MUSICIANS: PLAYING LIVE IS THE REAL DEAL IN THE AGE OF AI

Artificial intelligence is already as commonplace as a tap, is already changing music, and there’s no way to pretend that this isn’t happening. It can generate songs, arrangements, vocals, instruments, and entire productions in just a few seconds. And, in a way, this represents a problem for songwriters, producers, and artists who dedicate time, study, and years of experience to creating their work.

But there is another side to this story: no matter how impressive AI may be, it does not replace the experience of an artist performing live. There is no algorithm capable of completely reproducing the presence of a person on stage, the unexpected mistake, the energy of the audience, the interaction between musicians, the tension of a performance, or that feeling of being there, in that moment, hearing something happen for real.

Perhaps, precisely because of this, this is the moment when playing live becomes more important than ever. If producing music artificially is becoming increasingly easy, then the ability to create a human, real, and unrepeatable experience may become even more valuable.

I myself do some private experiments with AI on Suno. I find it interesting to see how far these tools can go and to experiment with their possibilities. But in my own musical work, I do not use AI at all. What you hear in my music is the result of instruments, hands, choices, mistakes, attempts, time, and, above all, the desire to play.

Perhaps the future of music is not a battle between humans and machines. Perhaps it is precisely an era in which what only a human being can do, which is to be present, play, improvise, feel, and share a real experience with other people, will once again have even greater value.

☛ That is why, if you are a musician: play. Play live. Play for a few people or for a crowd. Because, in a world where anyone can generate a song in seconds, being in front of someone who is actually playing may become one of the rarest and most important experiences in music.

(Content generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by the author.)

BOB LEFSETZ ON MUSIC: ART, IDENTITY, AND THE BUSINESS OF MUSIC

Bob Lefsetz has spent decades writing about music, artists, the record business, and the constantly changing relationship between musicians and their audiences. His perspective is often blunt, skeptical, and unapologetic. For Lefsetz, music is not simply a product to be marketed. At its core, it is about identity, inspiration, connection, and the ability to make people feel something.

In an industry increasingly focused on numbers, social media, streaming, branding, and algorithms, Lefsetz repeatedly brings the conversation back to the music itself. The following thoughts capture some of his strongest ideas about what it means to be an artist and why great music still matters.

“Skill helps, but is not necessary. Art is all about inspiration, which usually arrives like a lightning bolt.”

“Shortcuts shorten careers.”

“Identity is everything.”

“People connect with artists, not executives.”

“We’re drawn to those who speak their truth, from deep down inside.”

“There is nothing more powerful than listening to a song and feeling that the artist is expressing your inner emotion.”

“A real artist is on his own exploratory adventure.”

“Artists come first.”

“To qualify as an artist, you need to create something that changes the way people feel, hear and think.”

“Music is a game of creativity. If you’re imitating others, you’ve already sacrificed.”

“If you follow your own muse and gain an audience, you can be successful, just don’t expect anybody but your fans to acknowledge this.”

“Forget about the music, focus on the AUDIENCE!”

“Of course the music is important.”

“It’s about the music.”

“The road less taken always is. But that’s where the rewards are. For both the act and the audience.”

Lefsetz's message is ultimately about the tension between art and commerce. An artist can build a career around numbers, trends, and formulas but lasting connection comes from something harder to manufacture: a distinct voice, a strong identity, and music that gives people a reason to care. In a business constantly searching for the next hit, Lefsetz keeps returning to a deceptively simple idea: the music still matters.


(Content generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by the author.)

SETH GODIN ON MUSIC: CREATIVITY, COURAGE, AND THE POWER TO TOUCH PEOPLE

What makes a song truly great? Is it technical perfection, commercial success, or the number of people who hear it? For Seth Godin, the answer lies somewhere deeper. His ideas about art, creativity, marketing, and the music industry challenge artists to think beyond simply making something “good.” The goal is to create something that moves people, sparks a reaction, builds a connection, and perhaps even changes someone’s life.

For musicians, that also means accepting uncertainty. Great work can be criticized, misunderstood, or even rejected. But playing it safe rarely leads to something remarkable. In a world filled with more music than ever, being heard is not simply about making more noise. It is about creating something worth hearing and giving people a reason to share it.

Here are some of Seth Godin’s thoughts on music, creativity, and the courage to create:

“Great music, like a great idea, spreads.”

“Great means unsettling. Great means open to criticism. Great means booed off stage.”

“If it’s great, let it go.”

“If you want to be great you have to be prepared to fail.”

“If you want to be mediocre you can be consistently mediocre and never fail.”

“The price of being great is you have to be prepared to fail.”

“You cannot be a musician and you cannot be an artist until you acknowledge that one of the things you’re trying to do is make a dent in the universe, that you’re trying to touch people.”

“Marketing is finding out the best way to touch people, and to touch them in a way that resonates enough that they tell their friends.”

