While admitting that the technology may not be able to evoke the same emotions human resonance can, one music industry insider is advocating that players in the space not only familiarise themselves with artificial intelligence (AI), but learn to use it to their advantage as a large portion of the music to be produced in the future will be AI-influenced.

“I think what AI is going to do is help the world create a lot more music. In the next five years, more music will be created than has been created in the history of the world. We’re about to be flooded with music,” said Steve Greenberg, music executive and record producer.

The founder of New York-based S-Curve Music, he was addressing one of the opening sessions on Day 1 of the 2025 Island Music Conference co-conceptualised and chaired by Orville “Shaggy” Burrell, with Courtleigh Auditorium as the host venue.

Greenberg went on to share that, though the quality of the music generated by AI may not be great, the technology offers a unique opportunity for individuals who are less musically inclined to pursue careers in the field.

The music executive outlined that the use of AI will open doors for creatives who are not necessarily equipped with the traditional skills needed to pursue a music career.

“What AI will do is open up music making to people who never had the opportunity to make music before, because music making will require less physical skill than it did previously,” he explained. “In the past, you had to master the trumpet to make the sound of the trumpet, and that took years to do. All of a sudden you have computers that can generate these sounds with the touch of a keyboard, and in the future it may be even less: You may say to the AI ‘I want the sound of a trumpet here,’ and it will insert it; or it may even suggest to you that the sound of a trumpet would work well in your song,” he told attendees.

Greenberg continued: “I think, in the next few years, a lot of the music that will accompany social media posts is not gonna be professional hit songs, but music that you made and AI will create that incredible outlet for human creativity that we have never seen before.”

Still, while anticipating AI to open the floodgates for the mass production of music, the music executive admitted that there are concerns.

“A lot of people are afraid that in the future we’re not gonna be musicians any more, we’re not gonna be producers, composers because AI can do it all. That’s not true, because music does need to keep moving forward, and it does need to keep having human input,” he said, adding that the human cannot be eliminated or truly replicated.

“When AI creates a piece of music… it’s spitting out something new, but if you look at the properties of that music you will see that it doesn’t look like a real piece of music. Therefore, AI can only use human-generated music, and so there is constantly going to be a need for people to create new sounds, new genres,” Greenberg explained.

Creative Strategist Brittany Johnson agreed. She shared that for the music that will be generated through AI to truly resonate with people a balance must be struck between technology and the kind of musical taste that only humans can produce.

“If you use AI as a tool and then combine it with that human creativity, you’re gonna win. Where you’ll lose is if you rely on it too much; you look at it as the authority,” she said. “While AI can generate a large amount of new music, what it can’t exert is taste.”

Popular media personality and co-founder of Code Red sound system, ZJ Rush, for his part, stated that, while AI has even gone as far as to mimic the voices of popular artistes, Jamaica’s entertainment industry in particular, still has a huge need for human input as AI has not yet mastered patois. He shared that the latter means Jamaican artistes have the upper hand in terms of staying connected with their audiences.

“Luckily in terms of the dubplate thing, AI hasn’t mastered patois yet, and so if you were to hear an AI Bounty Killer it wouldn’t sound as ‘cross’, and it wouldn’t connect as much,” he said. “We have another two or three years before dem ketch that. But AI is a thing you have to be careful with.”

The panellist agreed that while the use of AI is becoming commonplace in countless creative industries globally, music will not be immune, but very soon the space will be inundated with material AI-assisted.