So there’s this guy on YouTube having what can only be described as an existential meltdown in real-time, and honestly? I get it. I really do. He’s sitting there, face gone white, watching the future eat his past for breakfast, and all he can do is hit record and tell us about it.
This poor bastard spent nine semesters at Berklee—that’s right, Berklee, the place where you go to learn how to be properly poor while studying music—learning arranging, sound design, orchestration. He can write for big band, for strings, a cappella, the whole nine yards. Then he spent twenty-five years in studios, producing albums, learning which knobs to twist and why. Everything he’s ever known, everything he’s dedicated his life to mastering, just got replaced by an algorithm that costs eight bucks a month.
The thing that gets me is how it happened. He’d been playing around with AI music for his guitar gear reviews—you know, silly songs about amp specs, the kind of goofy shit you do when you’re having fun with technology. The early versions were rough. Weird lyrics, odd time signatures, intros that went nowhere, verses that lasted seven measures for no goddamn reason. He’d have to rip the songs apart into stems, reassemble them like some kind of digital Frankenstein, just to make them listenable.
But that was the old world. That was last week.
Then he stumbled onto Suno Studio. Version 5. And that’s when everything changed.
Here’s what happened: He watched a video of these two young guys in Cambridge—probably half his age, probably never spent a sleepless night worrying about whether the kick drum was sitting right in the mix—demonstrating their new toy. And this toy? It doesn’t just make music anymore. It understands music.
He fed it one of his own songs. Just dropped it in there. And the AI analyzed it, transcribed all the lyrics, correctly identified verse-chorus-bridge structure, and then—here’s where it gets fun—wrote out a massive prompt describing exactly what it heard: “Acoustic folk pop song in major key featuring a male vocalist with a clear, slightly melancholic tone. The primary instrumentation is an acoustic guitar playing a fingerpicked arpeggiated pattern throughout…” and on and on, describing production techniques, atmosphere, everything.
You know who can do that? Music producers. Sound engineers. People who spent years learning their craft. People who aren’t needed anymore.
He says “finito,” which is Italian for “finished,” and he means it in every sense. Not just done with the task at hand, but done as a profession, done as a species of worker, done as a relevant human skill set.
The guy gave a prompt: “Write a song about the world of music changing, with the chorus saying ‘I am done.’” Seconds later, he had complete lyrics. “I am done, I am done, chasing shadows, chasing sun.” Set it to 80s rock, 140 BPM, D minor. Hit create. Out comes a song with drums that crack like thunder, guitars that wail, the whole package. Is it the greatest song ever written? No. But it’s good enough. That’s the killer—it’s good enough.
And here’s the part that really twists the knife: People keep saying AI music is soulless. Cold. Heartless. Lacking that ineffable human quality that makes music meaningful. We want that to be true. We desperately want that to be true. Because if it’s not true, then what the hell are we still doing here?
But this guy listened to what the AI did with his own song, and he couldn’t lie to himself anymore. It wasn’t soulless. It was beautiful.
Think about the economics of this for a second. This guy just paid 280 bucks for a yearly subscription to the very technology that’s making his entire skill set obsolete. He gave money to the people who are, as he puts it, “de facto taking our jobs.” But what choice does he have? This is where it’s at. This is it. There’s no way back.
He traces the history: Music used to be live performances only, back in the 1700s and 1800s. Then recording technology came along and changed everything. Record labels emerged, created a business model that lasted maybe fifty, sixty years tops. Then streaming killed that model—everyone gets music for pennies while some Swedish guy gets billions to invest in whatever the hell he wants. Now AI is killing the streaming model, or at least killing the need for human musicians to feed it.
Each iteration lasted less time than the one before. The acceleration is the scary part.
What gets me is the specificity of the loss. This isn’t some abstract “the robots are coming” think piece. This is a guy who knows exactly what he’s losing. He knows what an LFO is. He knows how to write for orchestra. He knows which knobs to fiddle with and why. He built his entire YouTube channel around reviewing gear, understanding guitar sounds, explaining the technical aspects of music production. And now? Nobody needs that anymore.
The AI does it in thirty seconds, and it does it better.
He says commercial music creation by humans is done. Not hobbyist stuff—you can still noodle around on your guitar in your basement, still worship your guitar heroes and practice their licks, at least until there are no more guitar heroes to worship. But music as a profession? Music as something you get paid for? Finito.
Here’s my take, and maybe this is the whiskey talking, but probably not: He’s right. And he’s also wrong.
He’s right that the old model is dead. The Berklee education, the years in studios, the carefully cultivated expertise—yeah, that’s not worth what it used to be worth. The market doesn’t care about your credentials when a machine can do it faster, cheaper, and arguably better.
But he’s wrong if he thinks this is the end of music. It’s just the end of music as we knew it. Music will survive, the way it always has. It’ll just be different. Maybe music becomes less about technical mastery and more about curation, about taste, about knowing what to ask the machine to make. Maybe the skill becomes prompt engineering instead of music theory. Maybe we end up in a world where everyone can make professional-quality music, which means the differentiator becomes something else entirely—vision, taste, cultural relevance, whatever.
Or maybe I’m just whistling past the graveyard here.
The thing that haunts me about this whole rant is the image of him sitting there, face gone white, watching that demonstration video. That moment of recognition. That instant when you realize the world has shifted beneath your feet and there’s nothing you can do about it. We’ve all had that moment in some form or another, but usually it sneaks up on you over years. This guy got the whole apocalypse delivered in a thirty-second demo video.
And the kicker? He’s still making videos. Still reviewing gear. Still doing the thing he loves, even knowing it’s all being rendered obsolete in real-time. There’s something almost noble about that. Or maybe just stubborn. Hard to tell the difference sometimes.
Welcome to the future, where everyone’s an artist and nobody’s a professional. Where the machines make the music and we make the choices about which machine-made music to listen to. Where nine semesters at Berklee gets you exactly the same place as eight dollars a month and a decent prompt.
Pour one out for the session musicians, the sound engineers, the arrangers, the producers. They had a good run.
Me? I’m just glad I chose writing as my obsolete profession instead of music. At least when the AI comes for my job, I’ll be too drunk to notice.
Source: RANT - THIS IS IT