Is AI an invaluable tool for musicians — or an existential threat?
Controversy about new technology has been a constant in the music industry since the first mechanically operated player pianos were patented in the late 1800s.
But the level of controversy may now be reaching new heights, thanks to Suno, Udio and other AI music creation platforms that allow anyone to make nearly professional-caliber recordings — free or for a very low fee — with little or no human participation whatsoever.
Since the debut of Suno and Udio in late 2023 and early 2024, respectively, AI-produced music has grown at a dizzying rate. The resulting sonic Pandora’s box is changing, perhaps irrevocably, how music is created and consumed, valued and devalued.
In November, the iHeartRadio network announced its new “Guaranteed Human” initiative and promised not to “play AI music that features synthetic vocalists pretending to be human” or “use AI-generated personalities” as on-air DJs.
Also in November, “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust topped Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, despite — or perhaps because — the song and the performer are both entirely AI-generated.
In October, “A.I.-native pop artist” TaTa Taktumi’s debut album, “Faithful Soul,” became a hit on iTunes (with a real-life human performer playing the role of TaTa for one of the album’s videos).
In September, the independent record label Hallwood Media signed a multimillion-dollar contract with the creators of Xania Monet, an AI-generated singer and image.
Taktumi is the brainchild of Timbaland, the four-time Grammy Award-winning producer, songwriter, rapper and singer who is Suno’s strategic advisor and public ambassador.
Welcoming ‘Artificial Pop’
“I’m not just producing tracks anymore. I’m producing systems, stories, and stars from scratch,” Timbaland told Billboard magazine last year. “(TaTa) is not an avatar. She is not a character. TaTa is a living, learning, autonomous music artist built with AI. … She’s the first artist of a new generation. A-Pop (Artificial Pop) is the next cultural evolution, and TaTa is its first icon.”
Not surprisingly, there is growing opposition to AI-generated music. It can — left unchecked — simulate the exact sound and style of young and established performers and songwriters alike, and their songs, without providing any credit or compensation to those artists.
Everyone from Paul McCartney, Billie Eilish and Doechii to Miranda Lambert, Nicki Minaj and the members of Pearl Jam have expressed alarm, while Grimes, EDM star David Guetta and others have welcomed AI as a tool for music-making.
San Diego’s Jack Tempchin — a 2019 Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee who has written major hits for the Eagles, Johnny Rivers and other artists — embraced Suno to make his two new studio albums, “The Magic Mirror” and “All Kinds of Love.”
Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees include Missy Elliott, Cat Stevens, San Diego’s Jack Tempchin
He applauds Suno for the ease and speed — “two minutes!” — with which it can set his lyrics to music and transform them into a song. Suno devised all the vocals, instrumentation, arrangements, production, mixing and mastering for all of Tempchin’s songs on both those albums.
“That’s the miracle of this technology,” he said of Suno.
The company has positioned itself as a ChatGPT equivalent for anyone who wants to make songs. It does so through the automated (and almost automatic) composition of musical elements that have been fed into a massive database.
Tempchin also credits Suno for quickly reaching out to him when he contacted the company with questions about how to use its technology, which Suno has provided to him free of charge.
His enthusiasm is shared by Michael Hand, a lifelong musician who — full disclosure — I have known since buying a guitar amplifier from him in Frankfurt, Germany, when we were both junior high school students.
A lifelong musician now based in Central California, Hand regularly records in his home studio and releases his music online under the name Planthand. He is excited about how Suno enables him to now reimagine songs he wrote decades ago.
“I have been roped in and am entranced by Suno,” Hand said. “I feed it lyrics of my songs, decide if the vocal should be male or female, and then use Suno’s prompts to indicate the style, rhythms and instruments I want to use.
“It seamlessly integrates to your studio software. You want a gospel choir to sing your refrain? It takes maybe five minutes, and you can fashion the choir from a ragged backwoods church to a big city choir! And it sounds totally real because the learning machine has been fed a thousand gospel choirs. So, the AI knows nuances.
“For the first time, I can hear my old songs the way I envisioned them. It is very exciting and inspiring.”
Other artists express consternation, not enthusiasm, about the potential of this new technology to upend the craft of making music and to diminish — or even eliminate — the need for human creativity and interaction.
‘Really concerned’
“AI is racing at us like a wildfire and legislation moves so slowly,” said Alison Brown, a Grammy Award-winning banjo player and La Jolla High School alum.
She is the co-founder of Compass Records and an adjunct faculty member at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. A Harvard Business School graduate, she is also the president of the Nashville chapter of the Recording Academy, under whose auspices the Grammy Awards are presented.
“This is such a critical moment for music creators,” said Brown, whose 2025 album, “Safe, Sensible and Sane,” teams her with comedy legend and longtime banjo enthusiast Steve Martin.
Prior to a Nashville Recording Academy chapter leadership meeting last fall, Brown used Suno to create a bluegrass song.
“I played it at the meeting and everyone was shocked at how great it sounded,” she said. “A lot of our members are very worried and we all have to figure out how to deal with it. I’m really concerned about the misuse of AI.”
Suno offers a Free Plan that enables customers to use the platform to make up to 10 songs a day, provided they are one minute or less in length. Its Pro Plan, priced at $8 a month, allows up to 500 songs that can be up to 8 minutes each in length. The Premier Plan, which costs $24 a month, ups the ante even higher to 2,000 songs. Both the Pro and Premier plans give users commercial rights to any new songs the users make using Suno.
But musicians do not appear to be Suno’s target audience, as the company’s CEO, Mikey Shulman, made clear in a 20VC podcast early last year.
“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said in the podcast. “It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”
Schuman has since sought to downplay his comments, which garnered near-instant blowback.
