“A safe, responsible, and profitable ecosystem of music”: Analyzing perceptions and implementation of generative AI in the music industry

This article analyzes music industry discourses about generative AI to understand competing and conflicting views across the industrial field. Our analysis mobilizes primary data from ethnographic fieldwork collected at music trade conferences between 2023 and 2024 and secondary data from trade press, corporate statements, reports published by governments, unions, and trade bodies. Our analysis illuminates tensions and contradictions among protectionist, liberalizing, and conciliatory views toward generative AI. Some corporate actors and public stakeholders advocate for protectionist business policies and “responsible” AI development that foregrounds potential harms of AI. Other corporate actors offer more liberalizing views, encouraging investment, experimentation, and adoption of generative AI systems to cut costs and increase profits. We also note conciliatory positions, mainly from musicians’ unions and trade bodies, trying to find compromises between these two poles. We argue that these contradictions reveal a fundamentally misunderstood notion of universal AI ethics in the music industry.