AI Is Flooding Streaming Platforms—and a Music Journalist Says We’re Losing Something Human

AI-generated music isn’t coming—it’s already here. Synthetic songs are quietly filling streaming platforms, blurring the line between human creativity and engineered output, and forcing a reckoning with what we actually value in art. When music becomes infinite and optimized for efficiency, the question isn’t just whether it sounds good. It’s whether anything meaningful is lost when struggle, imperfection, and lived experience are stripped from the process.

Those tensions sit at the center of a recent episode of The Intersect, where host Cory Corrine speaks with music journalist Sowmya Krishnamurthy about AI’s growing role in the industry. Krishnamurthy treats AI as an economic and cultural accelerant—one that concentrates power, squeezes working artists, and challenges fans to decide what kind of music ecosystem they’re willing to support.

How AI is Reshaping the Music Industry

When music becomes infinite, meaning gets diluted

Krishnamurthy is clear that one of the biggest dangers of AI is volume without depth. “Music, like all forms of art, is supposed to make you feel something,” she says. And once creativity is reduced to “data points or the algorithm,” it stops functioning as art and starts functioning as a product. Infinite output may sound impressive, but abundance doesn’t create meaning—it flattens it.

“My concern is we’re going to get to a point where there is no longer a visceral reaction,” she explains. In that future, AI would replace the emotional friction that gives music weight. When songs are engineered to be seamless, personalized, and endlessly available, AI risks becoming “a substitute for humanity and for human beings,” which she warns would be “a very dark place.”

The economic squeeze on working artists

AI doesn’t disrupt the music industry so much as it accelerates its most exploitative patterns. Artists have long sat “at the end of the economic food chain.” And AI intensifies that imbalance by concentrating power among an even smaller group of companies. “There’s a handful of companies right now controlling AI,” Krishnamurthy explains, and the problem lies with leverage. With fewer major labels and increasing consolidation, “too much power is in a very consolidated group of a small number of companies.”

Efficiency, she warns, comes at a direct cost to creators. If the goal is to make music “more efficient, cheaper, faster, get to market as soon as possible,” then artists are going to suffer. Krishnamurthy points to streaming as proof. While selling a million records once offered a sustainable living, today “it takes billions of streams to even come close to that.” It’s a threshold only reachable by an elite few. Her fear is that artists will lose ownership over the very labor being used to replace them.

Discovery was already broken—AI makes it worse

Long before synthetic music entered the picture, streaming had flooded platforms with more music than any listener—or gatekeeper—could realistically process. Krishnamurthy recalls programming playlists at SoundCloud and receiving “like 100, 150 releases every week” in just one genre. With that level of saturation, discovery stops being about quality and becomes a numbers game. As more content is generated with little cost or friction, the signal-to-noise ratio collapses. “How are you supposed to sort of rise to the top?” she asks, especially for emerging artists competing not just with each other, but with an endless supply of machine-generated tracks. The result is a two-tier system: a protected one percent of established stars who dominate attention, and everyone else buried underneath what she bluntly calls “a lot of AI slop.” 

Manufactured artists and the illusion of success

Always be skeptical of the headlines surrounding AI artists. Krishnamurthy argues that many are designed to create the appearance of success rather than reflect genuine audience connection. Announcements about AI performers signing multimillion-dollar deals or topping charts often collapse under scrutiny. “The math just is a math thing to me,” she says, explaining that many of these deals are intertwined with AI companies themselves, turning artists into case studies rather than breakthroughs.

She urges journalists and fans to look beyond splashy claims. Some rankings can be easily manipulated or bought outright. Even record deals aren’t what they seem. 

Why fans still hold the power

Gatekeeping, Krishnamurthy argues, no longer lives solely with executives or platforms, but with the choices fans make every day. “This is the attention economy,” she says, emphasizing that “one of the most powerful things we have is our attention.” What people click, stream, and ignore still shapes what rises and what disappears on the charts. “You are allowed to also be your own internal gatekeeper,” she says. And urging listeners to be more discerning about what they reward. Settling for disposable music only guarantees more of it. “If you’re willing to take what’s essentially considered slop or fluff…that’s what they’re going to keep feeding you.” 

To hear Sowmya Krishnamurthy’s full conversation on AI in the music industry, listen to The Intersect wherever you get your podcasts.

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