culture. Because the power and emotion of music especially (but all art really) is a quick way to get people on board and interested. That is the value that we all bring to the world. And it’s huge. Remember that art, entertainment and culture is really what makes us human. Much more so than business. So we've got to approach technological disruption in a sensible, human way.

It's also vital to recognise that when we're talking about AI, it’s not AI that we have the issue with. We tend to think of AI like it's a personified entity. But ChatGPT is never going to really lose its mind in a woodland festival in Southern Scotland. Gemini won’t be moved to tears by a new music recital in the Usher Hall. Claude ain’t going to strike up on the pipes at a trad session in Ullapool. And DeepSeek can’t experience the excitement of being the first one to see that hot new band at a gig in Sleazy’s on a Monday night.

It's not the AI that we have the issue with, because although it may seem like it's got Johnny 5's hunger for input, it's actually the human wizards behind the curtain that are pulling the strings.

So, let's harness the game-changing potential offered by AI tools, but let's hold governments and industry to account to require just the right amount of legislation and regulation for the big tech companies, so we can enjoy the benefits. And preserve our humanity in the process.