Let’s not pretend slop is a recent invention.

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Before ChatGPT spat out a single cliché, before Spotify made playlists with names like Study Time and Zen Focus, we’d already learned how to mass-produce music that sounded fine, did its job, and disappeared. The kind of sound that neither offends nor stays with you.

We didn’t need AI to make slop. We needed a spreadsheet, a soft synth, a few tropes. The rest was marketing.

So if you’re suddenly worried that AI will ruin music, you might be looking in the wrong direction. The real issue isn’t artificial intelligence it’s what we’ve been training it on.

We’ve been flooding the world with compressed sameness for decades now: loop packs, templated scoring libraries, pre-cleared sync beds, algorithmically blessed vocal melodies. Music that hits all the expected marks, pleases all the passive listeners, fits perfectly into the background of something else. Music that says, “Don’t worry, you’ve heard this before.”

And now, machines are simply giving us more of that. Faster. Cheaper. With fewer mistakes.

But that isn’t an AI problem. That’s a culture problem.

More specifically, it’s the natural outcome of an economic model that rewards scale, predictability, and safe returns. In capitalism, everything tends toward the most shareable, the most stable, the most profitable. So music gets flattened into mood. Emotion gets categorised. Sound becomes strategy.

The rise of the algorithm just accelerated this. It created a feedback loop where uniqueness is punished and imitation is scaled. Suddenly, music wasn’t something to explore it was something to optimise.

Functionality vs Feeling

One of the strangest turns has been how something as inherently expressive as music got reduced to function. Music as productivity tool. Music as brand asset. Music as “wellness aid.” Whole genres are now built on the idea of sound that does something to you: makes you focus, calm down, fall asleep.

Don’t get me wrong I’ve worked with ambient textures, lullabies, deep listening techniques. I care about music as medicine. But increasingly, it feels like we’ve taken a powerful, sacred thing and stuffed it into a marketing box.

“Functional music” is everywhere now usually pastel-coloured, slow, inoffensive, with lots of reverb. But it rarely says anything. It rarely feels like anything. It’s just there to soothe, to blend, to help you cope with the endless churn. It’s musical lavender oil: a scent for the soul-depleted.

And the more stripped-down it gets, the easier it is for AI to replicate. Because it’s not trying to move you. It’s trying to manage you.

That’s the great irony: the more “functional” we make music, the more redundant we become as makers. When music loses its friction, its strangeness, its emotional mess, then of course a machine can make it.

Digital Appropriation and the Vanishing Tail

This trend isn’t happening in isolation. Entire musical traditions Afrobeat, Gamelan, Hindustani classical, Indigenous drumming get fed into machine-learning systems and re-emerge as genreless textures in ambient beds or pop hooks. A tabla loop here. A “world music” pad there. No attribution. No context. Just a flavour to sprinkle in.

It’s a digital echo of cultural appropriation, except now it’s automated. Extractive. Sanitised.

Meanwhile, indie artists the ones who once thrived in the long tail of the internet are squeezed out. That old model where niche artists could build slow, steady communities around their work? It’s thinning. Platforms want hits, not slow builds.

What’s left is a narrow band of mass-approved aesthetics. The streamers have cast a spell over us. We confuse the algorithm’s echo chamber for the voice of culture itself.

The Guitars on the Wall

I had a moment recently on a Zoom call with a financial advisor. Looked like a normal chat until I noticed eight guitars hanging on the wall behind him. I smiled. “You play?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “I love music. I love playing guitar.”

Finally, I thought someone in finance who understands our world. But then he added something that stopped me.

“I’m not a musician though. Not like you.”

I blinked. “But… you play guitar?”

“All the time.”

“Then you are a musician.”

He laughed a bit, awkwardly. “Nah, I’m a financial advisor.”

That moment stuck with me. It was so revealing. Somewhere along the way, our culture convinced people that music isn’t something you do it’s something you are, or you’re not. A binary. A brand. Unless you’re being paid, performing, or blessed with some genetic spark, you don’t get to claim it.

Even as music surrounds us constantly on playlists, in shops, in our headphones while we work it’s become something to hear, not something to listen to.

As Pauline Oliveros put it:

“We are always listening. But we don’t always hear. The difference between the two is attention.”

That quote hits harder now than ever. The more music is everywhere, the less we notice it. It’s been turned into decor.

But music doesn’t need a stage or a release schedule or a strategy to be real. It needs a human, making a sound, with intent.

As Brian Eno once said:

“Everyone is born an artist. The trick is to remain one. What if we treated everything we made as if it were genius?”

Not ego care. What if we reclaimed the right to make music, badly or beautifully, and not apologise for it?

What Comes Next

Ted Gioia has said we’re entering a New Romantic Age. A shift away from optimisation and back toward emotional truth, beauty, risk. I hope he’s right.

Because the answer to this isn’t louder marketing. It’s quieter work. Smaller rooms. Deeper listening. Unusual projects. Music that doesn’t apologise for being weird, unresolved, or hard to place.

We don’t need AI to make slop. We’ve had slop for years. What we need now is permission. Permission to make. To feel. To move slowly. To get it wrong.

To the artists reading this especially those who are making honest work on the margins, keep going. Please. You’re not late. You’re not invisible. You’re where the next thing comes from.

And to the listeners: don’t settle for noise. Don’t confuse popularity for resonance. There’s another way to be with music. Closer. Wilder. Yours.

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