This is a trend subject, ultra-processed, and even if new, it’s getting worn out before reaching its peak. Nevertheless, there’s still interest, and some might not be looking at the core of the issue.
We’re shifting towards the age of AI, where everything can be produced in the blink of an eye. What will be left for the creatives when people lose sight of what is artificial and what is authentic? Of course, the live performances will still be relatively significant, but what about products or services based on creative assets? Where is the music industry heading? Will the film industry survive? Custom AI-ads might even knock out the advertising market as a whole. There might not even be work for ghostwriters.
Now, after an apocalyptic intro, let’s dig into what the real deal is with AI in the creative field, because people might freak out about the possibilities of oblivion, including me. Still, I have a different perspective on why the creative business might struggle, but for a better cause. If you look back in history, you will notice that technology created more jobs than it eliminated, creating new fields, shifting people to new media, atomizing production, and even creating new art forms, such as cinema and animation. The internet brought new ways to create advertising, and hey, we didn’t even have social media a few years ago, which made many jobs, not fewer.
Skilled and creative people have managed to navigate every technological shift, and this time isn’t any different. However, I must acknowledge that this time the technology is tackling the skills, not just the format. This is where the worry and anxiety kick in, because it’s not just about adapting to new tools, but is a different approach to how to think as a whole, not a mechanical issue. The way artists relate to the tools might differ from now on, not because they won’t be able to produce art, but in how to make their art relevant. As we all know, the more available a product is, the less valuable it is. This happened to music recently, initiated by Napster and ending up now with Spotify. The medium shift made music a commodity. Production costs have fallen significantly, and producing music with AI now has a value close to zero… unless there’s added value.
And here’s the point I want to reach: added value. AI can’t produce value. It can reduce costs, but can’t add value. Value is added with intention. AI doesn’t have intention. It can’t even prompt itself without imagination. The reality is that AI isn’t even close to a human mind yet; even if it can produce impressive results, the technology is still far from dreaming.
The challenge lies in adding value and intention, and without character, knowledge, and taste, it won’t be easy to compete. A person might even use AI to produce content and imbue it with relevance, but only if the person adds purpose to the art. Therefore, those who are art history-savvy, with proven taste and rhetoric, might thrive, but those with technical skills yet lacking in communication skills are more likely to struggle. Being able to manage all that data with human imagination is already proving different, and it will only get better as technology evolves. As Walter Benjamin noted nearly a century ago, “The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition.” People, not machines, weave that fabric.
In some ways, this dystopian future might shake the creative world, not to steal jobs, but to actually make creatives prove a point on why their art has value. The value might be the person themselves, their philosophy, or even physical traits; however, one thing will be required the most: their soul. AI doesn’t have a soul; people do, and their art thrives when people notice their soul. A musician shouldn’t play just for the sake of playing; they have to add their soul to it, as does the painter, the writer, the actor, the filmmaker, etc.
Once again, we are going back to the core: the anima. Everything goes back to this. Technology will keep evolving. Tools will keep improving. But the hunger for meaning (as Viktor Frankl famously pointed out), for connection, for something that feels human—that won’t change. That’s the constant. And as long as that hunger exists, there will be room for those willing to feed it with something only they can offer. Not perfection. Not efficiency. Presence. Art will always remain with the relationship between the author and the audience. Fewer transactions, more relationships. That’s not a downgrade. That’s a return to the original deal.
When Andy Hildebrand accidentally developed autotune, the music industry experienced a significant shift toward pitch-perfect music. The aesthetics of mainstream music underwent a complete transformation. The mass-production industry could now adopt formats for the widespread standardization of music. The tool even became a feature when T-Pain extrapolated the usage of the tool, creating a new genre of music. Everybody wanted to autotune their tunes. A little later, the vocal-chopped snippets with distorted pitches also became mainstream when Major Lazer’s “Lean On” hit 1 billion streams on Spotify.
A song rejected by top-selling artists was brought to life by Major Lazer (Diplo) and garnered billions of plays, making “Lean On” the fourth song on Spotify to reach that number.
