A.I. Survival Guide for P****d Off Musicians

Every time I touch AI on this channel, the comments fill up. Sellout. AI slop. Unsubscribed. We've had a lot of shouting about it. What we haven't had is an actual conversation.

So here's mine. I'll tell you where the people who hate this stuff are right, because they're right about something big. Then I'll show you the part nobody talks about: how technology built my business, and why none of that involves a machine making my music for me.

Two things first. This video isn't sponsored by anyone, on purpose. I paid for it myself so you know this is what I actually think. And I'm not going to pretend I'm neutral, because I'm not. In the last couple of months I've been contacted by at least ten legitimate AI companies. Not because I'm the biggest channel, but because I was one of the few people in this space willing to open the software instead of shouting at it. That willingness to look is the whole point.

Where the critics are right

Let me tell you about a drummer called Gregory Coleman. In 1969 he played on Amen, Brother by The Winstons, and partway through the track there's a four-bar drum break, about seven seconds long.

Those seven seconds became jungle. They became drum and bass and a huge part of what came after. The Amen break is on thousands of records and has been played billions of times. Gregory Coleman never got a penny for it. He died homeless in 2006. Years later, two British DJs crowdfunded around £24,000 for the band's leader, Richard L. Spencer, which was about the only money that ever came back to the band.

So when people tell me the panic about sampling was overblown and it all worked out fine in the end: it worked out fine for the people holding the sampler. It did not work out fine for the man who played the drums.

This one matters to me. I hire drummers. I pay drummers. My band is live and my records are full of real musicians. So I'm not going to tell you everyone who worries about AI is an idiot. There's a real thing to be angry about, and it's the same thing every time somebody builds a new machine: the money goes to whoever operates it, and the person whose work it was built on gets nothing. I'm not saying that's right. I'm saying that's what it is.

Six times, six sentences

AI is here to stay. You don't see horses in the streets any more; technology is a one-way train. But after 40 years in this business, I've watched this exact argument happen again and again.

• Recorded music was going to put orchestras out of work. John Philip Sousa wrote a whole essay about it in 1906: The Menace of Mechanical Music.
• Photography was going to end painting.
• The synthesizer was cold and soulless and would never replace a real string section.
• The drum machine was going to wipe out drummers.
• The sampler wasn't music at all. It was theft.
• Home recording was going to kill every studio on earth.

Different box, same sentence. And the photography example goes deeper than it looks. Photography did take portraits away from painters. But painting didn't die. It went where a camera couldn't follow: Surrealism, Dada, abstraction, Dalí. Photography forced painting to find out what only painting could do.

That's the pattern. The machine takes the mechanical part, and the artists who come out the other side are the ones who went looking for the part that wasn't mechanical. The drum machine didn't end drummers; it gave us house, techno, hip hop and jungle, music that couldn't have existed before. And good drummers, especially the ones who can play in time, are still working.

The 1982 receipt

The sampler was the most hated box in music, and often for good reason, because a lot of early sampling really was theft. In 1991 a US judge opened his ruling against Biz Markie with the words "Thou shalt not steal." But that gesture they were trying to outlaw is hip hop: the biggest music on the planet, and one of my favourites.

Then there's this one. In May 1982, the Musicians' Union here in the UK passed a motion to ban synthesizers, drum machines and any device capable of recreating the sounds of conventional musical instruments. It never became real union policy, but read that wording again. That is the anti-AI argument, almost word for word, written in 1982 about the instrument this channel is built on.

Machines that already do it, and nobody cares

Auto-arranger keyboards have been writing complete accompaniments on their own since the early eighties. They're in your local music shop right now. Was there a protest? Did anybody form a committee? No. Some people love them, good luck to them. I've never owned one. Not because it's immoral, but because I don't want a machine doing the one part of this I actually enjoy. That part is mine, and I'm keeping it.

Machines have beaten us at chess since the nineties, and more people play chess now than at any point in history. Because we never played to be the best on earth at it. We play because it's fun and it's good for your brain. I make music because I like making music. A machine being able to do it doesn't touch that. Not even slightly.

The part you won't enjoy

The thing that's going to take your job isn't AI. It's the guy down the road who spent a weekend learning it while you were writing comments about it.

I want to be careful here. Being frightened is absolutely reasonable. Some of you are watching your income disappear in real time, and I've had a couple of hard years myself, so I know what it is to be scared about money.

What gets me is something else: the person who has been angry about this for two years and has never spent two hours finding out what it does. That isn't a principle. It's a preference for being angry. You're allowed to hate it. You're just not allowed to hate it without knowing what it is, not if you're trying to make a living as a musician. I'm not asking you to like it. I'm asking you not to be the last person in the room to find out what it is.

