Music is already a commodity. You can just buy some anonymous background music to play in your restaurant. No effort required.

Yes but I don't want to hear some anonymous background music.

A better example would be Spotify replacing artist-made music recommandations with low-quality alternatives, to reduce what it pays to artists. Everyone except Spotify loses in this scenario.

In the future, everyone will have their own ai agents capable of generating music to their own tastes. They won't be using spotify.

The future with AI is not going to be our current world with some parts replaced by AI. It will be a whole new way of life.

My prediction is that personal generation is going to be niche forever, for purely social reasons. The demand for fandoms and fan communities seems to be essentially unlimited. Big artists have big fandoms, tiny ones have tiny fandoms, but none of that works with personalized generations.

You can have a million 'social' followers now, all posting on how your personally generated music is great, along with posting their faces and lives.

What does social mean in a future that could just simulate it.

Well, maybe. But there are overwhelmingly large numbers of people who want to be in a fandom, and that means being fans of some shared thing. Maybe that shared thing will be AI generated, but it won't be a world of solipsists.

I think what the person you’re responding to meant was that you can generate a fandom for the content that was generated for you. So, you can get the feeling of being in a fandom despite there being no actual other humans that know what you’re talking about.

Sure, and people might enjoy that, but I'm saying that as much as people want to have fans, people also want to be fans, and that's not compatible with everyone consuming algoslop generated for them personally. Nobody is going to walk around with a T-shirt for an algoband that has an audience of just themselves. Maybe a virtual band gets famous in the same way Hatsune Miku is famous. But that's not personalized generation, that's just an old fashioned band with different tech.

A world without fandom is one without sports. That seems deeply unlikely to me! Anyone can generate personal podcasts with NotebookLM, which people enjoyed for a bit but doesn't seem to have made any impact on actual podcasts at all.

Communities around fictional universes are already fractured and shrinking in member size because of the sheer number of algorithmically targeted universes available.

Water cooler talk about what happened this week in M.A.S.H. or Friends is extinct.

Worse, in the long run even community may be synthesized. If a friend is meat or if they're silicon (or even carbon fiber!), does it matter if you can't tell the difference? It might to pre-modern boomers like me and you.

I think things will look a lot more like Vinge's Rainbows End than everyone burrowing into their own personal algoentertainment. I can't speak for GenZ but when D&D can sell out Madison Square Garden, there doesn't seem to be any softening in people's interest in fandom.

Virtual influencers might be a big thing, Hatsune Miku has lots of fans. But it's still a shared fandom.

If you flood the space with AI-made music costing a few cents to create, human artists will have a much harder time to survive professionally.