Every time a new tool is released, artists strive to find innovative ways to utilize it creatively, whether intentionally or by chance. The same thing has happened with guitar distortion, vinyl scratching, and sampling. People are always attracted to new trends, which come and go in waves. However, with the spread of information through social media, there are many new micro-trends that we can barely keep up with. The latest I was able to follow was LoFi Girl and its nemesis, the hyperpop.
Lofi Girl YouTube channel captured the essence of a niche
However, to add to the pulverization of music creation, artificial intelligence isn’t just creating near-perfect songs based on current genres; we can’t keep up with the rapid release of music. Spotify’s Release Radar can’t show us everything that we could keep up with. This is a complicated scenario for new artists to break through, or even for new genres to gain widespread adoption among people. We are shifting to a scenario of niche massification.
But how does the atomization of music influence its aesthetics? The music industry will always profit from something; however, music itself is no longer the focus (and it barely was in the past). We had major music scenes that lasted a couple of decades, then shifted to short trends, and now the music creation is insignificantly related to all the rest that the artists are adding their effort to. Some niches still maintain a high quality of composition, but there is little to no progress in the mainstream regarding music itself. If we consider Spotify’s top 20 artists, most of them aren’t there because of their music, but because of the aesthetics they created alongside it; the songs are just background noise.
Xania Monet is a fake AI artist who somehow managed to reach the Billboard charts.
Many writers have already published books, articles, and essays regarding the problems of creating music for the masses. Adorno, Scruton, and Lipovetsky are worth mentioning—and their warnings were prescient. These critics were right to identify the leveling effects of mass production on art. Their so-called “elitism” wasn’t mere snobbery but a recognition that aesthetic standards exist and matter—a position I share without reservation. The dopamine shots became shorter and shorter, so that we are in a scenario where the addiction no longer cares about music; they gotta get the listener by other means necessary. Let’s listen to mainstream music (I carefully advise against it): you will find the artificial additives on every sonic wave, as it is an auditory version of ultra-processed food. The consequences of it are the same as ingesting unhealthy food; your brain is going to atrophy to the point of no return.
Music is a metaphysical process: we listen to enter another place, either through communion or solitude with ourselves. The dopamine hit eliminates this element. As Rudolf Otto pointed out, music is one of the most important artifacts used to access the sacred, as every religion incorporates it into its liturgy. Music is even mentioned as a vital element in the afterlife, as, for example, mentioned many times in the Bible, where angels sing to extol God.
‘And after these things I heard a great voice of much people in heaven, saying, Alleluia; Salvation, and glory, and honour, and power, unto the Lord our God: ‘ – Revelation 19:1
Mozart’s Lacrimosa captures the essence of music created for the sublime.
Now, let’s put all elements into place: ultra-processed aesthetics, artificial intelligence producing endless pieces of music, an overwhelming amount of information pushed through self-fed algorithms, and the elimination of music metaphysics. What’s left for music? The probable solution to this would be the rejection of mainstream and technological abuse of art, adopting a Luddite stance. Neo-Luddism has recently been adopted by individuals overwhelmed by the pressure that technological advancements place on society, causing them to prematurely embrace new trends. Nevertheless, we know beforehand that it’s impossible to avoid the winds of change, like a single sailor in a storm with a raft.
Certainly, discretion is advised. A balanced approach is needed, but we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in society, where we can’t trust any media or information. The exact process will happen to music consumption. Will we blindly embrace music created by AI, with the plastic hyperrealism it produces? If history shows us a pattern, we have to agree that it’s a certain yes. The aesthetics of music will reveal a shallow, unholy, addicted society, not as a norm, but as a Zeitgeist. We can’t pretend to have a crystal ball, but we see the data and realize that this path was taken.
The obvious objection to this critique is: who decides what’s good? But this question itself reveals the depth of our cultural crisis—it assumes aesthetic value is merely subjective preference, that one person’s masterpiece is another’s noise and neither judgment holds more weight. In reality, criteria exist: technical mastery, structural coherence, emotional depth, metaphysical resonance. These aren’t arbitrary impositions but accumulated wisdom from centuries of musical tradition. Rejecting expertise and canon in favor of algorithmic popularity or radical relativism—the notion that “everyone’s taste is equally valid”—has produced precisely the aesthetic wasteland we now inhabit. The democratization of creation tools doesn’t eliminate the hierarchy between craft and noise; it merely obscures it under the illusion that all output is equivalent.
