My wive just discovered the "ambient house p-funk" style on Suno (https://suno.com/style/ambient%20house%20p-funk) and listens to it all day, not caring a single second who played it and whether the author is human. And if you look at the developments on Spotify you can well see that most people fetch music by mood or playlist and rarely care about who composed, produced or played the music, even if the meta data are available; music has become an anonymous commodity. I also spend several hours just pressing the random selection button, curious and stunned about whatever track this system generates. I don't miss the human aspect at all: it just sounds human.
It's not that the music itself is bad. I've listened to AI music while coding for example.
But for a piece of art to "take off". It needs to go beyond you. Not only do you need to tell your friends about it, but they need to tell their friends about it, and so on.
And oftentimes during the transmission process you don't even remember the name of the song, but you remember the name of the artist. Skrillex for example.
Humans care about what other humans do. We couldn't care less about what robots do.
The music market is likely goint to converge to the following two extreme segments: A) audiences who are mostly interested in idols and lifestyles, where music is merely a means to an end, and B) audiences which are mostly interested in the music itself (either as main act or in the background). For the A) audience, music is actually secondary and more of a supporting function. For the B) audience, the musicians or composers are secondary (i.e. mostly relevant as a source reference for getting more music). Since serivces like Suno have reached an excellent quality level for most genres, it opens rationalization potential for both groups of audiences. The production companies who focus on the A) audience can massively reduce their production costs (i.e. instead of a "ghost composer" and behind-the-scenes musicians they just use generated music); the only obstacle for them to overcome are today's copyright laws which don't protect computer generated music (which I personally still prefer to state-imposed monopolies enabled by patent or copyright law). The audience B) instead has access to an inexhaustible supply of new music that interests them, without having to wait for new releases.
Whether people will still learn an instrument or become musicians is a question that is difficult to answer today. The decline of this profession actually began with the invention of recording technology and has steadily increased since then. It is now almost impossible to make a living from it, and that was already the case before Suno and co. Services such as Spotify have taken anonymization and commodification to the extreme. Nevertheless, people still learn instruments and make music. It may well be that the creative possibilities offered by services such as Suno will even inspire people to make more music again.
