On a warm Tuesday evening in mid-May, the music industry was out in force in central London. First, to see Dove Ellis play a support set at the 100 Club, followed by Tyler Ballgame, a short walk away at The Social.
Both are hotly tipped young artists. The former a Galway native, and student at the Royal Northern College of Music, whose music carries shades of Van Morrison, Joan Armatrading, Jeff Buckley, a touch of Prince, perhaps, a little Talking Heads. The latter hails from Rhode Island, studied songwriting at Berklee College of Music, and now lives in Los Angeles. His sound is soulful and spirited, with something of the depth and richness of Alabama Shakes, Nathaniel Rateliff and Otis Redding.
I had seen both artists play the previous week; different venues, different sets. I like these early days of getting to know an artist, listening to their records on repeat, coming to understand something of how their songs have been built, watching them live and seeing how the music’s shape might shift according to the night, the audience, the players.
These are strange days for songwriters. The straightforward desire to write music, play it live, perhaps record some songs, is tangled by labels and publishers and marketing teams, by social media and streaming platforms and sync departments, by live agents and promoters and the sheer gruelling attempt to make just a little bit of money. Now, too, they must grapple with generative AI, which threatens to gnaw away at their livelihoods even further.
Late last year, the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) released a global study on the impact on music of such technological advancements. Their findings suggested that, by 2028, tracks generated by AI will be worth €16bn, up from €4bn this year, and amounting to something like 20 per cent of streamed music revenues.
A couple of days after the Tyler and Dove shows, I was at the Ivor Novello Awards—the annual prize-giving ceremony for the songwriting and composing community. It’s a prestigious affair, the judging panel itself made up of songwriters. This year, recipients included Berwyn, Raffertie, Self Esteem, Sans Soucis and U2. Bruce Springsteen gave a prize to Brandon Flowers; Robbie Williams performed an impromptu rap.
The chair of the Ivor Novello Academy is Tom Gray, lead singer of the Mercury Prize-winning band Gomez. You might also recognise Gray as the founder of the Broken Record campaign, which lobbied for fairer remuneration from music streaming, leading to the parliamentary Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee launching an inquiry into the economics of streaming.
In January, Gray cautioned against the “sincere threat” of AI in the songwriting world. While it would be naive to wholly demonise AI—it is, after all, a tool that can be harnessed by musicians and support their creativity—it is, nevertheless, a technology that enters a gold rush period at a time when the music industry, as Gray put it, “hasn’t got its own house in order”.
The simple requests of human songwriters could seem too demanding to megacorps hellbent on profit
We do not yet have the kind of robust legislation that will protect songwriters and composers from having their work used unwittingly and without either their consent or their remuneration. We have not yet even restructured the streaming world to pay musicians fairly: under the current system, record companies take 41 per cent of income from streams while streaming services take an average of 29 per cent, leaving the artists themselves with just 16 per cent. It is not even yet an industry standard to pay co-writers per diems for their time or their expenses. Sometimes you worry that the simple requests of human songwriters will come to seem too demanding to the megacorps hellbent on profit—and they will conclude it easier to generate songs via AI.
You look for hope in these circumstances, some sign of human connection. I felt it at the Dove Ellis and Tyler Ballgame shows; in the sweet idiosyncrasies of their songwriting, in the industry excitement around their talents. I felt it listening to Charli XCX’s acceptance speech at the Ivors: “Don’t be afraid of yourself or your own internal language,” she told her fellow songwriters. “Because it’s the thing that makes you distinctly you.”
And when I feel particularly gloomy about it all, I think back to the words of Nick Cave. When a fan saw fit to send him a selection of AI-generated lyrics in the style of his own songwriting, Cave met them with a kind of sublime horror. “With all the love and respect in the world, this track is bullshit and a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human,” Cave wrote in response.
“ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience,” he said. “[Songwriting is] a blood and guts business, here at my desk, that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness.”