Therefore, acknowledging that the trends are becoming extreme and aware of how music for the masses is being produced, we, as a minority that thinks critically about the situation, will not simply become Luddites; we will have to construct a new path. We must reassert that not all music is equally valuable, that mastery and tradition matter, and that standards are not oppressive but liberating. The gatekeepers and curators—critics, educators, artists who maintain these standards—aren’t obstacles to progress but necessary filters against cultural entropy. Using the premises of the classical standards created by the giants on whose shoulders we stand, we must produce a counter-wave of discriminating, sober use of technology so that we can thrive through this storm: a tech-culturally savvy elite that filters and shares what is good, pure, and meaningful. There’s no wishful hope in the midst of a dystopian future, only pragmatic solutions grounded in the recognition that excellence exists and must be preserved.
Not by coincidence, Depeche Mode had a song called Sacred on their album “Music for the Masses”. What a unexpected turn of events.
Recently, I stumbled upon a YouTube video that was suggested to me, entitled “No Seriously, Classical Music is Dying”. The video was not particularly viral, nor the author is massively followed. The content was created by someone who actually has a bond with classical music but feels frustrated that it needs artificial means to survive.
She has some interesting points of view; nonetheless, we should dive into the arguments where the concern is raised. For example, why is it not popular or accessible, and why do patrons need to keep classical music alive, and why don’t they let it die because of “elitism”? All of those points are valid, but they don’t hold if you take into consideration the history of music itself: classical music always relied on the elite to survive and to be developed, as the universities and intellectuals of the world also did. Those things don’t rely on popularity for full development; they need a few people with money and vision. The best example of that was made in the Renaissance by the Medici. They not only supported music but also art in general, and because of people like them, we could further develop culture and science.
If we let the mob decide whether one style of music should live or die, we would end up regressing toward the most primitive forms of musical expression. This isn’t a moral judgment about anyone’s taste—it’s a structural observation about how cultural evolution works. When accessibility becomes the only criterion for survival, music optimizes for instant comprehension. But instant comprehension favors the familiar, the repetitive, the immediately graspable. Over generations, this creates a ratchet effect: each iteration must be understandable by ears trained on the previous iteration’s simplicity. There’s no mechanism for complexity to enter the system—no pathway for forms that reward sustained attention, no infrastructure for music that reveals itself gradually.
We can already observe this trend in contemporary popular music: the diminishing importance of melody, the simplification of harmonic structure, the reduction of song length, and even the decrease in instrumental variety. These aren’t accidents but adaptations to an attention economy that penalizes anything requiring more than a first listen to appreciate. The issue isn’t that simpler music is morally inferior—it’s that if we dismantle every institutional support for complex forms, we don’t get democratic complexity. We get only what survives without cultural scaffolding, without mentorship, without the time to develop ears capable of hearing what isn’t immediately obvious.
If we just “let classical music die,” we are letting go of music’s capacity for depth. We’re not preserving this tradition because it’s “better” in some absolute sense, but because it represents a pathway to experiences that require preparation—earned transcendence, revelation through training. That’s not an elitist movement; that’s a humanist movement. It’s defending the human capacity for growth, for the delayed gratification of understanding something that once seemed opaque. Without preserving forms that demand apprenticeship, we eliminate the very possibility of such transformations.
The Myth of Classical Music’s Popular Past
When people claim that classical music is “dying,” they usually imagine a golden age when it was popular, when concert halls were packed and symphonies were a shared civic ritual. But this is a modern projection. Classical music was never popular in the democratic sense — it was always the music of a minority, sustained by institutions, courts, and patrons who could afford the space and leisure to cultivate listening. Its apparent exclusivity was not an accident of privilege but the necessary condition for its depth. Classical music wasn’t accessible; by an unexpected turn of events, it’s more accessible today than it was ages ago.
Roger Scruton would say that beauty requires “disinterested attention” (Kant’s view) — something that cannot arise in a commercial environment where every sound must justify itself by numbers. The salons, chapels, and aristocratic courts of Europe were small, but they were listening communities, bound by reverence rather than market demand. Adorno called this the “autonomy of art”: the right of a form to develop according to its own logic, not the logic of the crowd. What sustained that autonomy was precisely its distance from popularity.
Schopenhauer, who believed music expressed the inner structure of the world itself, saw in this distance something metaphysical: only those freed from the immediate struggle for existence could fully surrender to the Will revealed in sound. Access, therefore, was not simply economic; it was existential — it required quiet, contemplation, and an inner discipline that most of life discourages.
When the public concert finally emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it didn’t democratize classical music in substance, only in form. The bourgeoisie replaced the aristocracy, but the function remained the same: a small, cultivated public acting as custodians of a complex art. The present obsession with “accessibility” forgets that every art form that endures does so through apprenticeship — through the few who carry the knowledge for the many. It was during the Romantic period that classical music became more introspective and took center stage. Before that, music was part of something else: a ceremony, a party, liturgy, background noise to anything else.
So yes — classical music was never popular, nor was it meant to be. Its power lies in its resistance to mass consumption. What made it valuable was not its reach but its refinement — the density of form, the intricacy of its inner life, the demand it placed on its listener. To expect it to thrive on the same terms as pop culture is to mistake a cathedral for a shopping mall.
Elitism versus Consumerism
Classical music never asked for a crowd; it asked for a congregation. As Roger Scruton reminds us, beauty is not an opinion but a demand—the demand that we learn to attend. The aesthetics of Classical Music rely on contemplation, not consumerism. Beauty creates obligations: to listen with patience, to refine taste, to make cognitive sacrifices for meaning. Elitism, in this register, is not snobbery but structure: an acknowledgement that some goods require apprenticeship. Adorno, writing from a different angle, calls mass culture production a machinery of regression. The “culture industry” trains the ear to crave the easily repeated and the instantly known. When the ear is trained downward, patronage becomes scandalous and difficulty becomes “elitist.” When the ear is trained upward, patronage appears as what it once was: the practical mechanism by which high forms survive periods of low appetite.
However, some degree of self-judgment among the classical elite must be revised, as pure intellectuality bypassed moral judgment and relativism emerged as a wild card. This prompted the decay of virtuosity, and the beast of emotions was loosened in the scene. Contemporary classical music paid more attention to its form than its content. This is where the sublime lost its place. Even Stravinsky reflected on that when he shifted his compositions towards neoclassicism.
The Medici were not merely pursuing a pastime; they were establishing a symbolic monument (maybe even greater than what they actually envisioned). Scruton is clear: high art grows where there is a conception of the sacred—of things before which we stand, not things we use up. Patronage concentrates resources around the holy so that difficult goods can appear in the world at all: cathedrals, fugues, instruments that require decades to master. Perhaps the sense of death in classical music reflects the refusal of the sacred in this Gestalt.
The Sacred and the Profane
Perhaps what we call the death of classical music is not an aesthetic crisis at all, but a spiritual one. It is the symptom of a civilization that no longer acknowledges the sacred — or rather, that refuses to admit the sacred as a legitimate category of experience.
In the classical tradition, music was never merely entertainment. It was an anamnesis, a remembering of order. From Pythagoras to Bach, sound was bound to number, number to cosmos, cosmos to God. Harmony was not a style; it was a metaphysical statement — that the world had a hidden architecture and that the ear, properly trained, could perceive it. In that sense, every fugue, every symphony was a small enactment of the sacred: form imposing itself upon chaos, proportion rescuing sound from noise. Kant and Hegel were fond of this notion of virtuosity and the sacred, as Rudolf Otto points out, as well as of music as a reflection of the numinous.
Roger Scruton repeatedly insisted that beauty is a “glimpse of the transcendental,” a way for mortal beings to perceive something eternal. To experience the beautiful, in his words, is to stand “in the presence of the sacred without needing theology.” When we lose the sense of the sacred, art loses its vertical axis — its striving beyond itself. It becomes horizontal, functional, flattened to the level of consumption.
