The Fast Food Era of Music is Here. Do we Care?
AI is about to release a full album. Not a remix. Not a backing track. A whole album. It’s called Paper Sun Rebellion by The Velvet Sundown. The first cut released is called Dust on the Wind. It appears that the band doesn’t exist. Not in any human sense. The music, though, is fully produced, polished, and strangely moving. Vocals, guitar solos, drums, bass. Everything sounds real. And here’s the twist: it doesn’t just sound good for AI. It just sounds good. So much so that they have already racked-up over 634,013 monthly listeners on Spotify.
This marks a turning point. For years, AI tools hovered around the edges of music production. They cleaned up stems, isolated vocals, and helped finish old recordings, like the Beatles’ Now and Then. Those were technical assists. What’s happening now is something entirely different. AI isn’t helping musicians. It’s becoming them.
We’ve entered what feels like the fast food era of music. Content is instant, disposable, and always available. AI-generated songs can be created in minutes, distributed across platforms, and streamed by millions before lunch. They satisfy on the surface, but the question lingers: are they nourishing us, or just feeding the algorithm?
Some in the industry are embracing the shift. Grimes released her AI voice model to the public and offered to split royalties with anyone who uses it. David Guetta dropped an AI-generated Eminem verse during a live show and called it the future of music. Holly Herndon has gone even further, using her AI voice twin, Spawn, to explore machine collaboration and the boundaries of authorship.
Not everyone is sold. Music veteran Rick Beato has raised concerns about what’s lost when music becomes perfectly predictable. If AI can replicate the sound of soul, what happens to the soul itself? When you remove the friction, the failure, the lived experience behind a song, what are you really left with?
This is no longer about novelty. AI is generating full albums, building virtual bands, and enabling prompt engineers with no formal training to produce music that competes with the real thing. It is efficient. It is scalable. And for many listeners, it will be more than enough.
But something deeper is at stake. Music has always been more than just sound. It carries weight. It is tied to time, place, struggle, and context. Great songs are messy. They come from somewhere. They stand for something. Strip that away, and you are left with aesthetic, not art.
What’s more unsettling is what comes next. This isn’t just about creating new AI music. It’s about reviving the dead. Picture a not-so-distant future where record labels, eager to cash in on nostalgia, resurrect long-gone bands using their archives as training data. Imagine hearing a brand-new track from Nirvana or The Doors on a streaming playlist. The voice sounds familiar. The vibe is right. But it isn’t real.
There is no band. No studio session. No meaning behind the lyrics. Just code generating content in the style of the past, sold as if it were still alive. The music will live on, but only as a product. No tour. No interviews. No cultural context. Just infinite replicas filling infinite playlists.
AI-only radio stations will emerge. New Beatles songs from a timeline that never happened. Digitally resurrected punk anthems made by people who never felt the anger or lived the resistance. Virtual bands will dominate platforms, creating perfectly engineered tracks designed to keep you listening but never truly connecting.
It might be good enough. It might even be great. But will it matter?
Because when everything sounds human, but nothing is, what exactly are we listening to?
And do we care?
This is not a call to reject AI. The tools are here. The technology is impressive. But we are the ones who choose what to value. If we give up on the flawed, unpredictable, deeply human process that makes music meaningful, we risk trading richness for convenience.
Fast food music may fill the airwaves. But if we stop craving the real thing, do we lose more than art? Do we lose the parts of ourselves that music once helped us understand?
