If AI replaces musicians, does the entire plugin industry die with them?

[VOODOO U]

Read the scripture.

I'd rather go to hell.

[enroe]

An A.I. prompt user is not a musician. Just someone who likes to lie to himself.

That brings us neatly back to the topic.

[Gamma-UT]

If a song takes a year or so until it's good enough then it's not good enough. It's a leech sucking on you with precious little tidbits and it needs to be burned alive. Get rid of it.

It's No Game, the song that bookends Scary Monsters, spent a decade or more in Bowie's notebooks. The melody began with one of his early songs and went through a bunch of revisions before it mutated into the two different versions on the album. The lyrics were also completely different: it was originally about suicide.

The idea that all end results come easily from an initial idea just doesn't match how much art really gets made. A lot of stuff comes from sketches that need to be reworked and refined to make them work. Sometimes it's the original idea that gets junked in the final product but if you're just burning everything that doesn't work instantly, you're just making things even more difficult for yourself. Not least because you're not learning how to differentiate from good and bad ideas. Or ideas that don't work for the particular song you're working on. There are plenty of other examples of ideas getting pulled from one song and dumped into a notebook to be used elsewhere because they just didn't work in the original.

This is why generative AI pretty much doesn't work: it doesn't support a way of working that lets you pull the bits apart. All you can do is write a different prompt and hope it keeps something you liked from the first prompt. The chances are the AI will do as you suggest and burn the original while copying elements from a different bunch of songs.

[GaryG]

An A.I. prompt user is not a musician. Just someone who likes to lie to himself.

That brings us neatly back to the topic.

let's spice things up a bit

648289746_1343343681153415_338620073333490347_n.jpg

[cron]

I think we're already seeing AI affect the plugin industry, but it's not because people are making music with AI, it's because they're making plugins with it. A giant flood of mostly $10 - $50 efforts. I saw one first time dev debut with a multipack of 60 plugins the other day. How many developers in history have ever released 60 plugins? Maybe Waves, a handful who've been around for decades?

The budget/midrange market is getting absolutely saturated with plugins made by people who likely don't even know what version control is let alone how to fix a bug without breaking existing projects. I have no idea how new developers in this segment are supposed to punch through in 2026 and beyond. The developers who were previously afforded the trajectory to become Klanghelms or Valhallas because simply writing a great plugin was enough - now such developers need to release great plugins and spend time building trust that their codebase isn't a one-off dead end they barely understand.

[D-Fusion]

I think we're already seeing AI affect the plugin industry, but it's not because people are making music with AI, it's because they're making plugins with it. A giant flood of mostly $10 - $50 efforts. I saw one first time dev debut with a multipack of 60 plugins the other day. How many developers in history have ever released 60 plugins? Maybe Waves, a handful who've been around for decades?

The budget/midrange market is getting absolutely saturated with plugins made by people who likely don't even know what version control is let alone how to fix a bug without breaking existing projects. I have no idea how new developers in this segment are supposed to punch through in 2026 and beyond. The developers who were previously afforded the trajectory to become Klanghelms or Valhallas because simply writing a great plugin was enough - now such developers need to release great plugins and spend time building trust that their codebase isn't a one-off dead end they barely understand.

I stay away from those plugins just like i did in the Synthedit days.
I find them to be short lived cash grabs so i am only interested in the free ones.

[enroe]

An A.I. prompt user is not a musician. Just someone who likes to lie to himself.

That brings us neatly back to the topic.

let's spice things up a bit

648289746_1343343681153415_338620073333490347_n.jpg

Well, that’s one of those phenomena: whether or not AI takes over music
production entirely — thereby rendering all plugins obsolete, for instance
— isn't a matter for a vote here on KVR. Instead, it’s going to happen — one
way or the other!