When Music Stops Being a Product

A few years ago, just a few weeks after I had started my studies in Cologne, I was crossing the city center every day with my saxophone on my back. One day, a man stopped me in the street and said:

Das ist ein Saxophon!

Yes, exactly, I replied. He glanced at the case on my back, then back at me, and asked:

Since when?

Since I was nine, I told him. He looked at me with sudden admiration as if that one answer let him see every hour stacked behind it. As if, without hearing me play a single note, he could already picture everything that lay behind the instrument.

I’ve been thinking about that man a lot lately because one question keeps circling back: will the rise of generative AI make fewer people want to learn to make music, or exactly the opposite?

This week I read the article The Popera Boom: How Opera Took Over Pop and the Dance Floor by Ben Jolley, published on the Chartmetric blog. The piece points out an increasingly visible trend: the incorporation of classical music elements into mainstream pop.

The spark for the piece was Rosalía’s Berghain, her collaboration with Björk, Yves Tumor, and the London Symphony Orchestra, but it’s not an isolated case. RAYE reached number one in the UK with an album that revisits Vivaldi’s Winter, and artists like Charli XCX, Harry Styles, Labrinth, and Lady Gaga are leaning heavily into orchestral textures.

The article offers an intriguing explanation: maybe this return to the orchestra is no accident, arriving just as machines learn to churn out music on demand. As musician Linton Stephens puts it, instrumental collaboration reminds us that music is, in the end, made by humans.

I don’t know if AI is the direct cause of this trend. It’s probably impossible to prove but the coincidence is intriguing.

The Vinyl Theory

Remember vinyl? We left it for dead for decades, streaming had won everything: all the music in the world, weightless, in your pocket, for a few euros a month. And precisely because music had become infinite and weightless, we began to crave the opposite: something heavy, something you had to slide out of its sleeve, set on the turntable, and hear from beginning to end. Maybe something similar is now happening with instruments.

Right now, we can generate a whole song just by typing a sentence. Drums, vocals, arrangements, mixing, and mastering. All in seconds. All infinitely reproducible which leads to an inevitable question: if a technology can produce music for us, what’s the point of making music?

This is where classical music regains its power. An orchestra is almost the exact opposite of a generative model: dozens of people who have all dedicated years to honing their performance, playing together in the same room.

As Loren Sunderland wrote in Blank Mag: “There is something about a room full of musicians responding to each other in real-time that AI simply cannot replicate.”

Music as a Verb

Sunderland’s phrase reminded me of a word that explains this better than any other: musicking. It was coined by musicologist Christopher Small in 1998, and his idea is as simple as it is radical: music is not an object; it is an activity.

Musicking is participating in the musical act: playing, listening, dancing, conducting, or even setting up the chairs in a hall before a concert. For Small, the meaning of music is not found in the piece itself. It’s found in the relationships built between people while the music is happening.

If we go back to Sunderland’s quote, we’ll see she doesn’t say AI can’t reproduce the sound, in fact, it replicates sound better every day. What she says is that it cannot replicate musicians responding to one another, and that is likely where the key lies. Streaming represented the culmination of music as an object, an infinite catalog available on demand, and AI takes that logic even further by generating it. It produces sound without the need for a room, a gathering, or a community and that is precisely what we suddenly seem to be missing.

Perhaps that’s why strings, choirs, and orchestras feel so significant today.

Not just because they sound different. But because they let us glimpse the human process behind them. The hours of study, the craft, the mutual listening... The dedication required to be part of a shared cultural event.

What Happens Now?

I won’t be naive. Vinyl came back, but it never regained the throne; it remains a minority passion. Maybe playing instruments will follow a similar trajectory. Most of the music we listen to will be, in one way or another, produced with the help of machines.

But that doesn’t mean the space for musicking will disappear; in fact, the exact opposite could happen.

The real opportunity is in live performance: concerts, the unrepeatable moment. Musicians have spent years reflecting on how to make music; now, AI is forcing us to ask ourselves why we make it.

Clara Munté, Wind Product Manager