By Jacob Allen
Amid the backdrop of an increasingly commodified and profit-driven music industry, the first half of 2025 has seen an explosion into the online music scene by a new wave of ever-developing AI-generated ‘artists’. One notable example of these ‘artists’ is The Velvet Sundown, a Spotify-verified psychedelic rock ‘band’ with over 970,000 monthly listeners(!), who found themselves at the centre of a media storm this summer. Users of the streaming platform found that their personal playlists had been infiltrated with the music of a suspicious new band they had never even heard of, let alone listened to or saved to their collections.
What does this mean for the working musician? Well, it doesn’t bode well. Not only will we have to continue fighting the uphill battle to make a living creating music for the streaming market, where the average provider pays out a fraction of a penny per stream, we now have competition in the form of robots working at an impossible-to-match pace (The Velvet Sundown has already amassed 3 full-length albums to its name since appearing in June of this year). This, of course, is what a capitalist, commodified music industry means: huge profits for the bosses – undercutting by any means possible the artists, who suffer increasingly precarious conditions.
This is not the only finger which AI moguls have in the pie, however. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek recently sparked controversy surrounding his investment of €600 million into Helsing, a startup that develops AI-powered combat drones and military software. Ek’s investment of Spotify profits into a recipient of such unquestionable evil prompted a wave of artists to remove their music from the platform – “we don’t want our music killing people”, San Francisco-based indie-rock group Deerhoof explained in a lengthy statement on Instagram.
Fighting back
This summer has seen thousands come together at gigs and festivals in support of bands like Kneecap, who have taken a stand against the ongoing genocide in Palestine. AI, which is only able to replicate the content on which it is trained, could never have the same ability to channel the massive opposition to the current system as real music, made by and bringing together real people.
Individual action, such as boycotting certain artists and music industry companies, can only go so far. A unionised music industry could challenge the bosses and companies, such as Spotify, that use their profits made from the art and labour of musicians to invest in war. Instead, music industry workers could fight for a living wage for all those in the industry.
Artists, listeners and musicians must collectively campaign to bring these companies into public ownership, democratically controlled by the artists they supposedly work for – rather than in the interests of private profit. Music, art and culture within a socialist planned economy would remove the profit motive and end the precarious employment conditions that millions of artists and musicians suffer under. While capitalism strangles the cultural industries in pursuit of profit, socialism would allow them to flourish.
