Musicianship Mastery with David Lane
Oct 12, 2026 · 16 min · 6 segments
Where do musicians fit into the near future of this world? It's a world where AI-generated art of all kinds, including music, appear to spell doom for human artists. I have a much more optimistic…
I'm not one of those people that's going to say if you use it as a business, I'm not going to support your business.
If you're a small business and you're putting together a commercial and you use AI-generated music instead of hiring a composer, I don't like it, but I'm not going to penalize you for it if I would ordinarily be the type of person to patronize your business.
I will hit that skip button really quick if it's an ad that pops up when I'm watching other videos and it happens to be for one of these AI-generated music companies.
And I'll start off with just the reason that I don't think there's much point in pessimism here.
If you're getting into music and you are worried that AI is coming for your jobs, well, I'm not coming to you as an expert here, so you may want to ignore what I have to say, but I'm just going to share what I think.
Either your job is safe for a very long time as a musician or everybody's in danger.
I think by the time AI replaces you as an artist, replaces you as a musician, it's replaced everybody else too.
So that's a way of saying I wouldn't jump ship to try to go somewhere else if you're thinking about this professionally.
But I want to talk to you as the person who's learning an instrument, as someone who's composing for fun, and that maybe you also want to do this and earn some money as well.
Where do I think that this leaves you in the year 2026 and going forward? Well, I'll talk to you as a composer and then I'll talk to you as a performer.
I'm not one of those people that's going to say if you use it as a business, I'm not going to support your business.
If you're a small business and you're putting together a commercial and you use AI-generated music instead of hiring a composer, I don't like it, but I'm not going to penalize you for it if I would ordinarily be the type of person to patronize your business.
I will hit that skip button really quick if it's an ad that pops up when I'm watching other videos and it happens to be for one of these AI-generated music companies.
And I'll start off with just the reason that I don't think there's much point in pessimism here.
If you're getting into music and you are worried that AI is coming for your jobs, well, I'm not coming to you as an expert here, so you may want to ignore what I have to say, but I'm just going to share what I think.
Either your job is safe for a very long time as a musician or everybody's in danger.
I think by the time AI replaces you as an artist, replaces you as a musician, it's replaced everybody else too.
So that's a way of saying I wouldn't jump ship to try to go somewhere else if you're thinking about this professionally.
But I want to talk to you as the person who's learning an instrument, as someone who's composing for fun, and that maybe you also want to do this and earn some money as well.
Where do I think that this leaves you in the year 2026 and going forward? Well, I'll talk to you as a composer and then I'll talk to you as a performer.
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