AI Music vs Underground Musicians: What Happens When Advertising Gets Personal?
For the final installment of this series on AI-generated music, AI music production tools, and how we can use this technology to enhance our music careers (while it’s still possible), I want to turn our attention toward the future. Everything I discuss here is speculative, based on what I personally believe we may begin to see flooding our feeds as companies become less reliant on musicians for high-commission advertising gigs. For decades, musicians have played a crucial role in creating memorable commercials and advertisements, giving us generational jingles like O’Reilly Auto Parts or phone numbers practically sung into our memories, like Empire Today’s. Soon, however, we may see a new way for commercials to connect with their audiences. As AI continues to advance, it could create a “new normal” across online spaces, particularly in advertising. Having grown up alongside social media and now watching AI become integrated into nearly every system we use, I believe advertising will be one of the first places where we see a noticeable increase in AI-generated music and a relative decrease in opportunities for working musicians. So make sure you tune into our Spotify playlist featuring a catalog of underground musicians all over America.
When we talk about AI changing the way things are promoted, most of the conversation focuses on how fast companies can make the ads we'll see on our phones, TVs, and social media platforms. Generate an image, write a caption, edit the video, reconstruct ten different versions, test them against each other, and move on to the next campaign. That's as simple as a day's work, and it will probably become a normal part of how we all see advertising and commercials. Still, I think there's another possibility that could be much more interesting, especially when AI-generated music becomes cheap, quick, and making a song is nearly as simple as writing a comment.
What happens when advertisements no longer need musicians? What happens when commercials aren't the catchy slogan we've been programmed to know, supported by the company's earworm anthem to sell their services? What if the advertisement itself becomes music? As AI continues to advance, I believe promotion and advertising could be moving toward product launches, customer comments, sales announcements, creator collaborations, and even viewers could produce their own soundtracks based around the new bottled drink, trending toy, or combo meal at any fast food joint. As strange as that sounds, given how hypnotic our personal playlists are, it could make advertising more palatable for the people who are forced to see it.
The Music Could Become the Content
This is where I think AI music starts becoming much more interesting for social media. Think about scrolling down your Twitter feed and seeing an interactive prompt for you to entertain yourself with “[Your zodiac sign here] as a 2000s rap song,” or “Make a rock anthem for [your favorite NFL team here]." Anyone could turn their dog's personality into a death-metal song, while a company uses its funniest customer review in the comments and turns it into a parody piece for the click value it can gain on Instagram. As this continues to grow, music won't sit behind the commercial anymore, nor will it be made by real musicians; artificially made tracks could become the whole plot of the advertisements.
That changes the relationship between advertising and our engagement. Big corporations have spent years asking us to comment, like, share, tag somebody, duet a video, stitch a post, or answer a question through interactive stories and effects. AI-generated content can give more traceable data than what TikTok already tracks from its users. Potentially, it could track our physical responses that may become tomorrow's content.
Comments Could Become Creative Briefs
Think about Tinder asking its matches to describe their relationship in five words and promising to turn the best response into an R&B love song you can hook up to the aux on your next date. Applebee's could ask customers to describe their favorite entree and turn some of the answers into miniature jingles for the next commercial (a great way to use customer testimonials in a way that doesn't feel like a scam). Epic Games could take player comments and turn them into character skins for the next battle pass, and the Dallas Cowboys could turn fan stories into team anthems (I believe they're the likely team to do something dumb like this for their marketing).
I'm not saying I think engaging online with AI will be cool or enjoyable, but I do think it will be as personalized as our social media algorithms have become. Obviously, none of us desperately need a song about what we ordered for lunch. That's not really the point. The ad is an excuse for engagement. It's something that gives people a reason to comment and come back later to see what happened. AI music becomes less about generating random songs and more about creating basically a "social community engagement engine."
Advertising Could Become Something People Actually Participate In
There is definitely a bad version of this future. Every company, big or small, could start generating endless advertisements. Every product could have its own terrible AI jingle. Social media feeds could flood with synthetic music that becomes as repetitive as the trending songs we're already tired of hearing. Personalized advertising could become so specific that people start wondering why a shoe company apparently knows exactly what kind of music they've been streaming all week. But another possibility is that companies use these tools to make advertising more interactive instead of simply making more of it. Your comment becomes tomorrow's song. A customer review becomes a music video. Fans create variations of a brand's sound. Creators remix the campaign. Different communities develop their own versions, and the audience starts influencing what gets made next.
For decades, advertising interrupted entertainment. Social media already started changing that relationship because an advertisement appearing on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube has to compete directly with everything else someone could be watching. AI could blur that line even further. The sale announcement becomes the hook. The customer review becomes the lyrics. The comments become the creative brief, and the audience becomes part of the production process. That doesn't necessarily mean people are suddenly going to love advertisements. Most of us can still recognize when somebody is trying to sell us something. But it could change what advertisers compete over; still, it revolves around our attention.
What worries me about the future of social media advertising is how close we may be to a dystopian version of our online “social society”. AI doesn't just give companies another way to make the commercials they put out cheaper or faster to make; it gives them the ability to make advertising more hypnotically comfortable, personalized, and interactive than ever before. Whether that creates better turnover for the company’s yearly analysis, or keeps consumers locked in on what's on their phone screens, will depend on what we, as consumers, focus on. If a company's goal is to keep profit over progress, the future of promoting your business might not be a finished visual commercial dropped into your feed or on TV. It could be something constantly changing around each audience, responding to our feedback in real time, turning our information into interactive entertainment, and inevitably giving viewers “exactly what they want.” I mean that maniacally, if you catch my drift.
What Happens When It's Personal
I could definitely see where the slippery slope of AI may lead, where Ad space can get a lot more futuristic. Thinking about that may be a little uncomfortable because it doesn't seem too far off to become a reality. Instead of creating one soundtrack for an advertisement, companies could eventually generate different music depending on the person seeing it.
Imagine three people receiving the exact same sneaker advertisement. One person hears electronic music, another hears soft R&B, and another hears hip-hop. The shoes haven't changed. The company hasn't changed. Maybe even the video hasn't changed. The only difference is the soundtrack the advertising algorithm believes will work best for that particular viewer.
Take that idea further, and the music could potentially change based on region, demographics, behavior, time of day, campaign objectives, or even the type of creator whose content you're watching. An ad for coffee at 7:30 in the morning could sound completely different from the same one at 9:00 at night. Someone who watches a lot of hip-hop content might hear one version, while somebody whose feed is filled with indie rock receives another algorithm-personalized version to get their attention specifically.
At that point, advertisers aren't really creating ten different versions of an advertisement anymore. They're building systems capable of creating variations automatically. The advertisement becomes something that changes depending on where, when, and potentially who is watching it.
Tailored Advertising = Anti-Privacy
This is also where that possibility becomes something to watch for. Privacy of our data is a large and recurring issue that the base population of many countries faces. A large portion of what gets tracked is our likes, dislikes, wants, and needs so new products can be pushed to the proper demographic. But what happens when any product can be marketed to any fanbase and received the same way? That is a line advertisers and platforms are going to have to watch and take seriously. What information is being used to make those decisions? Did we knowingly provide it? How specific will personalized advertising be allowed to become? Could we opt out of it in the settings? At what point does personalization start feeling like manipulation, and how much could AI help it grow?
Those questions already exist and get discussed in digital advertising online, but generative AI could make them more complicated because advertisements could eventually have thousands or millions of tiny variations. The commercial incentive is obvious. If changing the soundtrack makes someone slightly more likely to stop scrolling, remember the company, or buy the product, advertisers are going to spend the money for it. The harder question is how far that "personalization" will go.
That would mean the advertising algorithm isn't necessarily one finished video anymore. It could be a collection of instructions and creative rules capable of producing thousands of different versions. I actually think that makes human creative direction more important rather than less important. Somebody still has to decide what the brand is supposed to sound like, what it should never sound like, what jokes make sense, what feels desperate, what crosses the line, and what should actually be released. AI can give you hundreds of possibilities, but somebody with good taste in music still has to throw a handful away.
The Future Still Needs Musicians
So, where does all of this leave musicians? I don't think AI-generated music means we're all going to disappear, but I definitely think it could change where musicians are needed and what companies are willing to pay us for. If a company can generate 500 versions of a thirty-second jingle before lunch, they're probably not going to pay five different musicians to do the same thing. That's just the unfortunate reality of where this technology could take certain parts of the industry. At the same time, somebody still has to know what actually sounds good. Musicians know when a chorus sucks, when a melody sounds like something we've heard a thousand times before, when a vocal is too perfect, and when a song desperately needs someone to stop adding things to it. Maybe as generating music becomes easier, having good taste becomes one of the more valuable skills we have left.
Advertising is probably just one of the first places we're going to see that shift happen. Companies don't need every song behind a commercial to be a masterpiece; they need something that gets your attention long enough to make you remember whatever they're trying to sell you. If AI can do that cheaper, faster, and make a different version for every person scrolling by, companies are obviously going to experiment with it. That's why I don't think musicians can afford to completely ignore this technology and hope it eventually goes away. We should know how these tools work, where they can actually make our lives easier, and, more importantly, recognize when they're being used to make hiring a musician seem unnecessary. There's a difference between using AI as another tool in the studio and letting it become the reason there isn't a musician in the studio at all.
Whatever happens next, though, people are still going to make music because people have always made music. There will still be bands playing to 30 people on a Tuesday night, rappers recording in bedrooms, producers spending six hours fixing something nobody else will notice, and underground entertainers working ridiculously hard just to get somebody new to hear what they're creating. No algorithm changes that. And as our feeds inevitably get filled with more artificially generated music, I think supporting the actual people behind music is only going to matter more. That's also what we're here to do at SpinBinMag.com, where you can always find human musicians, underground entertainers, and people who are still putting the work into making something real. AI can make the soundtrack to an advertisement in five seconds, but I'd still rather spend my time finding the person who spent five years figuring out what they actually wanted to sound like.
Comments