The death of the RIAA will come from an open source music gen model that busts open the economics of music IP. And probably one from the Chinese.
It's been announced that AI-generated music is already starting to top charts [1, 2]. The RIAA moved to shut down Udio [3, 4] and succeeded in getting them to capitulate to onerous demands [5]. They're probably trying to shut down Suno and the rest as we speak.
If a solid music gen model comes out of China, the RIAA will be toast.
Nobody is going to go after every single song published and ask them to show their sources. That's absurd. There just aren't the resources to do that. And generative software will eventually generate those anyway.
Once this begins to proliferate in the open, there won't be any control levers left.
The RIAA couldn't stop RVC models. Once there are more powerful models, it's game over. Every DAW will bake them in and everyone will have a complete working studio on their desktop.
Tencent is working really hard on this [6, 7]. There's no way the tentacles of the RIAA can stop China.
We've already artists switching to concerts and merch as the primary means of revenue generation. Switching to using singles and albums are more promotional of the artists' brands - that's the correct model.
[1] https://www.billboard.com/lists/ai-artists-on-billboard-char...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/01/entertainment/xania-monet-bil...
[3] https://www.riaa.com/record-companies-bring-landmark-cases-f...
[4] https://musically.com/2025/09/29/riaa-updates-udio-lawsuit-a...
[5] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/universal-music-settl...
I once hooked up lasers, galvos, and a web cam with some band pass filters to make an interactive art demo where people could draw onto the side of tall buildings using a laser pointer. The web cam tracked the laser pointer and the projector I built traced your work and displayed it with persistence.
None of those ingredients would scream art at face value. It takes an artist to assemble them into something that captivates others.
AI is simply one more tool in the tool belt for an artist.
You might be talking about "prompting". Such as someone typing something lazily into ChatGPT and calling the output "art". I'll give you that. Without sufficient intention, taste, or curation, it's not going to hold attention.
I'm talking about tools for artists like these:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQaorWJETXe/
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQakfG2D3tN/
https://x.com/get_artcraft/status/1972723816087392450 (something I made)
Or tools for musicians like these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN2CQLZIlbI
Or even interactive art that leverages AI and involves the viewer, like these:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fW9LI6dwCX8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hnIPdVZK1A
I'm a filmmaker and I've made countless "photons on glass" films. AI tools are incredible at getting ideas out of my head and into yours on both a time and monetary budget.
I'm elated that Disney- and Pixar-level VFX are now within scope and that I don't have to be born as a nepo baby in order to direct a film with "Disney-caliber" visuals.
One last analogy using pre-AI tech: not all cameras produce art. We have them in our cell phones and can use them to snap selfies and food pics. But in the hands of the right person or under the right conditions, we might call the outputs of the process of photography "art".
The master's house will not be destroyed by cow tools.
It's not hard to be slop with slop. If we're being honest here.
> Every DAW will bake them in
And this is when my love of music will finally start to die. Living long enough to see DAWs elevate the common hobby musician into developing a skillset, only to give in to the AI hype cycles and kill the soul of creativity.
But at least the main DAW I use these days (Renoise) is so traditionally minded that kind of slop shit will never make it into an update since the userbase would riot in response.
May the AI enjoy the rot in their soulless world.
A tool in and of itself is not slop.
What someone makes can classify as slop if the person doesn't have skills and taste. If they're not diligent about their work and careful about what they share.
A real artist is capable of using any tool available to them.
> Living long enough to see DAWs elevate the common hobby musician into developing a skillset, only to give in to the AI hype cycles and kill the soul of creativity.
Are you angry about AI code completion? Is tab suggest/autocomplete ruining your love of programming?
Are all the "common hobbyists" going to make you exit your career?
(At least that's what I remember reading - the band certainly changed it's name from Hybrid Theory)
The RIAA's action there destroyed vast amounts of music, pretty much the equivalent of if someone just aggressively deleted Bandcamp and Soundcloud put together and everything on it because they were upset they didn't control it all. I will never forgive them for that.
I found countless artists on mp3.com, watched plenty of small but successful careers take off, and then watched it all go away for a very stupid reason.
I'm, obviously, still annoyed about it nearly a quarter of a century later.
I don't blame the RIAA, I blame the founder for doing something that was obviously going to be ruled illegal.
There is no guarantee that the site would have survived, but abandoning it's original indie artists user base to chase psuedo-piracy $$ was ridiculous.
Counter point is that given its insane valuation, something mass market had to be pursued. Selling 1 off burned CDs for indie artists wasn't ever going to pay the bills.
Still a shitty thing to do to their original user base.
TLDR: This website contains a static copy of the MP3.com website as it existed during Thanksgiving November 2003.
I worked on (and very briefly ran) MP3.com after the CNET acquisition of the domain (CNET only bought the domain, which I think was for $1 million). It had nothing to do with the original site mentioned here (good on them for archiving it).
The initial idea of the CNET version of the site was that in 2004 we assumed you would need a directory of which music was on which service. At the time there were quite a few (itunes, recently legal Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic...etc) and the thought was that the labels would sign deals separately on each, splitting where legal MP3s could be bought. Rhapsody was the only one where you paid a monthly fee for access, the rest were pay per song or album. The directory was similar to something like justwatch.com now, and it was really hard to build the data catalog from the early Internet spiderweb of music content from these services. Believe it or not, we got most of the data from FTP drops from each service. The site also would review all the different MP3 players of the time (there were a lot of them!).
The iPod and iTunes devoured the industry to a degree that no one needed such a directory. Everyone was happy to pay 99 cents per song, or get it illegally. Rhapsody, which was way ahead of its time, was too niche, and pre iPhone, no one could "stream" on anything buy a computer.
Everyone of course hated our new site. It didn't carry the spirit or the catalog of the indie bands from the original version (we didn't own any of the rights to keep the content), and all of those artists were rightfully very angry about losing a pay stream (which again, was a nod to what was coming later with YouTube partners). It got so bad that we had to remove the message boards completely because it was pure vitriol. We later added independent artist uploads, but by 2005 it was too late and the site mostly made money converting "eyeballs" (search any artist + mp3) into money through ads.
Despite all this, I had a lot of fun working on it, and as a young 24 year old who just moved to San Francisco it was a great way to learn about online communities and how they could turn on a dime. Other, later sites of mine took the lessons learned from MP3.com and became successful, but I'll always have a soft spot for MP3.com.
Here's a screenshot from the site in 2004! https://www.davesnider.com/file/d979a4b48bb
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