AI in Music: Inspiring or Demoralising?

It’s 2025 and AI is everywhere now and depending on who you ask, it’s either the most exciting creative tool ever invented… or the laziest shortcut to lifeless music thats ever been produced…

I sit somewhere in the middle. Impressed, confused, curious and slightly gutted.

My new band, Lunng Bleeder (an evolution of “The Wax Lyrical Sound) recently tried the thing every musician pretends they’d never do… we dropped a rough phone demo into an AI system to see what it would sound like “finished.” Well… it came back sounding clean. Mixed. Wide. Like we’d recorded it in a studio we could never afford.

It was good BUT it didn’t feel right.

It was like someone had removed the emotion and left the skeleton of the song behind. You could hear the structure, but not the intention.

And that’s where things start getting messy.

When the Shortcut Becomes the Finish Line

AI is useful — I won’t deny it. You can hear ideas faster, test structures quicker, and sketch songs without committing days to a studio and even use it to help with lyric blocks or fills etc... That’s the inspiring part.

But the demoralising part creeps in quietly.

If an app can make your demo sound like a “final mix” in ten seconds, you start questioning the entire purpose of learning, improving, experimenting, sweating and FAILING… everything that actually builds a musician.

That’s the bit no-one talks about enough:

not “AI will replace artists,”

but “AI might kill the ambition before it starts.”

A Real Wake-Up Call: The Architects Incident

The clearest example of just how deep this can go came from Architects recently. If you didn’t catch it, I had already started penning notes for this blog based on my own recent experience and then I saw that Metal Hammer and LouderSound covered this and it honestly felt like a glimpse of the future none of us asked for.

A track called “Ashes of the Kingdom” suddenly appeared on their official Spotify page. The artwork looked slightly AI-ish. “The production felt clean but weirdly sterile.” Fans started posting about it, confused about where it had come from.

It turns out:

• The band didn’t write it.
• The band didn’t record it.
• And the band definitely didn’t approve it.

It was AI. A full AI-generated track that somehow ended up on a verified artist page — and real listeners streamed it before anyone realised.

Metal Hammer broke the story, fans amplified it, and the song eventually got pulled. But the point had already been made:

AI isn’t just a tool anymore. It’s capable of impersonation.

And apparently, quite convincingly.

If that can happen to a band with millions of listeners, what does it mean for smaller artists with no visibility or control?

It’s unsettling and honestly, musicians have every right to feel rattled by it.

What This Means for Real Creativity

For me, as someone who literally shapes metal with a hammer to create a sound, AI feels like the opposite of everything I stand for. Craft takes time — real time (which I’m still learning every day). You make mistakes, you learn, you get better, you build intuition and finally, you feel the metal responding.

There is no shortcut.

Music works the same way.

AI can copy.

It can estimate.

It can imitate.

But it can’t experience anything.

It has never spent a late night reworking something because it wasn’t good enough.

It has never felt proud of a big dirty riff or breakdown.

It has never been moved by a song it helped create.

That’s why, weirdly, the rise of AI might actually make real, human-made music more valuable? When everything starts sounding “perfect,” people begin craving the stuff that’s flawed, alive, and emotional. Real drummers. Real takes. Real intention.

So… Inspiring or Demoralising?

Honestly? I think there’s an argument for Both!

AI can absolutely help creativity — it can spark ideas, speed up a process, or help you hear a song’s potential before you’re ready to record it properly.

But it can also make you question why you’re even trying. Which is exactly how I felt 30 minutes into a practice session when we tried out that popular software, Suno.

It can flatten the emotional journey of creating something and in the case of Architects, it can even pretend to be you.

The way I see it, AI might speed up music — but it will never replace musicians. The heart of music has always been human, and humans are still the ones with something to say.

As long as that’s true, creativity isn’t going anywhere.

Author’s Note

I’m Ryan, the founder of The Ashmore Cymbal Co — a small, independent cymbal brand built from late nights, stubbornness, way too much hammering and a genuine love for real, HUMAN-made music.

Every cymbal I produce is shaped by hand, tested by ear and created with the same intention that pushed me to start this journey in the first place: to make something honest (while searching for a better family life).

 

In a world where AI is getting louder, faster and harder to ignore, I think authenticity matters more than ever — the kind of sound you can only get from real craftsmanship and real musicians playing with real emotion.

What I find fascinating is that everything we do, whether it’s the image I have used in this post, any SEO to help drive visibility and sales and a simple ChatGPT which has easily replaced Google in my life - AI is everywhere and it’s only really been popular for around 6 months….. imagine where we will be tomorrow!

If you ever want to chat cymbals, hear what I’m working on, or just talk music, you can always reach me through Ashmore Cymbals Co. or any of my social channels.