The Future of Music is You

Just How Much Faster Do We Want to Get Shit Done?

Productivity advice has been consistent for years. It can be distilled down to this one sentence: Work Faster. Now, I don't think that this advice is necessarily wrong, I mean, plenty of producers genuinely do get paralyzed by perfectionism, and learning to actually finish things is obviously important.

But what if being able to work quickly is not the skill most worth developing anymore?

Suno and Udio can generate a finished track in about twenty seconds. These aren't demos or rough ideas but complete tracks with arrangement, mixing, mastering, the whole thing. Professional-sounding output that most listeners couldn't distinguish from human-made work. And remember:

AI will never be as stupid as it is today.

If our key value as producers comes from being able to work quickly, we compete in a race we've already lost. The workflow optimization, the keyboard shortcuts, the template building—all the advice about finishing faster are preparation for work that's already being automated.

Computers Are Better Computers Than We Are

When you have an idea in your head, it's like a butterfly. One moment it’s there, the next it’s gone. Having an efficient way to get ideas out of your head is extremely important. Mission critical. But assuming that it's the key metric in determining how good a producer you are is silly. Just because someone can use Microsoft Word real fast, it doesn't mean they have a story to tell that people will be interested in hearing.

Today, entire educational infrastructures are built around the exact thing that computation handles trivially: speed. Machines don't have the same challenges we do when it comes to execution speed. They don't need to learn shortcuts or struggle with writer's block or decision fatigue. Every friction point we spent years trying to eliminate through better workflow, AI eliminates by simply not having human limitations in the first place. We spent ten years teaching producers to optimize workflow, eliminate friction, automate everything, build templates, memorize shortcuts.

We trained humans to behave more like computers at the exact moment computers became better at those tasks than humans ever could.

So... Now What?

What's left of what makes our music ours? Well, taste, for one. The ability to recognize when something means something to us and when it doesn't, even when you can't fully articulate why. AI can generate endless options, but it can't tell you which option serves your vision because it doesn't have a vision, and even if it did, it wouldn't have your vision. It can suggest, execute, combine patterns, but it can't tell what should matter to you. It can't answer the question of who you are.

To top all that off, every art-form is full of decisions that don't have right answers, per se. Or they have as many right answers as there are artists. Should this bass sound small and intimate, or large and epic? Well, as I was told by the professors at the University of West London "you tell me". In other words, these aren't questions you can formula your way through. They require judgment that you build through experience, through getting lost and trying to find your way out, understanding what went wrong—all through one word: struggle.

What makes you a great artists is the struggle to get there.

And then there's the question of why you are making this piece of music in the first place? What are you trying to communicate? What feeling are you going for? Machines can execute intent once you point them in a direction, but they can't generate your intent. They can't want what you want unless you first understand what it is yourself.

If we want to be great artists, we need to get good at struggle. We need the capacity to sit with discomfort. As Mark Manson says: "get good at feeling bad". Real learning involves confusion, frustration, not knowing what the hell you're doing. What many people don’t realize is that failure isn't a sign that the learning process isn't working. Failure is the learning process. It feels like the process breaking, but it’s the process working. The discomfort is the signal, not the problem. Most people quit when it feels like that. AI never experiences that discomfort because it's processing patterns from its training data. The human ability to stay with problems even when shit gets hard and uncomfortable, is the very thing that grows you as a person, and it’s an integral part of being human. And that human voice, that agency might might just be one of the few things that's becoming increasingly scarce now.

What Does This Mean For Us?

We still need technical skills. We can't direct tools we don't understand, and we can't make informed creative decisions without knowing what's even possible technically. The difference is that technical skills become tools for expressing what we want to say rather than being the main thing we’re building.

Don’t measure your progress by how many tracks you finish. Finishing ten tracks this month doesn't automatically mean you've learned or know more than someone who finished two tracks. Could be quite the opposite, in fact. Substance and weight requires time and refinement.

Having something interesting to say does not equal talking a lot.

Volume without judgment just produces volume. Build the capacity to evaluate your own work honestly. Can you recognize when something works and when it doesn't before you show it to anyone else? Can you identify specifically what needs to change and why? This skill becomes way more valuable when AI can handle the execution part.

Get Better at Creativity: Read More

Not just reviews or articles or news but books. Fiction. It will boost both your imagination and visualization, which are the two pillars of creativity.

Yes, creativity can be learned.

Reading, particularly fiction and narrative writing, requires imagination to function. The words on the page are instructions. Your mind builds the world. When you read "the room was cold and dimly lit," your brain constructs that room. You decide the color of the walls, the quality of the light, the feeling of the temperature. The author provides direction, but you do the building.

Write More

Journal. What happened today, what was interesting, what’s annoying. Writing, particularly journaling about observations, trains creative judgment: noticing what matters and making choices about what to include or exclude. When you write about something you observed, you face a challenge. You have far more sensory information than you can include. You remember a lot of details from the scene, but the page has limited space. What do you choose? This selection process is creative decision-making in its purest form. What details capture the essence of the moment? What can you leave out without losing meaning? How do you translate a complex, multi-sensory experience into linear text that recreates something similar in someone else's mind?

Expose Yourself to Ideas

Pay attention to things outside music production. Creativity doesn't develop in a vacuum. It comes from exposure to ideas, patterns, stories, emotions that have nothing to do with your DAW. If you only study production techniques, you have limited raw material to work with when making creative decisions. Your art's sole message probably shouldn't be that you have music production chops. Use those chops to say something interesting, something worth telling. The producer who reads fiction, studies other art forms, notices how things make them feel, that producer has more to draw from.

And be prepared: if you're building judgment and taste instead of collecting techniques, progress becomes harder to see and measure. You can track the number of keyboard shortcuts learned but "got better at taste" or "having more things to say" are much harder to track. The development is legit but it’s harder to see. Most people quit exactly when they can't see progress in a way that feels satisfying. But that might be when the work matters most.

Who Are You?

AI changed what we have little of. What we have little of has value. Speed used to be scarce, now it isn't. Technical execution used to be scarce, now it's automated in most contexts. What's still hard to come by: knowing what it is that you want to say, having taste refined enough to recognize when you've said it, the judgment to make hard calls under uncertainty, and the ability to keep working when things feel confusing and difficult.

These aren't the type of skills that you build through workflow optimization. They develop through different kinds of practice entirely. Practice that may feel less productive in the moment because you can't count it or track it or put it on a progress bar.

All this is uncomfortable because it means a lot of what we've been told to focus on might not matter as much as we thought. But being uncomfortable about what doesn’t work anymore doesn't change whether it works or not.

For better or worse, reality has no regard for our preference.

We can keep optimizing for speed in a world where speed stopped being a thing, or we can start paying attention to what actually makes our music ours.

Which brings us to the most important question: who are you?

When the execution is easy, when the speed isn’t a thing any more, your answer to that question is the only thing that makes your music different from everyone else's. Or from anything that AI will generate. It's not a question you answer once. It's the question you answer every time you sit down to make something.