The Allure of Listening, Epilogue - It Didn't Have to Be This Way

 

I’m going to close this memoir with a cautionary tale, which may well determine the fate of human-generated music in the latter 2020s and beyond. Chapter 16 addressed the earliest days of true A.I.-generated music, and how faux bands like Velvet Sundown can make it on Spotify and other playlists. Listeners might not realize the band was artificial, and might even enjoy the music if they liked the beat of the phony band. While I’ve had problems with generative A.I. since the first consumer apps appeared in 2023, there is nothing inherently wrong with hearing music created by A.I., and deciding for yourself if you enjoyed it or not.

But a line was crossed in music distribution in 2026, around the same time that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was referring to Anthropic’s Claude as “woke A.I.” Hegseth’s tirade resulted from an unofficial agreement on “guardrails” for A.I. apps that was reached by many A.I. vendors in the summer of 2023. Hegseth thought that the rules preventing A.I. agents from engaging in active warfare without a human in the loop were “sissy.” Whether Anthropic really can be frozen out of all Pentagon contracts remains to be seen. But the message for companies in a variety of vertical realms working with A.I. agents was that “anything goes.” Many people worry about a future of Artificial General Intelligence, the so-called “singularity,” where the A.I. application itself does things contrary to the limits set by human designers. We had clues to the possibility of such things when A.I. chatbots began going on racist rants, or encouraging consumer users to take their own lives, during the 2023-26 period. But such examples are glitches in the machine itself - what about the bad human Sorcerer's Apprentice?

Doomsayers often refer to “bad actors,” referring to non-state terror groups or developing nations, who might get hold of advanced A.I. agents. But what if the executives behind A.I. startups, and the executives that work for the vertical industries using A.I., are bad actors themselves? In early 2026, we saw the first hints that companies in the music development and distribution realm were operating in deliberately underhanded ways, and hurting small independent musicians in the process.

The bad signs appeared early in the year when jazz singer Veronica Swift complained of two A.I.-generated songs being inserted into her Spotify playlist, under her name, without her knowledge or permission. Rolling Stone published an article in March 2026 about the tracks “Sweet Smile” and “Still Healing”, neither of which were penned by Swift. Google A.I. even said the latter song related to Swift being a victim of a drunk-driving incident, which never happened to Swift. She has never gotten the tracks pulled down as of this writing, but stressed to her fans “If you see something, say something” – alert all streaming service when fake tracks are released.

Lily Kershaw was a victim of a more sinister theft. Vydia, a music distribution service owned by gamma, began distributing fake songs which were claimed to be by Kershaw. When she raised fan awareness, Vydia said it would file its own copyright claims, and warned that the company was ready to file copyright lawsuits against Kershaw, for Kershaw’s own songs that were posted to YouTube. The company backed down after her fan base raised publicity, but we should assume that this kind of intellectual property theft will become commonplace soon. The parent company gamma is run by Apple Music’s former creative director Larry Jackson, and longtime record executive Ike Youssef, so this activity is far from a cloister of rogue nerds operating from outside the music industry – it reaches to the heart of the music industry.

NPR warned in an April story that the A.I. fraud is taking place in an environment where smaller music venues are unable to turn a profit, and larger venues remain under the thumb of concert giants like Live Nation, which reached a settlement with the Justice Department in an antitrust suit early in 2026. The situation is not hopeless for the small independent musician, but such musicians, as well as venue owners and record labels, will have to fight constant battles to remain viable. Human music is not dead – it has turned into a revolutionary activity against big shots who are trying to reassert control of every aspect of the music chain.