The music industry has already passed the threshold for digital AGI, but seems to be experiencing disruption dramatically less than AI song generation capabilities might suggest. Anyone can create a song of expert level quality in under 10s with an automatically generated prompt (or write one themselves if they want). The Chainsmokers took about 8 hours in total to make the single Roses, which has over 1.3bn streams as of 02/10/2026 and I believe is on the quicker end of writing time for pop songs, although I am not sure reliable data exists for this anywhere. However, despite AI’s capability to create expert level music 2,880x faster than human artists with essentially 99.9% reliability, this has not significantly disrupted music production or consumption in the past year since the capability was developed. I believe this is because the bottleneck of music productivity is in capturing attention, not generating additional supply of songs. I think it is worth investigating the economics of industries where AI has already fully automated digital human labor with some 10x or more improvement along a relevant dimension to understand when and where access to cheap intelligence will matter and by how much.
The music industry has already passed the threshold for digital AGI, but seems to be experiencing disruption dramatically less than AI song generation capabilities might suggest. Anyone can create a song of expert level quality in under 10s with an automatically generated prompt (or write one themselves if they want). The Chainsmokers took about 8 hours in total to make the single Roses, which has over 1.3bn streams as of 02/10/2026 and I believe is on the quicker end of writing time for pop songs, although I am not sure reliable data exists for this anywhere. However, despite AI’s capability to create expert level music 2,880x faster than human artists with essentially 99.9% reliability, this has not significantly disrupted music production or consumption in the past year since the capability was developed. I believe this is because the bottleneck of music productivity is in capturing attention, not generating additional supply of songs. I think it is worth investigating the economics of industries where AI has already fully automated digital human labor with some 10x or more improvement along a relevant dimension to understand when and where access to cheap intelligence will matter and by how much.