I've been the first person in the room before

• 1986. My first studio was a Commodore 64 and a dreadful MIDI interface that barely worked. Everyone around me was explaining why computers and drum machines weren't real music, and my mother kept telling me to turn off that mechanical Kraftwerk noise. I got my first job in a recording studio because of it. Not because I was the best player around, but because I was the kid who understood the machines.
• The late nineties. I put my music on the internet because I wanted to release it without asking a label for permission. People genuinely asked me why I needed email when I could write a letter.
• MySpace. I spent a lot of time and money on it and lost the lot when the platform faded. Years of content, gone. So no, it doesn't always pay off.
• YouTube. A cheap camera, terrible light, me being an idiot in front of a lens. People thought it was beneath a professional musician. It's the only reason you know who I am.

And the biggest receipt of all. In 2006 I made a record called Urban Sessions as Sunlightsquare, with Steve Gadd on drums and Will Lee on bass. I didn't chop up Steve Gadd. You don't do that. You hire Steve Gadd and you let Steve Gadd play. What I did was build a big, modern breakbeat world around him out of chopped-up samples of my own playing, with Steve in the middle doing what only humans can do and Will holding the two worlds together. Modern Drummer gave it nine out of ten and described it as the future of synthetic rhythm built on the best acoustic qualities of the past.

The machine and the human in the same room, each doing what it's good at. That's what I've been doing my whole life. It isn't a position I took when the money showed up.

Rule zero: AI is not one thing

Before the useful part: "AI" is one word covering about nine different technologies that have almost nothing to do with each other. There's generative music, which is what everybody is angry about. Fine, be angry. I don't use it for my music either.

And then there's everything else. Stem separation. Transcription. Agents that can read, write and browse for you, which means coding, research and admin. The people shouting loudest have squashed all of that into one word and formed one opinion about it. That's a mistake. Same as it's always been: right tool, right job. The tool I'd tell you to download right now is the Claude app, and then learn the difference between its modes for working on your files, writing code and using a browser. None of this makes art. All of it gives you your week back.

How it actually changed my life

None of this is about the music. All of it is about the stuff that eats your week.

• My website. I'd been burned twice by agencies. Even the good team, proper people at proper rates, meant a site that cost a fortune to run, and every small change was a project. In February I started building my new site myself with AI, and now it works like a charm. But here's the catch, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying: I had to learn what a web stack actually is. AI didn't remove the need to understand it. It removed the need to type it.
• Bookkeeping. I connected Claude to my bank, my accounting software and my inbox. For the first time in my life I can ask a question about my own accounts and get an answer the same hour, instead of waiting three weeks and paying for the privilege. A chartered accountant still checks the machine's work, but the heavy lifting is done.
• Legal correspondence. I've been in a dispute, which I won't go into here. I put the whole history in front of the machine, and it understood my position without bias. I walked into the expensive legal calls prepared, which is a lot cheaper than being confused at £300 an hour.
• Building things. I built my Commodore 64 synthesizer with a lot of help from AI. I was DJing the machine, pointing it in the right direction once I understood enough of the context.
• Email and admin. Inbox, follow-ups, scheduling, posting, building a mailing list. The least glamorous thing on the list, and probably the one that saves the most musicians.
• Learning. This is the one I didn't see coming. It's the best teacher I've ever had. I've learned more in the last 18 months than in the ten years before. Not because it knows more than a good teacher, but because it's infinitely patient, it meets me exactly where I am, and it has never once made me feel stupid for asking the same question 500 times. I'm a grown man and I learned electronics properly, from nothing.

One caveat on all of it: everything I've just described will be out of date in about three months. My setup in February was different from April's, and April's is different from today's. So I'm not selling you a setup. I'm telling you to be a practitioner.

My survival guide

AI is an instrument. The internet is an instrument. YouTube is an instrument. Your synthesizer, your voice, your mind: instruments. Get your hands on them and learn how to play them. That's all I've done since 1986.

I'm not going to tell you it'll all be fine, because I don't know that, and it's already harder to make a living than when I started. What I'm saying is simple. Technology turns up, everybody argues about whether it should be allowed, and one day it stops being an argument and is just the thing people use. The people who come out the other side in one piece are the ones who got their hands on it early, and more than that, the ones who went and found what it couldn't do.

Give AI the boring part. Keep the part that's yours. And go and find what it can't do, because that's probably outside your comfort zone, and that's probably where your best work is.

I may be wrong, and I welcome your comments. From one musician to another: keep hustling, and don't be afraid of the future.

If you want to see what DJing the machine looks like in practice, try the free SIDMIX Commodore 64 synthesizer I built, or read the story of how I finished it.