Coldplay is my favorite band. Some make fun of me for this, but their discography, ranging from the raw immediacy of Rush of Blood to the Head (2002) to the synthetic coldness of Ghost Stories (2014) is too wide ranging, beautifully rendered, and personally resonant for me to dismiss.

That said, something’s happened to the music industry that has even alt-rockers in its grip, including Coldplay. The super-band’s latest single, “feelslikeimfallinginlove,” is a far cry from their roots. While some bands maturate with age, Coldplay has simplified and infantilized; frontman Chris Martin was writing much more interesting, compelling lyrics at age twenty-five than forty-five. The new single is a simple pop song, youthful, exuberant, without much musical complexity or the vulnerability that used to characterize the British act. Don’t get me wrong. The song is fine. But the pop-ification of the music scene has made many of these songs catchy but without substance, finely produced but without spirit. Coldplay used to embrace a sense of melancholy without ever closing the door to hope and the possibility of transcendence and joy. Now their music tends to espouse a vapid form of optimism, a vague sense of love and positivity that doesn’t seem to want to honestly engage with the emotional range of human life. Pop music can generate a great bop for the dance floor, and in principle, I don’t have anything against it. And again, Coldplay’s foray into the pop world isn’t entirely unwelcome. I’ll always listen to their work with enjoyment. But it probably won’t land with me in the same way it used to. Why? Well, pop music doesn’t feel as human to me, and seems much more vulnerable to the hijackings of the monster crouching in the corner of the recording studio: artificial intelligence.

The simpler and more formulaic modern music becomes, the easier it will be for AI to create its own songs and albums. Already, AI companies are trying to get access to the music of major pop stars so they can start training their programs on it. YouTube is purportedly among the companies seeking permissions from major recording labels. Jess Weatherbed writes in The Verge,

After debuting a generative AI feature last year that produces music in the style of famous artists like Charli XCX, John Legend, and T-Pain, YouTube is now asking major record labels to allow it to clone more musicians. According to the Financial Times, the Google-owned video platform is offering to pay Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records “lump sums of cash” in exchange for licensing their songs to legally train its AI music tools.

-Jess Weatherbed, YouTube is trying to make AI music deals with major record labels – The Verge

Will it reach a point where one can’t discern a pop song from an AI fake? While it may be easy for AI to mimic a pop song, it seems less likely it will be able to manage the raw, honest, lyrical goodness of an OG Coldplay song, or a complicated jazz piece, or Vivaldi. The AI companies should keep their paws off of real music, but in the meantime, maybe the best thing musicians can do is make really good music so memorable that, if anyone tried to emulate it, we’d know immediately to treat it as an imposter.