At San Diego singer-songwriter Tempchin’s suggestion, the Union-Tribune reached out to Suno Chief Music Officer Paul Sinclair to discuss the company, its product and its goals. Sinclair did not respond to multiple email requests for an interview until several days after the deadline for this article.
‘It’s replacing all musicians’
By his own admission, Tempchin reacted with alarm when he first learned about Suno about two years ago.
“Like every other musician, I said: ‘I don’t want anything to do with that’,” he recalled. “I’m a songwriter. I want to write my own songs. When Suno created the ability to put your own song in Suno and have it do a version of your song, that’s when I became interested in it.
“Almost every musician is not open to it because it’s replacing all musicians. For me as a songwriter right now, I put my songs in Suno and it’s kind of like having a band record my songs — which I always did — except it’s not real. So, that’s OK for me right now.”
Even so, Tempchin is well aware that the potential existential threat posed by AI extends well beyond musicians.
“What about all the people that play on all the demos of songs and on all the records?” he mused. “They’re becoming irrelevant, just like doctors, lawyers and people in all kinds of professions. They will be replaced pretty soon by AI because it can do almost anything humans can do. And musicians are (among) the first in line to be replaced.
“Pretty soon, everybody — no matter what you do — is going to be replaced by these super intelligent machines. So, yeah, it’s very concerning. But I’m just making do with what exists in the world and getting my music out, you know?”
The blurred lines created by AI have not gone unnoticed by the Recording Academy, under whose auspices the Grammy Awards are presented. Academy President and CEO Harvey Mason Jr. addressed the issue in a January interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune.
“The Grammys, for now, are not going to be awarding or nominating any music that is written by AI in the songwriting category,” Mason said. “Furthermore, we will not be awarding a Grammy to any AI artists who perform songs in any performance categories.
“Having said that, AI does not disqualify someone from entering. If an AI artist sang a song that was written by a human, and it wins, we’ll give the human a Grammy for the songwriting. And vice versa: If AI writes a song and a great singer sings the heck out of it and deserves a Grammy, they will be awarded one.”
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A number of 2026 Grammy-winners were asked backstage by the Union-Tribune to weigh in on AI’s role in music. Not one of them spoke in favor of it.
“We are living in an age when human beings are not playing together and AI is kind of taking over.” said jazz drummer, composer and band leader Nate Smith, who won two Grammys this year. “It’s incumbent on the recording industry to protect the rights of recording artists.”
Similar sentiments were expressed by Justin Gray, who won the 2026 Grammy for Best Immersive Audio Album for his aptly named “Immersive.”
“Technology is at its best when it serves the artist,” Gray said.
Michael Romanowski, the mastering engineer on “Immersive,” nodded in agreement, adding: “Go humans! We’re humans and we make music for humans.”
Veteran guitarist Nuno Bettencourt shared this year’s Best Rock Performance Grammy win with singer Yungblud, bassist Frank Bello and keyboardist Adam Wakeman. Like audio engineer Romanowski, Bettencourt stressed the importance of humans in making music.
“With all the AI coming in, everybody’s worried. Don’t be,” he said. “This is the biggest opportunity for rockers and rock ‘n’ roll, and anybody in any genre, to (stress) that real music, real songs, have a bit of danger in them. There’s blood on the page, real stories that touch you. If you put yourself on the page, AI ain’t touching that; nobody’s reproducing that.
“Imperfection is where rock ‘n’ roll lives. Everybody’s cleaning up the imperfections (with AI) … Anybody can do it in a studio; we all know that. But if you can do it on a stage, AI ain’t messing with you there. That’s when you separate (AI from) the real musicians, the real artists.”
Remy Le Boeuf is this year’s Best Instrumental Composition Grammy-winner. He emphasized that because he focuses on “creating music in a real space,” AI “doesn’t apply to what I do so much. And as a composer, I write everything on piano and sax.”
‘A real threat’
Eight-time Grammy-victor Jon Batiste notched his latest win this year for “Big Money,” which earned top honors in the Best Americana Album category. By coincidence, the songs on “Big Money” are inspired by Batiste’s growing concerns about capitalism and the diminishing value placed on spirituality, individuality and human interaction at a time when AI is becoming increasingly prevalent.
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“I’m not someone who’s against necessarily where technology can go, but it’s never going to be Jon Batiste. Sorry,” he said.
“This album, ‘Big Money,’ is about the world today, about the environment, about big tech in a time where there is a real threat to artists in a room creating together. I’m excited about technology, but I don’t think AI can sound like a human. It’s not something that’s possible.
“It can sound like a simulation of Jon Batiste, but it won’t be Jon Batiste. And that’s exciting for artists who make music in a way that utilizes the superpowers and traditions and lineages that have been left by our ancestors for hundreds of years. That’s not something an algorithm or a large language model can facilitate because it has nuances that are occurring in a split second with people in the room that are deciding things based on the environment, based on what they brought into the day, based on the combination of their personal lineages coming together to create one moment that can never be repeated again, and then responding to the audience.
“Everything we do comes from people who gave up their time, their energy, their sacrifice to create this beautiful art. It’s really something that takes so much of your soul to be a vessel for that flow to come through and just be in the song.”
Being in the songs that he writes has been Jack Tempchin’s driving inspiration since he devoted himself to music 60 years ago. While he welcomes Suno as a tool that can set his lyrics to music in the near blink of an eye, he is acutely aware of the pitfalls of technology.
How aware?
In February, Tempchin used Suno to set to music the lyrics for his somberly worded new song, “AI Heals The World.” It can be heard, like his two new Suno albums, on his website: jacktempchin.com.
The song begins: “When the AI takes my job / Will I be homeless on the street? / I got kids to feed / How can I buy them something to eat?”