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

[DCrown]

Omg, yes women liked Liszt because he was attractive, that's no secret, a very one-sided and superficial view on Liszt, are you a woman?
That primitive animalic awkward female behavior screaming or fainting started with Paganini to Liszt to Elvis to The Beatles to The Backstreet Boys.
Not sure about that, but obviously a stalker, cuz you mentioned to have found me on different threads. Do I need your permission?
Is that all you know about Liszt?
More important fact is that he excersised about 12 hours a day, he wanted to become the best pianist just like Paganini - the first superstar with a tour and even merchandising - was said to be best violinist. Like Paganini Liszt also made concert tours and he even had a silent keyboard when he traveled, he was obsessed that's why he had to play all the time and was a bit jealous of Chopin cuz he never excersised, also in young years he didn't excersise a lot, some Bach, Moscheles or Hummel here and then, nevertheless blessed with talent and wrote the most revolutionary piano pieces at that time and dedicated his famous etudes to Liszt. The etudes set a new standard are still performed live today by classical pianists. Etudes = excersising pieces!
Chopin is maybe one of the biggest miracles in music history.
When I want an opinion on Liszt, I want an opinion from someone who knows what he is talking about, and Chopin disliked Liszt 's theatrical performances like a monkey. Chopin was the key for Liszt to progress. And Liszt was faced with lots of competitions, other great pianists wanted to show that Liszt is not the greatest pianist at public duels
Music is competition, most people seem to have forgotten it and think just by releasing some crap made by AI that they created something special.
You are a nobody and you want to join conversation without having any clue.
You can have your own opinion, but you have obviously no clue reacting like a teenager just because there is someone who is a hundred times wiser than you
I would make you look so small at any competition and you could choose every instrument for the competition but bagpipes.
Btw I didn't have to ask AI to write down all these facts, they are saved in my head, cuz I read books and lived in places with old music tradtion and huge libraries, not sure whether you know what books were.
So stop stalking!

[guitarzan]

A.I. can emulate but can it innovate? Can it make whole new genres or sub-genres? I don't know, maybe so and perhaps as it matures it will be able to create instead of recreate.

If you can innovate the prompts to give to AI it will attempt to create a tune in the new genre you wish to create — then you keep hammering at it with prompts until it produces what you had in mind. You create the genre and innovate, AI does its best to comply with your prompts. It will keep trying to shape the project until you either decide you have what you want or you give up. AI doesn’t decide any of that.

So basically AI can't innovate or create. It can only recreate what it is fed. That's not really intelligence is it?

AI will never have a soul or a spirit. It's just a mindless machine spitting out what it's prompted to do.

If one can get any artistic or personal satisfaction by making music using words in a prompt then I have nothing but sympathy for them as they are missing the whole joy of creating Art in any form.

We have to be careful that the use of AI doesn't become a crutch instead a tool. To go from something we can use to something we must use.

Yeah, it’s not alive, it’s an algorithmic generative composer with an LLM as the UI, which is a huge improvement since it can get much closer to what I want out of an algorithmic composer than I ever could — they are quite complex to use.

Then I get my jam track and I do all the soul and spirit stuff myself, but a huge part of the quality of the AI results are up to how much effort is put into the prompts, and what the user accepts as finished.

The best AI composition tools are the ones that output MIDI only in my opinion, because then it is easy to comprehensively edit it manually, and then you route the MIDI to whatever plugin or hardware sound source that you want and create all the patches yourself, so the sounds are exactly what you want, and the results are actually more humanized than the output if the old generative composing tools, through the user prompts and just because AI itself is capable of producing non quantized music that doesn’t have the robotic quality that even a lot of actual human generated MIDI stuff possesses.

It is great for jam tracks because while the user controls the direction and mood and really pretty much everything about the nature of the generated track that they care to address, still there are things that the user never would’ve come up with themselves, and that’s the only kind of track you can really jam to — some of the content has to be based on ideas that come from outside your own head. Not better than a band, but better than any other technology ever available.

So AI composition is very handy that way, and it can sound at least as human as a lot of the bleep bloop randomly generated arpeggiator and sequencer based stuff that has been generally accepted as electronic music for as long as it’s been around. More so. A very advanced composition tool — like sci-fi advanced.

[Kenmac]

Software sales will very obviously drop. People will prompt their own synths and plug ins soon. Probably all coding jobs in every field of computing will likely be gone in a short but unknown amount of time.

It is difficult to see this as anything other than cataclysmic for coding of computer applications including OS, phone apps, websites, server scripts, any software at all, everything.

The musicians who play out and studio musicians will carry on making what they make much the same for the life enhancing and enriching aspects.

Prompting synths and effects plugins is already happening. Earlier this week, right here on KVR a new plugin was made freely available for Mac and Windows called "Amorph". You can read more about it here: https://www.kvraudio.com/news/artists-i ... s-fx-66137

[BBFG#]

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

Direct answer is no. It merely shifts into dichotomies of how they're programed. The plugin industry responds to the market's lowest common denominators and what it will bear.

Re: The current discussion of AI being better than human input.

No. And it's always about the relationship between the player, the music and audience - (And something else not realized or discussed here.)

But along the use of it, I would ask those that are currently using it, (especially those that are using the better paid for ones), about prompts.

