Every few years, music finds a brand new way to start an argument. Right now, it’s artificial intelligence. Before that, it was streaming. Before that, it was MP3s, and before that, it was sampling, drum machines, synthesisers and home studios. If you go back far enough, someone probably complained about electric guitars ruining everything.
The technology changes. The argument doesn’t.
There is always a group of people absolutely convinced that the latest tool will finally destroy music forever. And every time, without fail, music stubbornly refuses to cooperate. Songs keep appearing, people keep listening, and somehow the sky never actually falls in.
The interesting thing about these arguments is who tends to have them. They happen almost entirely among people who care deeply about how music is made. Musicians, producers, collectors, critics, enthusiasts with heroic vinyl shelves and very strong opinions about analogue warmth.
But most listeners don’t live in that world.
Most listeners are actually just out walking the dog, or driving to work, cooking dinner, or jogging on a treadmill. Music arrives through earbuds, car stereos, Bluetooth speakers and whatever the algorithm throws at them next. If they like something, they keep listening. If they don’t, they skip it and move on with their day.
That’s the entire system.
The idea that the average listener is sitting there worrying about whether a track was recorded on vintage tape machines or assembled in a laptop with a bit of AI assistance is mostly a fantasy that exists among musicians arguing with each other about it. The audience has always been far more relaxed about the machinery behind the music than the people who build it.
What the listener actually cares about is how it feels.
I was reminded of this the other morning while watching a YouTube video about Johnny Marr. Someone had broken down one of his famous guitar parts where several amplifiers run tremolo patterns against each other. In the original recording, Marr used multiple Fender amps running slightly out of sync at different BPM (beats per minute), a highly technical setup that reportedly took days to get right in the studio.
The kid on YouTube recreated the whole thing with a plugin. Four virtual amps. Tremolos synced to the tempo. Ten minutes of fiddling about inside a Boss amp modeller, and there it was. Same swirling texture. Same musical idea. Different tools.
Johnny Marr spent days building that sound. The YouTube kid built it before the kettle had hardly finished boiling. And if you played those two versions to most listeners, they wouldn’t be sitting there conducting a forensic analysis of signal chains. They would simply hear a good guitar sound and carry on with their lives.
Music technology has always worked like this. Studio tricks become equipment, equipment becomes software, and software eventually becomes presets. It’s just another sound people take for granted.
Which brings me to an old story from the days when CDs still mattered.
Many years ago, I walked into a pub/club in southwest London carrying a freshly pressed CD my band had just made. Proper studio recording, with proper artwork, our own typeface on the sleeve, and a working barcode for retail sales. We’d printed a thousand copies and managed to move a third of them through a small distribution label we were on.
I slid the CD across the bar and said I was looking for a gig.
The bloke behind the bar barely looked at it. Instead, he just shouted across the room to his mate, “Book this band in for next Friday.” Then he pulled me a pint.
I asked if he wanted to listen to the CD first. He looked down at it again and said, “Mate, anyone who walks into my pub with a CD that looks like this knows what they’re doing. I don’t need to hear it.”
That man was Terry Rawlings, who had spent most of his life around music.
And what Terry responded to wasn’t the music at all. He hadn’t heard a note of it. What he recognised was the signal. The band looked organised. The record looked finished. It looked like somebody had taken the time to do it properly.
That was enough.
Looking back now, it says something rather useful about the arguments people are having today. Even in the supposed golden age of “real music”, decisions were rarely based on romantic ideas about process. They were based on instinct, presentation, and whether something looked like it had its act together. The tools were never the point.
The song was the point.
These days, the tools have changed again. You can write music on a laptop, collaborate across continents, and send a finished track straight into digital distribution without ever pressing a CD. Some people use AI tools as part of that process. Some don’t. The internet has a great deal to say about this.
The audience mostly doesn’t.
Listeners don’t spend their evenings worrying about the state of the music industry either, which is another strange obsession that crops up in these debates. You’ll often see people clutching their pearls about streaming revenue, record label economics and the supposed collapse of the music industry itself.
The average listener couldn’t care less.
Why would they? The music industry has been happily selling the same records back to people in different formats for decades. Vinyl, cassette, CD, remastered CD, deluxe edition CD, digital download, streaming subscription. If you actually knew how that business worked over the years, sympathy for it would probably not be your first emotional response.
Listeners are not shareholders in the music industry. They are simply people who like songs, and a good song is still a good song. And a shit song will always be a shit song. No matter what anybody says, the method used to produce it doesn’t magically change that equation.
As for me, I’m not particularly interested in chasing trends, algorithms or industry approval. I make the music I want to make, release it through Good Boy Records, and let it exist in the world. If people find it, wonderful. If they don’t, the songs still exist, and I can still enjoy them.
Occasionally, they turn up in unexpected places. Nancy in Sicily listens. The Spanish kid in Haiti checks in from time to time. World domination, it turns out, arrives one country at a time.
Meanwhile, the internet continues arguing about cassette tapes, artificial intelligence and the supposed death of music.
Opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got one.
The songs will carry on regardless.
Yup. They're everywhere.
This makes sense. 😎