MusicTech Insights #6 | Curated by Sigurdur Arnason

This issue is guest-curated by Sigurdur Arnason, CEO and founder of Overtune, a music-making app that lets anyone create music using simple sequencing, samples, and beat packs. In this edition, Sigurdur takes a hard look at AI in music, pushing back against hype and conventional wisdom.

Expect sharp, contrarian insights on why AI isn’t the real crisis, how social media has warped creativity, and what the next cultural paradigm in music could look like.

We’re excited to share Sigurdur’s perspective and his pick of the most relevant stories shaping MusicTech today.

The End of an Era: It’s All About to Crash

Hi, my name is Sigurdur. Most people call me Siggi.

Back in April, I commented on Mikey Schulmann’s claim that “no one likes making music anymore.” Since then, I’ve been asked repeatedly to expand on my views about Suno, Mikey, and that entire ecosystem. But this conversation is much bigger than one founder or one company.

What we’re witnessing is not just an AI bubble. It’s the collapse of a cultural paradigm that has defined the last 20 years.

With support from MusicTech Lab, and special thanks to Maciej Dulski for research help, I dug into several articles about AI in creative industries. Most arguments fixate on royalties, copyright, or the lack of human touch. These points matter, but they miss the deeper shift.

AI isn’t the crisis. AI is the symptom.

The real crisis is that the cultural operating system we’ve lived under since the rise of social media is running out of road.

It’s Time to Rage Against the AI Music Machine

Maciej surfaced this piece, which frames AI as the ultimate fake and highlights public pushback against machine-generated music. But long before AI entered the conversation, artists were already battling the algorithm.

For years, especially in the TikTok era, musicians have begged the algorithm to pick them, hoping virality would validate their work.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth. Social media doesn’t reward creativity or sincerity. It rewards speed, repetition, emotional spikes, and familiarity. AI-generated slop thrives because it is engineered for that system.

Its mechanical scale exposes the emptiness of the current paradigm by taking it to its logical extreme. We’ve sensed something was off for a long time. Now we finally have a villain to point to.

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BeReal and the Authenticity Rebellion

In a LinkedIn post about BeReal, its founder Ben Moore explains the platform’s mission as a kind of protest against the fakeness of traditional social media.

But authenticity alone isn’t a business model.

When social media collapses, BeReal will only have a real chance of surviving if it stops positioning itself purely as a social platform and instead evolves with culture, not against it.

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Treat AI as a Noisy Environment

Virginie Berger is one of the sharpest voices in music tech, fighting to protect artists from exploitative AI practices. But here’s the real issue.

Suno signing with Warner or Udio disappearing into Universal is the wrong mental model. It’s like imagining YouTube in 2004 flying to Hollywood to get Paramount to legitimize the platform.

That would have missed the point entirely.

Music doesn’t need validation from the old system. It needs a new grammar.

YouTube used video, but it was never a movie studio. The next music medium will use audio, but it won’t look like the music industry as we know it.

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Amazon Is Blundering Into an AI Copyright Nightmare

This piece pushed me to speak with Stuart Dredge at Music Ally about the deeper issues behind Mikey’s comments. His line that “musicians are being outnumbered by their audience” is technically true, but context matters.

Today’s paradigm is built on feeds, algorithms, reach, and metrics. Creativity is treated as content. Value is measured by scale. Success becomes a number.

This is why creators feel alienated. Pouring your heart into your craft often gets punished, not rewarded.

My issue with Mikey isn’t morality. It’s shortsightedness. His actions reveal a CEO who is out of his depth and now publicly hiding behind PR damage control.

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Disney Is About to Embrace Generative AI, and the Internet Is Furious

This isn’t just music. The same pattern is unfolding across all creative industries.

AI slop floods feeds. Trust in AI collapses. Prompt culture peaks. Velocity overtakes meaning. Social feed value flattens. Streaming value flattens.

The cracks are visible everywhere.

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Podcasts: A New Twist on Net Audio

Wired, October 8, 2004

When radio was dominant, a fringe phenomenon appeared. Amateurs talking into cheap microphones in their basements. It looked niche, unscalable, and impossible to monetize.

It became podcasting.

New paradigms always start this way. Small audiences first. Deeper meaning first. Scale later.

Music is the language of emotion. It’s no surprise that creators reject its reduction into disposable audio.

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