Can AI Bands Ever Play Live?
With the rise of AI-generated music by apps like Suno and Udio, we must ask ourselves this question: how does an AI band perform live? One thing is having fake music generated by apps and using it to fill the silence, but another, and one of the greatest joys for a music fan like me, is to see your favorite band live and experience the real thing.
Well, the short answer to the main question is that AI bands can’t play live (at least for now). Maybe in the future they will play through holograms (technology that has already been used to add deceased musicians like Michael Jackson and Tupac in special shows or presentations), but it isn’t remotely the same as seeing the real band. That’s the real sad thing about a beloved musician passing away, that we won’t ever see them playing a show again, yeah, holograms may present something nice, but they’re not there, it’s artificial.
What Can AI Do And Not?
AI bands can release music, generate songs, gather followers, and even, in the future, may obtain revenue for their music (if the copyright laws change about that), and also they can generate full concerts on YouTube (they haven’t done it yet, not that I’m aware of, but I guess it’s just a matter of time). Yet they cannot rehearse, cannot tour, cannot fail on stage or miss a note, they cannot feel the energy of a crowd, and the crowd cannot feel and connect with their emotion, because they don’t have one.
Live music is not just sound, it’s a risk, it’s imperfection, because they are humans, and that’s what creates emotion in them and in the crowd, it’s a shared experience and shared feeling. And for me, that’s one of the best things ever.
The Future
A concert isn’t music playback, it’s presence. So if AI bands ever grow bigger than real ones (I hope that would never happen)… What happens to live culture? To festivals? To underground scenes? To the human connection between artist and audience? That all would disappear. Maybe the concerts would still exist, but just as a hollogram shallow show.
Music isn’t just about streams and listeners; it’s about experience, the connection between humans, and AI cannot replicate that, and even if they ever tried to do something remotely similar, it wouldn’t be the same.
My video about this: