These are strange times.
AI is a constant presence in almost every creative field right now - simultaneously a threat and a promise. It could be the thing that levels the playing field, making accessible what was previously exclusive. Building this website, for example, took a few evenings instead of weeks of trial and error with results that would have been mediocre at best.
For me personally, AI has made it easier - and honestly more enjoyable - to tackle the parts of running a small music business that feel more like admin than actual music-making.
Time is the real constraint here. With a family, the hours available for composing are limited. Add planning new music packs, sketching out some kind of marketing approach, and keeping a website and social channels updated - and suddenly even a modest to-do list becomes genuinely difficult to sustain. And somewhere in all of this, I have to remember that I'm doing this because I enjoy it. Not because I have to. My bills get paid whether I'm in the studio or not.
So. Here's my current strategy - or at least how I'm thinking about it right now.
What I use AI for
I keep everything about my music packs in Notion: themes, target audience, references, instrumentation, tempo, you name it. When I'm developing a new pack, AI helps me check the marketplaces I sell on, bounce ideas around (sometimes my ideas are bad; sometimes Claude's are worse - we work through it), and structure everything. By the time I actually sit down in the studio, I have a solid, well-thought-through concept to work from. That alone has done more for creative block than I expected - more on that in a future post.
Being able to quickly generate detailed descriptions, and sometimes even follow them, plus some visual help - it moves me from a blank page to something resembling a sketch much faster than I could manage before. Closing Logic night after night after hitting CMD + A → Delete is not something I'd categorize as fun.
Beyond the music itself: the website, this blog, ideas for how to launch packs, social media strategy - all of that runs largely through AI. These aren't areas where I'm particularly strong, and if I'm honest, not areas I find especially interesting. But if I want to release music that people actually get a chance to hear, they're part of the job. Occupational hazard.
Sidenote: these posts are written by me in Swedish and translated to English - it's simply more natural to write in my native tongue.
What I don't use AI for
This part matters to me.
I don't use any AI service to generate music. Plenty of people do, and I'm not judging - it probably works well in a lot of contexts. But writing music is the whole point for me. Outsourcing the part I actually want to do, the part I feel like I can do, just feels wrong. You could argue that using AI to brainstorm pack concepts edges toward this territory, but the music itself is still mine. My decisions, my details, my fingerprint - hopefully the thing that sets my work apart.
Artwork follows a similar logic. I either make it myself, or I buy artwork from artists and build on top of that. An attempt, at least, to support people who've put real time into their craft.
The honest conclusion
There's probably some hypocrisy baked into all of this. Wherever you draw the line with AI, it's always affecting someone. That's hard to escape, and I hold my position with some humility - I might change my mind.
But if I simplify it: things (outside of the whole music thingy) I used to do myself but that took months, I'm happy to automate. Things I used to pay someone else for, I intend to keep paying for.
That's the line. For now.