Adorno, from a different temperament, diagnosed the same pathology: the “administered world,” where art’s aura decays because meaning itself has been instrumentalized. In such a world, the concert hall becomes just another leisure venue; silence becomes awkward; and transcendence is confused with branding. The sacred — that sense of something before which one stands — becomes alien to the social order, even offensive to it.
Schopenhauer would have seen this as the victory of the Will’s lowest expressions: endless striving, restless distraction. The contemplative dimension of music, which once offered temporary deliverance from the Will, now competes with background noise. The “death” of classical music, therefore, is the death of contemplation — the death of the listener who could still experience music as metaphysical deliverance.
When you write that if we let classical music die, we let music as a whole die, this is what you are really describing: the loss of the sacred gesture itself — the bowing of the soul before form, the recognition that sound can be more than sensation. Classical music’s disappearance would mark not the extinction of a genre but the completion of secularization — the total refusal of transcendence.
The Death of Music
If we acknowledge that Classical Music is dying, we might as well say that music itself is dying. Music became a commodity, and a really worthless one, as the mass production of its production, enhanced by today’s artificial intelligence, makes us lose the connection to what music really is: “The beauty of music is the beauty of the world itself, revealed to the sense of hearing.” (Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music).
Somehow, though, music will find its way out of this hyperrealism where nothing satisfies the soul anymore, as the abuse of technology and the market will turn things around and make people cultivate the purity of music created by humans for humans, as a way of transcending the sublime. Or we might head towards a time when people take their auditory version of SOMA and become numb. I rather hope for the opposite.
Core Philosophical Foundations
Roger Scruton – The Aesthetics of Music (1997) Scruton argues that beauty demands “learning to attend” and that music reveals transcendence without theology. His chapter on tonality and meaning is crucial for the “sacred architecture” argument.
Roger Scruton – Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (2011) More accessible summary of his aesthetics. The section on “desecration” directly addresses what happens when the sacred dimension is lost.
Theodor Adorno – Philosophy of New Music (1949) His critique of the “culture industry” and defense of art’s autonomy. Warning: dense, but the sections on Schoenberg vs. Stravinsky illuminate the “contemporary classical paid attention to form over content” point.
Theodor Adorno – Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962) More approachable. His typology of listeners (expert, good, culture consumer, emotional, resentment, entertainment, indifferent) maps perfectly onto the accessibility critique.
The Sacred and Music
Arthur Schopenhauer – The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, Book III (1818) The section on music where he argues music expresses the Will itself—the metaphysical foundation for your “music as deliverance from striving” argument.
Rudolf Otto – The Idea of the Holy (1917) Defines the “numinous”—that sense of the sacred you’re invoking. His concept of mysterium tremendum explains why beauty creates obligations, not just preferences.
Cultural Patronage and History
Jacob Burckhardt – The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) The definitive account of Medici-style patronage. Shows how cultural forms require institutional support, not popularity.
The Crisis of Contemporary Culture
Christopher Lasch – The Revolt of the Elites (1995) Argues that contemporary elites abandoned their custodial role—directly relevant to the point about “pure intellectuality bypassing moral judgment.”
George Steiner – Real Presences (1989) Argues all serious art and literature are predicated on the wager that transcendence exists. When culture loses this wager, art becomes mere commentary. Essential for your sacred/profane section.
On Listening and Attention
Alex Ross – The Rest Is Noise (2007) Accessible history of 20th-century music. Shows how classical music’s relationship to audiences transformed.
Pierre Bourdieu – Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979). Maps how “cultural capital” works. Helpful in understanding the infrastructure of taste without dismissing it as snobbery.
The Populism Question
José Ortega y Gasset – The Revolt of the Masses (1930) Classic argument that mass society threatens cultural excellence. Controversial, but articulates the concern about “letting the mob decide.”
Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America, Volume II, Part I (1840). Chapters on how democracy affects arts and letters. He predicted exactly the tension describing between democratic equality and cultural refinement.
