Billy Corgan says AI will change music forever: “You think there’s a lot of bad music coming out now, you just wait”
Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has claimed that “AI will change music forever” in recent comments about technology’s impact on the future of music.
Speaking on the Zach Sang Show, Corgan, who has been an active musician since 1985, explained: “Once a young artist figures out that they can use AI to gain the system and write them a better song, they are not going to spend 10,000 hours in a basement like I did. They’re just not.”
When asked about whether this will still result in “art”, the 56-year-old musician mused: “Ultimately, art is about discernment. Somebody was telling me the other day about how a famous rap artist would work. They would bring in all these different people and they would sort of pick the beat that they were most attracted to.”
He likened this process to a mere primitive form of a musician using AI as a muse for their craft. “Now, let’s change that to AI: ‘Hey AI, give me 50 beats’, listen and meh not really feeling it. ‘Hey AI give me 50 beats from the 50 most famous rap songs of all time’. Okay, I like number 37, that inspires me,” he hypothesised.
Adding: “Are they ripping it off? Not really because I did the same thing, I just did it analogue. I listened to 10,000 songs and I was like, ‘I like that beat’, so what’s the difference?” Corgan then added that his own songwriting approach is based on the discernment of what goes well based on the findings of his musical studies. He claims AI essentially simply streamlines this process.
However, he highlighted the potential issue of the oversimplification of the process resulting in a lesser-quality product. “The problem with it is,” he said, “if you’re an organic artist like I am, it is going to be really hard to compete with a bunch of people who don’t know how to write songs but have good discernment, can’t sing but have auto-tune.”
Concluding: “So, you think there’s a lot of bad music coming out now, you just wait.”
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