So please qualify first if yours is a free or paid AI. And what your prompts are from initial use to the variables that most come up as you progress.

I'm wondering if your first prompt is something like deciding genre/tempo/beat?
Or do you first lay down an idea and prompt off that?

[guitarzan]

Prompting synths and effects plugins is already happening. Earlier this week, right here on KVR a new plugin was made freely available for Mac and Windows called "Amorph". You can read more about it here: https://www.kvraudio.com/news/artists-i ... s-fx-66137

Wow… cool

[wagtunes]

Software sales will very obviously drop. People will prompt their own synths and plug ins soon. Probably all coding jobs in every field of computing will likely be gone in a short but unknown amount of time.

It is difficult to see this as anything other than cataclysmic for coding of computer applications including OS, phone apps, websites, server scripts, any software at all, everything.

The musicians who play out and studio musicians will carry on making what they make much the same for the life enhancing and enriching aspects.

Prompting synths and effects plugins is already happening. Earlier this week, right here on KVR a new plugin was made freely available for Mac and Windows called "Amorph". You can read more about it here: https://www.kvraudio.com/news/artists-i ... s-fx-66137

I can't find a download link in that maze.

[guitarzan]

I can't find a download link in that maze.

In the first paragraph of that write up the name Amorph, the text is orange on my phone, brings up this link:

https://artistsindsp.gumroad.com/l/amorph

Not a download link, but it looks like the place to get the download link from after you submit the form —

You'll be able to download Amorph 24 hours before the official release

[vurt]

btw generative composition is not ai.
carry on.

[guitarzan]

btw generative composition is not ai.
carry on.

I’m tired and I’ve already gone through this what feels like dozens of times already, so I’m just going to paste my best effort to summarize here:

Jan Hammer used Dr. T’s Algorithmic Composer software with his Fairlight. Algorithmic Composer evolved into Dr. T’s Tunesmith…

Dr. T (Emile Tobenfeld) just received the MIDI Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2026 NAMM Show. In the video about the event put out by The MIDI Association, toward the end, around 1:20, they say about Tunesmith:

“… its influence is seen today in generative music tools and AI assisted composition platforms…”

So I’m not that far off. Underneath it all AI is taking your prompts and manipulating the parameters of something that works quite like an algorithmic generative composer.

Besides, I thought everyone was against the idea of generative composition in general, otherwise what makes choosing a key and pressing an onscreen button to generate a piece of music any more intellectually involved than having a conversation through prompts with an LLM to arrive at the music?

What I think is overlooked is AI composition isn’t locked down to the automatic song generators.

There are AI composing tools that have MIDI in and out… so they are really just like the old algorithmic composers in that way, but now you have all the say you want in how those arpeggios or whatever are executed versus the old way of choosing a key and hitting a randomize button.

So if you’re not against all types of generative music, then I think the AI is actually much more engaging for the user.

[BBFG#]

"not that far off" is still off.

[guitarzan]

At its core, AI composition platforms are generative composers with a highly advanced LLM UI that benefits from all the AI musical training.

EDIT:
I asked GPT-4o mini to evaluate the accuracy of my statement, because it should know:

This statement is partially accurate, but it lacks nuance. Here's a breakdown:

Generative Composers

Accurate: AI composition platforms indeed use generative algorithms to create music, which can be classified similarly to how composers generate new works.

Advanced LLM UI

Partially Accurate: While many platforms utilize large language models (LLMs) for tasks like lyrical generation or user interaction, not all AI composition tools rely on this specific technology for music composition. Some may employ specialized algorithms more tailored to music.

Benefits from AI Musical Training

Accurate: AI models trained on extensive datasets can indeed benefit from musical training, learning patterns, styles, and structures that inform their compositions.
Conclusion

Overall, the statement captures the essence but simplifies the complexities involved in AI composition platforms. It would be more precise to specify that not all rely exclusively on LLMs and to clarify how they utilize musical training differently.

So I wasn’t all that far off. Some AI composition platforms don’t use an LLM… but the ones we are discussing do.

[Neon Breath]

Probably all coding jobs in every field of computing will likely be gone in a short but unknown amount of time.

It is difficult to see this as anything other than cataclysmic for coding of computer applications including OS, phone apps, websites, server scripts, any software at all, everything.

[vurt]

This statement is partially accurate, but it lacks nuance

and an understanding of "generative composition"

there's far more to it, than pressing play somewhere, or whatever you said.
yes, there is some crossover in the overall idea, but they're different things essentially.

[Zeisner]

Before AI replaces musicians, it will replace plugin programmers.

You forgot the first step: AI replacing listeners. See Spotify and others (and the dead internet theory of course).

[guitarzan]

This statement is partially accurate, but it lacks nuance

and an understanding of "generative composition"

there's far more to it, than pressing play somewhere, or whatever you said.
yes, there is some crossover in the overall idea, but they're different things essentially.

It is basically still Dr. T’s Algorithmic Composer at heart but with the AI training in millions of musical rules in all types of music represented in the chain in response to the users prompts.

I know there can be much more to algorithmic generative music than choosing a key and randomizing (just look at what AI accomplishes with it), but that’s how many musicians have used arpeggiators and sequence generators for decades.