From AI song generators like SUNO and Udio to “knob-free,” browser-based DAWs like BandLab, a rash of new music production apps and software is wooing creators with the promise of shortcutting the time and elbow grease it traditionally takes to make music. But is quicker and more effortless necessarily better? Montreal-based writer and musician Devon Hansen, creator of the new Substack Paracosm, tackles that in their essay, “The great process squeeze: How efficiency bias is choking the music industry.” We get into how tech’s fixation with productivity and frictionless-ness is infiltrating not only how we consume music, but how it’s being created; how financial precarity and pandemic isolation pressured musicians to internalize this Silicon Valley worldview; and what aspects of being a musician (and the music itself) are emphasized or minimized as a result.
