Music is becoming easier to manufacture, and the music industry may be making a catastrophic mistake by confusing abundance with progress. I have spent enough time around music to know that a song’s value cannot be measured by how quickly it can be produced. A melody can stop you in your tracks, a pause can leave you aching for the next note, and a voice can make a stranger feel understood.
These experiences come from human creativity, with all its imperfections, frustrations, and unexpected flashes of brilliance. We risk losing something irreplaceable if we allow technology’s ability to generate music to dictate what the industry values. As reported by the Chicago Tribune, artists in Chicago are bringing this fight into public view through a planned two-day streaming boycott [October 26 and 27], targeting services such as Spotify and Apple Music.
Their message, “Human music only. Press pause on AI,” turns a complicated debate about technology and copyright into a direct economic challenge. If the industry will not listen to the people creating its music, perhaps it will listen when those people and their audiences stop generating revenue.
The music streaming service Deezer reported in July that fully AI-generated tracks accounted for more than half of its daily music uploads at peak levels in June, averaging approximately 90,000 tracks a day. Its data also showed that AI-generated music represented just 1 percent to 3 percent of total streams on Deezer, despite the extraordinary volume of uploads. Up to 85 percent of streams on fully AI-generated tracks had been identified as fraudulent in 2025.
The numbers expose an industry confronting a flood of content whose sheer volume can obscure the interests of genuine creators. My concern extends beyond the technology itself. We are already losing artists, and the economics of making music have become even more difficult for many people trying to sustain a career.
A study by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) and PMP Strategy projected that nearly a quarter of creators’ revenues could be at risk by 2028 under its modeled conditions, potentially amounting to €4 billion [approximately $4.5 billion] in annual losses. The consequences reach songwriters, session musicians, producers, and emerging performers who depend on creative work to pay their bills. Human creativity has a quality that output statistics cannot capture.
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