Last month, I watched a “live” set by an artist who wasn’t there. Not delayed. Not backstage. Never existed. Her voice—smooth, smoky, flawlessly in tune—came from an algorithm. Her image, projected in 4K, moved with uncanny grace, hitting every cue. The lighting sync’d to the beat. The crowd swayed, phones raised, as if witnessing something real.
But real is sweaty. Real is off-key. Real is the DJ who reads the room and slows the tempo because someone’s crying in the back. Real is the bass you feel in your ribs, not your headphones.
AI is reshaping how we find music, too. Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” doesn’t just recommend—it predicts. TikTok’s AI doesn’t surface songs; it engineers virality before a human ear hears the first note. And now, with tools like Suno, anyone can generate a “deep house track at 118 BPM” in seconds—tailored to algorithmic taste, not human yearning.
Discovery used to be accidental: a late-night radio host, a dusty bin in a record store, a friend whispering, “You have to hear this.” Now it’s optimized. Curated by patterns, not passion. And while that’s efficient, it’s also isolating. AI shows you more of what you already like—never what you need to hear.
Live performance is heading the same way. Virtual concerts, AI avatars, deepfaked legends “resurrected” for Coachella—these aren’t tributes. They’re replacements. Clean, controllable, and utterly safe. But music was never meant to be safe. It was meant to risk everything in the moment.
I still DJ. And when I drop a track I’ve waited all night to play—and the room moves as one—that’s not data. That’s communion. No algorithm can replicate the electricity of 500 strangers surrendering to the same pulse, not because they were told to, but because something true passed between speaker and soul.
So yes—AI can help you find a song.
It might even help you “perform” one.
But can it teach you how to lose yourself?
Or how to find someone else in the dark, dancing to the same heartbeat?
If AI is your friend,
ask yourself: does it want you to connect…
or just keep scrolling?
By Shadrack ‘SK95’ Mashaba
