Amazon’s AI Music Gamble: Slop, Lawsuits, and the Crisis of Meaning
It’s almost white-pilling to watch a tech giant stumble headfirst into a copyright minefield.
Almost.
Image: Berklee Online
Amazon’s Alexa Plus demo was supposed to be a PR layup: “Look how clever Alexa is! It can spit out a song on command!”
But farther down the rabbit hole from the novelty of prompting a jazz reggae EDM pop song, we see a deeper crisis: total failure to understand why art matters in the first place.
Suno is a symptom. Like most A.I. startups, it isn’t selling a product. It’s selling the fantasy that you can automate the creative impulse, form it into disposable content, and never pay a cent to the people who did the actual work.
Related: The Cure for A.I. Slop
Real musicians spend years developing taste, skill, and voice. You don’t get “Johnny B. Goode” or “Great Balls of Fire” by mashing keywords together. You get there through the living school of trying, failing, and trying again.
The fact that Suno’s founders seem confused about this process is telling. Their cofounder whined to Rolling Stone that music is “lopsided” because musicians are outnumbered by audiences. As if that imbalance is some cosmic injustice to be corrected by algorithmic slurry.
It’s not. That “lopsidedness” is the point. Art is not a manufacturing bottleneck to be optimized away. It’s a human enterprise, born from striving and discipline.
But Amazon can’t see that reality. Like most big tech outfits, it assumes that copyright is just a licensing headache to be smoothed over with clever contracts and legal disclaimers. Unfortunately for them, the music industry still has fangs. You can bet that Universal, Sony, and the RIAA are sharpening their knives over this one.
Every minute spent listening to a Suno knockoff is a minute not spent with the real thing—and not just in the economic sense. Culture becomes a wasteland when it’s flooded with derivative noise. We’ve already seen what this effect does to literature. A.I.-generated “books” have turned the Kindle store into a landfill of mushed-up copypasta. Now other bugmen running the same playbook are coming for music.
Related: A.I. Books: The Death of the Author?
The current crisis shows why serious artists and publishers need to draw a line. No one’s arguing that using a tool to refine your work is evil. But when the tool becomes the creator, the results are obvious: emptiness, pastiche, and legal exposure.
In a twist of irony, Amazon’s entanglement with Suno shows why human editors, curators, and patrons are more essential than ever. It takes judgment to separate genuine works performed to a standard from cheap imitation. You need discernment to know when a given piece is adding to culture instead of scavenging from it.
But here’s the most damning part: Even in the best-case scenario, Suno has nothing to say. It can clone a Mariah Carey Christmas tune, but it can’t write the next one. It can replicate a Steve Vai riff, but it can’t feel the thrill of performing it in front of an audience.
Music, like all worthwhile art, is about connection. It’s about human beings reaching across time to stir each other’s hearts. No algorithm can automate that kind of pseudo-telepathy.
And if Amazon and other tech companies don’t learn that lesson soon, they’re not just courting lawsuits. They’re paving the way for a culture where nothing means anything—and no one remembers why we bothered to make art in the first place.
Don’t let them.
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