What AI Means for Songwriters and the Future of Music

A fifth technology arrives

Gordon Chambers has worked through every major technology shift of the last four decades: sampling, the drum machine and the MPC, Auto-Tune, and streaming. He has written for some of the most celebrated voices in music, he has released four independent solo albums, and he spent time early in his career covering the industry as an entertainment editor at Essence. Now he is watching a fifth technology arrive, one that can produce a song in thirty seconds from a typed request.

Jeff Carson built the expert series around a simple observation. The loudest voices in AI are often the least qualified, and the people affected by these systems are usually missing from the room. Chambers is one of the people affected. He joins the series as someone who has lived through every disruption that came before this one and can say what each of them actually cost.

Music and machines have always worked together

Chambers was quick to push back on the idea that technology and music are natural enemies.

He pointed to Stevie Wonder's run of classic 1970s albums, made with two synthesizer pioneers, Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, who brought an entirely new sound into R&B. He pointed to Sly and the Family Stone's "Family Affair," built on a small drum machine at a moment when the band was coming apart, and to Prince's "Kiss," which leans on little more than a guitar and a drum machine. In each case, the technology carried the artist's warmth into a new form rather than replacing it.

What is different now, in his words, is that you can literally tap into a computer and tell it to make the song. He does not think that can be stopped. He thinks the question that matters is what people choose to do with it.

What a listener can still hear

Chambers has heard plenty of AI-generated music, and his assessment is direct. He can tell the difference.

He described coming across a track online presented as an unreleased Whitney Houston song. It was not. It was AI, built to sound like a specific period of her career, and the comments underneath were full of people arguing over whether it was real. He did not say it sounded bad. He said that if you simply wanted to hear something like her voice again, you could enjoy something about it. He also attended the hologram tour staged after her death, and he enjoyed that too.

The law is only beginning to catch up with tracks like that one. Tennessee's ELVIS Act, which took effect on July 1, 2024, added a person's voice, including simulations of it, to the state's protections against unauthorized commercial use. In September 2025, Spotify banned unauthorized AI voice clones and vocal impersonation unless the artist being imitated has approved it.

Then he described seeing Houston perform at Radio City Music Hall, and the feeling in the room afterward. Nothing synthetic, he said, will come close to that.

His comparison was food. You can survive on Pop-Tarts. They will never be scrambled eggs, toast and grits on a Sunday morning. You can enjoy a fast food cheeseburger once in a while and still taste the difference from one made on a grill in the backyard.

He also offered a recent example of people choosing the real thing. On Jill Scott's 2026 tour, phones are locked in pouches for the length of the show. Plenty of fans debated the rule. For Chambers, putting the phone away let the chords and performances reach him on a deeper level than he had felt in years. His prediction is that as synthetic content grows, audiences will develop a deeper appreciation for music that is made and experienced by people.

Carson drew a parallel from film. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, passed $1 billion worldwide within a month of release, and Nolan has said publicly that younger audiences are rejecting what he calls AI slop. Carson's point was that audiences still respond to human craft when they can see it, and that the same choice is coming for music.

What the research says about telling the difference

The research is less reassuring than Chambers' ear. In a survey for the streaming service Deezer, Ipsos played fully AI-generated and human-made tracks to 9,000 adults across eight countries in October 2025. 97% could not tell them apart. Just over half said that made them uncomfortable, and 80% said music made entirely by AI should be clearly labeled.

That changes what his prediction depends on. If most listeners cannot hear the difference, the choice he wants them to make only works if they are told. Deezer now tags AI-generated albums for listeners, and Spotify has backed an industry standard for disclosing how AI was used in a track's vocals, instrumentation or production.

Who is writing the rules for AI in music

Carson put the central governance question to him directly. The rules for AI in music are currently being written by technology companies, record labels and award bodies. Who is not at the table?

Chambers' answer was the musicians. The people who keep the humanity connected to the art, in his words, need to be in those rooms, because in difficult times people turn to art for hope and community.

He is seeing the rules take shape from the inside. Chambers recently joined the ASCAP Board of Review, a panel of songwriters and publishers that reviews cases and advises ASCAP's lawyers on how to resolve them. He expects more of its work to involve AI as collaboration with AI grows and questions about splits and attribution follow.

He has also met the question as a working writer. When he registered a new song for Grammy consideration this year, the entry process asked, for the first time in his experience, whether any part of the recording used AI. He did not know the answer. He had to ask his co-writer, who told him one of the producers had incorporated AI into the final production. That explained why the finished track sounded different from the version he remembered. Listeners love the song. Chambers still prefers the more organic version.

Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. has said that using AI does not make an entry ineligible, and that it affects which categories a work can enter. He has also said the songwriters and producers he knows all use AI somewhere in their process. Chambers' experience shows what that looks like from the writer's side: AI can be inside a song before everyone who wrote it knows.

The underlying rule dates to 2023, when the Recording Academy decided that only human creators are eligible and that the human contribution must be meaningful and more than de minimis. The U.S. Copyright Office took a similar position in January 2025: prompts alone do not make someone the author of AI output, while the human-authored parts of a work that includes AI material remain protected. For a songwriter in Chambers' position, knowing exactly what the AI contributed has become a practical question about credit and ownership.

Streaming was the warning

Asked which past technology frightened artists most and whether they were right to be afraid, Chambers did not hesitate. Streaming.

As an independent artist, he had spent tens of thousands of dollars making albums, then toured them through clubs, churches and listening parties, selling CDs by hand. Streaming asked artists to keep making records at that cost while giving them far less to sell. He has not made a solo album since.

His songwriting catalog fared better, because the music now plays in more places, but the math changed for everyone. Touring became the main way artists earn, which is part of why so many legends are still on the road. Newer songwriters, he said, have much less to look forward to from the music itself and have to build other skills to pay the bills.

Did artists end up with a fair deal or just a deal? Just a deal, in his view, and the business was never fair before that either. He pointed to Prince stepping away from the major label system, to the 360 contracts that give labels a share of touring and merchandise as well as recordings, and to the steady offers he receives to buy his own catalog, which he refuses. His conclusion is that artists have to organize, because the fairness has never arrived on its own.

Where the money is going now

The major labels have started striking deals with AI music companies. Universal Music Group settled its lawsuit with Udio in October 2025 and announced a licensed platform launching in 2026. Warner Music Group settled with Suno in November 2025, with terms that include an opt-in before an artist's or songwriter's name, likeness, voice or compositions can be used in new AI songs.

The courts are weighing in as well. In November 2025, the Munich Regional Court ruled in a case brought by GEMA, Germany's music rights society, that OpenAI's models had memorized song lyrics in a way that infringed copyright, and ordered OpenAI to pay damages.

The stakes for writers are large. A study by PMP Strategy for CISAC, the international confederation of authors' and composers' societies, projected in December 2024 that 24% of music creators' revenues would be at risk by 2028, a cumulative loss of €10 billion over five years, while revenue for generative AI music providers grows to about €4 billion a year.

When Carson asked where that money is going and what it means for a writer who lives on royalties, Chambers was candid. He does not know, and he finds it disturbing. Anything that affects whether creative people can earn a living concerns him, especially when the cost of living is this high. His answer was the same as it was for streaming: creative people need organizing strategies and a seat at the tables where these deals are made.

The world needs art, he said, and a world without art is a world without heart.

Where AI could genuinely help artists

Chambers is not against the technology. He is specific about where he thinks it belongs.

Making music is expensive. A proper demo means studio time, producers, musicians and engineers, and he knows extraordinary singers in New York who perform live constantly and have never been able to afford a recording. If AI can help talented people get their music recorded and heard, without replacing their talent, he is for it.

He sees a second use in distribution. He has hundreds of unreleased songs he considers better than some that became hits. AI that helps good music find the right listeners, revive older material and compete across streaming platforms is a collaboration he supports. AI that makes the music itself, he is far less interested in. In his view, there are plenty of people who can make good music. The hard part is getting it heard.

The numbers support him. Deezer reported in July 2026 that fully AI-generated tracks passed half of all new uploads to its service at their June peak, nearly 90,000 a day, while accounting for only 1 to 3% of streams. Deezer found that up to 85% of streams on those tracks in 2025 were fraudulent. Spotify said it removed more than 75 million spam tracks in the twelve months to September 2025. When a song can be generated in thirty seconds, the scarce thing is a listener's attention, and that is where Chambers wants AI working for human artists.

The governance lesson outside the studio

Music is an early version of a question every industry using AI will face. The people most affected by a system are rarely in the room where its rules are set.

Chambers found AI inside his own song only because a registration form asked. Songwriters are learning about licensing deals after they are signed. Listeners are left to debate in the comments whether a voice is real, and most of them cannot tell. Each is a gap between what an AI system is doing and what the people affected by it can see.

Inside a company, the same gap shows up when customers, employees and applicants are affected by AI they cannot see and have no way to question. Governance starts with knowing where AI is in use, who it touches, and whether the people it affects have a voice in how it is used.

Keep caring

Chambers closed the conversation by turning it back on Carson. He said he could talk openly with Jeff because Jeff came to technology as a musician and still cares about the human connection. Then he gave him a challenge. As the company grows and Jeff sits in the rooms where these systems get built, keep caring.

Carson's answer: he will.