AI, Music, and Ownership: Why the Future Should Be Open to All
Let’s get one thing righ straightaway AI doesn’t/cannot do anything without human input. It’s not some autonomous genius churning out art. Think of it like a musical instrument: just as a piano or guitar needs someone to press the keys or strum the strings to from single notes to chards, AI needs a person to provide input. But AI is more like a synthesizer than a traditional instrument—depending on how it’s programmed or “played,” it can produce a wide variety of results, just like shifting the phase of a wave on a synth can change its entire sound.
This brings us to a bigger idea that’s been evolving for decades. Record labels had to learn a hard truth: they don’t own musicians. And now, maybe musicians need to confront a similar truth—they don’t own music itself. Music has always belonged to everyone. We’re just seeing that more clearly now, thanks in part to technology like AI.
Take Ed Sheeran, for example. After winning a copyright case over his song Shape of You, he reminded the world that there are only so many notes and chords in pop music. With 60,000 songs being uploaded to Spotify every day, overlaps are inevitable. No one owns the musical alphabet.
Elton John might own his voice, and fair enough—that’s a unique human instrument. But does anyone really own a progression of sounds over a particular waveform? That idea seems shaky at best. AI doesn’t change the essence of music—it’s just a new kind of tool. You control the input, and like any other instrument, the outcome can be as simple or as complex as you make it.
And yes, AI makes it easier to create music. But is that a bad thing? Should music be hard to make just to preserve a belief that only certain people have the right to create it?
Music predates ownership. Picture our ancestors banging on hollow tree trunks and singing to the rhythms they discovered. They didn’t travel cave to cave to copyright their drumbeats. Music was—and still is—a human impulse, not a commodity.
Trying to limit who gets to make music is nonsense. The door is open now, wider than ever. Whether you’re young or old, trained or not, if you have something to express, you have every right to make music—and yes, even to share it or sell it. AI is just one more way we do that.