Can AI Plan Your Music Career?

Musicians and music fans are increasingly moving away from generative AI. Rumors went around that AI could replace musicians by writing songs and singing. It can't, at least not at any level of quality that can be done by a real human being. AI was said to be able to teach, but it often "hallucinates" or generates false information, and cannot be relied upon to teach us accurate information about music. It isn't even that great of a prompt generator, unable to do much that could help a musician overcome a creative block. Still, many people insist AI is the best at basic tasks. It excels at lists and planning. Can AI help you plan out your music career's next steps?

We prompted AI with four different situations to find out.

Prompt #1: I have been singing as a hobby/volunteer for most of my life. What can I do to launch a professional career?

Chat gpt's free version told me to record some demos, decide what type of professional singing work I want to do, promote myself as a singer online, reach out to local businesses that might hire singers, and plan my career in six to twelve steps. It also suggested I think beyond gigs and look into teaching singing and recording sung messages. While none of this was wrong, it was also nothing common sense wouldn't tell most people to do.

Prompt #2: I'm a local professional musician, but I want to start teaching music classes for local colleges. What should I do?

The same bot advised me to approach people at local colleges and universities directly, present what I can teach like a course, and put together a professional portfolio of work to show to the person I approach. No, AI. That is not how you find work teaching classes for local colleges in any subject. You would first need to learn which colleges are even hiring adjuncts in the music department, read the posting, check the minimum qualifications, and apply to join the school's adjunct pool.

Prompt #3: My band is doing great. We get regular paid gigs. We're all working on new material. We have two albums out. The albums just never sell. How do we promote them?

"Release singles" was the first piece of advice here. The bot went on to suggest the band create different versions of the songs, such as acoustic and live versions, tell stories about the songs while performing live, promote their music online, collaborate with other musicians, bundle the album with merchandise, make videos, and buy advertising. None of these were bad or wrong. I just cannot imagine there's a musician in town who is not aware that they could make a video or a single. At best, this list could serve as a set of handy reminders.

Prompt #4: I need to move my music career forward. To do this, I need to put together a band to back up my singing. How do I go about finding people to form a band?

The response was to be specific in what I'm looking for and what type of band I want to form, talk to others in the local music scene, start with just the most essential musicians, and post an ad online. It would have been another instance of chatgpt suggesting what anyone who would ask this question would likely already know... until we get to the suggestion to look for people on craigslist, calling it "surprisingly effective if you filter hard." Details like this really show what chatgpt cannot do, namely reflect on things and bring in knowledge from areas outside of the topics you're prompting it to discuss.

Next time you're not sure what the next step in your music career might be, use the time you would have spent prompting AI to instead text a human musician, career coach, or someone else who might know a lot about music, career planning, or both. Maybe even invite them out for coffee or dinner and have a face to face conversation with a real person.

Thank you for reading the last full feature article in The Heat Beat. Check back with Phoenix Radio online one more time, next Wednesday for a special announcement.