AI Does My Admin. Not My Art.
Hey friends,
Most of my admin goes through an AI assistant these days. It works like a coworker I can hand the boring half of my week to, and what I get back is creative time — actual hours in front of the Push instead of hours in front of a spreadsheet.
So I am not the guy who thinks the technology is evil (although I think a lot of the companies behind the technology are, but that’s another story…). But there is a line, and for me it sits exactly where the music starts.
Why the line is there
When I find a piece of art that gets under my skin, I go looking. Interviews, old live footage, some half-forgotten blog post where the artist explains what they were going through at the time. I want to know why it exists, and how it got made.
That search is one of the most reliable ways I know to get inspired. With AI-generated music there is nothing to search for. No history, no reason, nobody who was sitting somewhere feeling something. Sometimes a story is attached, but it is usually an invented one wrapped around an invented avatar.
The London to Barcelona problem
Here is how I explain it to myself.
Say you plan a bike tour from London to Barcelona. Roughly eighty hours of riding. Down through Nantes, along the French west coast, then Bordeaux, Toulouse, and across to the coast.
Why would anyone do that? You could fly and be there in two hours.
You do it because of the flat tire in La Rochelle and the strangers who help you fix it. Because of the small ambient club in Toulouse you would never have found otherwise. Because of the people who decide to ride with you for a day and a half. None of that can be planned, and none of it happens if you land at the airport.
Barcelona is not the point. Barcelona is the thing that ties the days together so they have a shape.
The song was never the destination
For years I thought the finished track was the goal. Get it done, get it out, start the next one.
The longer I work, the less true that feels. The finished file is what makes everything else cohere — but everything else is where the value actually sits. The frustration, the hours where nothing works, the moment something clicks at eleven at night and you forget to eat.
Platforms like Suno skip all of it. They are built entirely around the output, trained on work taken from the people who did the hard part. What they hand you is the arrival with none of the road.
So where do you land?
I am not trying to talk anyone out of anything. This is a live argument and thoughtful people land somewhere else on it, which is fine.
But I keep coming back to the same thing. I like that my process is slow and messy and sometimes exhausting. That is not a bug I need to optimise away. It is the reason I do this at all.
Stay creative,
Milan
P.S.: Melodic Minute is fully human-made, and Patreon is what keeps the series going. Patrons get every episode a week early, plus the season albums and the Ableton Live project files: https://www.patreon.com/kvndra
