We'll see. Companies like Abelton aren't going to throw out their whole codebase and start from scratch, just to accommodate advancements in technology. But if I can just talk to the LLM, and say "hey, gimmie a drum beat, now add in a bass line, no not like that, like <hums into mic>", do I really need the overhead of the traditional view of separate tracks and midi and plugins? When making music is as easy as describing something to Stable Diffusion, it's not that old is automatically bad, but we don't operate car like the Flintstones. When I'm walking, I use my feet, one at a time, over and over again. When I'm in my car, I don't use that same interface to operate my car. I don't take foot steps to make my car move. There's just a button press, with my foot, to make many many footsteps happen. If AI is able to similarly accelerate music production, the old interface may just simply not make sense anymore.
Is the old in this case the wheel, which is fundamentally the same, except there have been thousands of years of technological improvements surrounding it, or is it the computer, where modern day computers have only a passing resemblance to the original thing.
That sort of thing is only going to accelerate the amount of crap, derivative music that is already flooding the market
The difference between music and driving a car is that music is art. Many of those who labor in the space enjoy creating from scratch. Technological progress does not automatically make things better
Crap music that other people made will flood the market, but music that's made just for personal enjoyment will explode. Writing music, creating/recording it, and arranging the tracks in Abelton is a very time (and money) consuming hobby if not done professionally. Learning to play an instrument in the first place can be far more rewarding because it's "yours". Prompt engineering on an LLM will be a total shortcut to creating music, but it will be yours.
Commuting to work/school/etc in a car might not be art, but driving for sport, at the top of the profession is very much an art form simply because of the technical skill, creativity, and emotional depth and investment. Just as a musician understands the nuances of their instrument to produce a captivating melody, a driver must intimately know their car's attributes to master each track. The racetrack is their canvas, with split-second decisions, adaptability, and emotional connection to the track, car, and other drivers. Like a well-composed symphony, high-level driving's graceful turns and passes resonate with both the drivers and the viewer. It's not just about who crosses the finish line first (despite what the Fast and the Furious movies told you), but the elegance and finesse required to drive at that level is befitting a music virtuoso to educated viewers.
Very much agree on the last point, technological progress often isn't. Electric cars are the future, but the diagonal torque curve of the motor lacks the charm of ICEs.
Is the old in this case the wheel, which is fundamentally the same, except there have been thousands of years of technological improvements surrounding it, or is it the computer, where modern day computers have only a passing resemblance to the original thing.