🎼 One-Third of Musicians Draw Inspiration from AI

According to a study by the Berklee College of Music’s Berkeley Emerging Arts and Technology Lab (BEATL), one in three musicians (33%) already uses AI to generate initial concepts, melodies, or reference tracks. Furthermore, approximately 26% of respondents incorporate fully AI-generated backing tracks into their final commercial releases, while 31% of songwriters utilize algorithms to assist with lyric writing.

The survey, which polled over a thousand industry professionals ahead of the AIMS Summit, revealed an unexpected disparity in content creator behavior. Contrary to expectations, aspiring musicians experiment with AI significantly less frequently, with only 56% engaging with the new technology in some capacity. Meanwhile, among creators for whom music is a full-time profession, the share utilizing AI tools reaches a staggering 92%.

According to Berklee President Jim Lucchese, these figures demonstrate a high level of individual creative autonomy: for some, AI serves as a compositional tool, while for others, it is a means to expand their own technical skill sets.

However, the legal and ethical landscape surrounding musical AI remains a zone of intense conflict. Just days ago, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) filed a lawsuit against major labels Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, accusing them of failing to compensate artists for using their tracks to train the Suno and Udio models.

In parallel, the industry must account for listener sentiment: according to opinion polls, 52% of the audience has no interest in listening to AI-generated tracks from their favorite artists.

Nonetheless, completely synthetic projects, such as the country hit Walk My Walk by the virtual band Breaking Rust or the TikTok sensation Saxboy Billy, are already topping the charts, proving that the rules of the music market have changed forever.