When music floods the market: What still holds value in an AI-driven industry

By Michael Hancock | Commentary, Undercurrent Substack

As artificial intelligence transforms music creation, the industry must rethink price, purpose, and prestige.

For most of the modern era, the music business was built on scarcity. Studio time was scarce. High-end production talent was scarce. Distribution was scarce. Radio access was scarce. Even the ability to turn a songwriter’s idea into a polished, commercially viable recording required an expensive chain of specialists: musicians, engineers, producers, labels, promoters, marketers, distributors. The structure of the industry followed from that fact. Whoever controlled access to production and distribution controlled the business.

That era is ending.

AI-powered music tools like Suno do not merely make music production faster. They threaten to dissolve the scarcity on which the traditional industry was built. A composer-producer can now move from concept to near-finished song without booking a commercial studio, hiring session musicians, courting a label, or depending on an artist in the traditional sense. What once required an industry can increasingly be done by a small creative unit, perhaps even by a single person with taste, vision, and the right tools.

That change will not kill music. But it will almost certainly change the economics of music in ways the legacy business will find deeply unsettling.

The first and most obvious effect is that the supply of music will explode. Not simply rough demos or low-quality experiments, but increasingly polished, commercially plausible tracks. When the cost of production drops and the speed of production rises, creators make more. They try more. They risk more. Ideas that once died in notebooks or voice memos now make it into finished form. The result will be a flood of music: more genres, more subgenres, more hybrid forms, more mood-based tracks, more niche catalogs, more functional sound for every conceivable use case.

And when supply surges while marginal production cost falls toward zero, prices come under pressure. That is not ideology. It is economics.

This is the part many in the industry will resist saying plainly: AI-driven abundance is likely to drive down the price of recorded music as a commodity. If listeners, brands, creators, platforms, and businesses can choose from an effectively infinite pool of decent or very good songs, then undifferentiated music becomes harder to price at a premium. Music for podcasts, videos, retail environments, digital stations, gaming, workouts, relaxation, study, or advertising will increasingly be sourced according to fit, speed, and cost rather than prestige. Much of that market will begin to behave like any other abundant digital commodity.

That does not mean music becomes worthless. It means we will be forced to distinguish between music as a file and music as something more than a file.

The song itself may become cheaper. The scarce things around the song may become more valuable.

Consider what does not become abundant merely because software gets better. Human identity does not become abundant. Trust does not become abundant. Taste does not become abundant. A loyal audience does not become abundant. A believable story, a distinctive point of view, a voice people care about, a community that gathers around a sound and feels that it belongs to them — those things remain scarce. In fact, in a world flooded with interchangeable tracks, they may become more scarce, not less.

That is why the next great value center in music may not be production at all. It may be curation.

When the world has too little music, the powerful people are the ones who can finance and distribute it. When the world has too much music, the powerful people are the ones who can help others find what is worth hearing. The gatekeeper of scarcity gives way to the guide through abundance. That means playlists matter more. Tastemakers matter more. Trusted stations matter more. Music supervisors matter more. Brands and platforms that can create a coherent sonic identity matter more. The new prize is not merely owning content. It is earning trust amid noise.

That shift will create enormous opportunities. Independent creators who once had no realistic path into the industry will be able to compete. Niche musical communities that were too small to justify traditional investment will become economically viable. Producers may become brands in their own right. Music designed for specific contexts — late-night writing, prayer, sleep, focus, melancholy, urban jazz ambience, retro soul workout playlists, digital radio channels tailored to highly specific moods — will proliferate. The future may produce not merely more music, but more relevant music: songs and soundscapes made for particular people, places, moods, and moments rather than for one-size-fits-all mass distribution.

There is another positive effect, too often overlooked. Cheap production lowers the cost of creative risk. When making a finished track no longer requires major financial commitment, creators can afford to experiment. Strange genre blends, unusual arrangements, regionally inflected sounds, experimental vocals, concept-driven music ecosystems — all become more thinkable. Every major reduction in production cost has unleashed a new wave of experimentation. There is no reason to think this case will be different. Yes, there will be more junk. There is always more junk when barriers fall. The printing press gave us more bad writing. Cheap cameras gave us more bad photography. Digital video gave us more bad filmmaking. But abundance also gave us more talent, more innovation, and more unexpected excellence.

The old music business may interpret this as a threat because it weakens old choke points. Fair enough. It is a threat — to institutions built on the assumption that great music must travel through them to reach the public. But from the standpoint of creators and consumers, this realignment could be liberating. It shifts power away from those who control access and toward those who create value in public. It rewards not just ownership of machinery, but the ability to build connection, trust, resonance, and meaning.

The future music economy, then, may not revolve around selling songs the way the old one did. It may revolve around attention, curation, identity, fandom, community, and experience. Live performance may become even more valuable precisely because it cannot be automated into infinity. Premium human artistry may command greater loyalty precisely because synthetic abundance makes the authentic stand out more sharply. In that sense, AI may not cheapen music so much as clarify what people were really paying for all along.

The old music business was built to manage scarcity. The next one will be built to navigate abundance. And that will force a long-overdue admission: the lasting value of music was never just in the recording itself. It was in what the recording meant, who it came from, who helped us discover it, and what it allowed us to feel together.

Hancock also publishes on Substack. You can check out more of his work here.

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.