Contemporary Diagnosis
Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism (2009) Short, sharp analysis of how market logic colonizes all cultural space. His concept of “depressive hedonia” (can’t enjoy anything but can’t stop consuming) illuminates the sense of “nothing satisfies the soul” closing.
Jonathan Haidt – The Anxious Generation (2024) On how technology destroyed contemplative capacity in young people. Directly relevant to the “tyranny of immediacy” point. A very popular book by Haidt.
Counterpoints Worth Engaging
Richard Taruskin – The Oxford History of Western Music (2005). A Monumental work that challenges romantic myths about classical music’s autonomy and purity. Reading him would strengthen your argument by forcing you to address his critiques.
Lawrence Levine – Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988) shows how the classical/popular distinction is historically constructed, not natural. Engaging with this would make essentialism more defensible.
Music is a metaphysical experience because sounds interact directly with your brain, independent of other senses, and can transport you to different realities. Therefore, the power of music goes beyond its source; it’s sublime [1][10][11].
Many philosophers contemplated music as the most sublime art form, primarily because of its characteristics. Even Nietzsche said that life without music would be an error.
How Sound Interacts with the Brain
Physical entry: Air vibrations reach the cochlea in the inner ear, where hair cells convert them into electrical signals. These signals travel via the auditory nerve to the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe [2][10].
Emotion & memory: The auditory cortex has strong connections to the amygdala (emotion), hippocampus (memory), and nucleus accumbens (reward/dopamine). This is why a song can trigger goosebumps, nostalgia, or even tears [3][10].
Imagery & mental travel: Music activates parts of the default-mode network and parietal association areas involved in mental imagery and spatial processing. Brain-imaging studies show that listening to certain sounds—like ocean waves or cathedral echoes—can create vivid inner scenes, almost as if you’re in another place [4][5].
Altered sense of time and self: Rhythms entrain brain oscillations; tempo can change the perception of time. Deep engagement (like in trance or flow) can reduce activity in the prefrontal cortex, which can feel as though self-boundaries dissolve [1][11].
It’s fascinating that one can be mentally transported to another state purely through sound. The Pavlovian-like effect of sonic cues can be used deliberately: when a composer understands how specific sounds trigger emotional reactions, they can shape the listener’s feelings [3][10].
Pop Music and the Hook Economy
The pop-music industry has long experimented with what keeps audiences engaged. While verse-chorus (ABAB) song forms pre-date the 20th century [6], record labels and radio learned that hooks, repetition, and brevity boosted listener retention and sales.
In the streaming era, songs have become shorter and hooks appear earlier to meet the fast-scroll attention economy [7][8][9]. Long-form tracks still thrive in niche scenes, but mainstream pop increasingly favors the “fast-food” style—often around two minutes.
The Composer’s Deeper Role
Recognizing that emotions can be influenced through sound makes the composer’s task even more intriguing. It’s not only about harmony or melody—it’s about shaping collective memory and meaning. Throughout history, music has been used to embed ideas—from protest anthems and theatre music to advertising jingles and even the Psalms, whose lyrics and metrics endured long after their original melodies were lost.
However, the commoditization of this art may disrupt one of humanity’s most sublime forms of transcendence. I’ll share this song by Porcupine Tree as a critique of the current scene.
Daniel J. Levitin – This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (2006) – A popular-science classic explaining how music perception, memory, and reward work in the brain.
Roger Scruton – The Aesthetics of Music (1997) – A philosophical exploration of the metaphysical and aesthetic nature of music.
“Silence is the language of God. All else is poor translation.” – misattributed to Ludwig van Beethoven.
To get inspired, we must find a way to be quiet. Countless people retreat to reflect and recover. Lent is an ideal time to do it. Beethoven took long walks in nature to develop musical ideas. Claude Debussy – Found inspiration in the quiet contemplation of nature. Henry David Thoreau – Lived in solitude at Walden Pond to connect with deeper insights. Max Richter – Uses silence and minimalism as core elements in his music, often retreating into solitude for composition. Arvo Pärt – Known for his “tintinnabuli” style, he spent years in near silence before returning to composition. Björk – Frequently isolates herself in nature for inspiration, especially in Iceland’s quiet landscapes.