“What you do for a living is: You lead a group of fans who want you to take them somewhere and hang out with other fans.”

“Very good music is unheard every day, because very good music is not in short supply. There’s a huge surplus of it.”

“Almost none of it changed my life, and that’s what great music does.”

“By definition, great cannot create widespread apathy.”

For artists, perhaps the biggest takeaway is simple: don’t create merely to be heard. Create something worth hearing.


(Content generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by the author.)

WHEN MUSIC BECOMES TOO CHEAP

We have never had more access to music than we do today. With a streaming subscription - or even for free - we can listen to millions of artists and virtually any album released over the past several decades. But this convenience hides a contradiction: while listeners have gained almost unlimited access, many musicians have lost an important source of income.

That is precisely the issue discussed in the Folha de S.Paulo article (Brazilian newspaper), which examines how streaming may be "squeezing" the middle class of the music industry. The problem is not necessarily with artists who have very few listeners, nor with major stars who accumulate millions or even billions of streams, but primarily with musicians who have an established career and a loyal audience yet cannot turn that audience into enough income to make a living from recorded music.

In the past, album sales played a much larger role in a band's finances. A group could spend months working on a new album and rely on the revenue from record sales to support itself during that period. With streaming, that model has largely disappeared for many artists. Even a song with millions of streams can generate relatively little income compared with the costs of maintaining a professional music career.

As a result, musicians increasingly depend on live shows, merchandise, and other sources of income. A career can become a kind of "permanent tour": artists have to keep performing in order to pay the bills. The article uses the Brazilian band Dead Fish as an example of this shift, showing how even a group with decades of history and a loyal audience still has to deal with this new reality.

There is another issue as well: streaming has democratized distribution, but it has not necessarily democratized discovery. Any artist can upload a song to streaming platforms, but that also means competing for attention with millions of other songs. Algorithms, playlists, social media, short-form videos, and the constant need to produce content all become part of the equation. Simply having your music available is no longer the main challenge; the challenge is getting someone to find it and choose to listen.

And the change is not only financial. The way we consume music is changing as well. The album, which for decades was conceived as a complete work with its own sequence, concept, and identity, is losing ground to playlists, singles, and individual snippets of songs. Sometimes a track becomes known because of a few seconds used in a TikTok or another social media video, without the listener ever getting to know the artist's work as a whole.

This also changes our relationship with albums. An album that once required time, attention, and even a ritual - putting on a vinyl record or CD and listening from beginning to end - can now become just another item in an almost endless library. Music is always available, but precisely because of that, it can increasingly be perceived as disposable.

The central contradiction raised by the article is this: technology has made music more accessible than ever, but it may also be making it harder to assign economic and cultural value to it. Streaming has solved many of the old problems of distribution and access, but it has created new challenges for the people who make music, especially artists somewhere between complete obscurity and global stardom.

In the end, the discussion is not simply about being for or against streaming. It is about understanding the price of that convenience. Music has never been easier to access. Perhaps the challenge now is making sure that, because it is available all the time, it does not end up being worth less and less to the people who create it - and to the people who listen to it.


(Content generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by the author.)

CHA-CHING

 At a time when most people prioritize access to music via streaming platforms over owning music files, I am truly impressed by the milestone Bandcamp claims to have reached. These are very significant figures.

You can follow the sales pace under the "Selling right now" tab (I really enjoy looking at the covers art). Congratulations to everyone involved.

THE INTERNET DISCOVERED COLLABORATORS I NEVER KNEW I HAD

I decided to Google “Alex Cebe.” An apparently innocent activity that ended up providing me with some unexpected entertainment for the search performed on September 10, 2026 - this may change over time.

On the first page (go figure) of the search results, I found my own material available for free download on a site called MP3.PM. Free, obviously, because I never authorized its distribution.

I was particularly impressed by the downloading experience. Some of the links lead to pages that simply don’t load. Others take you to pages filled with betting ads. A complete cultural experience, really: you go looking for music and are unable to download the file, they send you to a blank page that appears to be installing malware on your device and, as a bonus, get an opportunity to lose money.

I’m not going to waste my time contacting whoever runs the site to ask them to remove my material. Some battles simply aren’t worth fighting. And honestly, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone waste their time there either.

But the entertainment continued. On the second page of Google results, I found another site hosting my material: MUSO.AI. According to the platform itself, its purpose is to “Solve Music Credits.” And apparently, they take that mission very seriously. My “artist page” contains some of my work distributed through ONErpm, including older artwork. Fine. The interesting part comes in the credits section. According to the platform, there are four collaborators on my work. Four!

I found that rather curious, because as far as I knew, I work alone. That’s when I discovered that I apparently have two collaborators I have never met: Alex James Lodder and Alex Rose. I have no idea who these guys are, I’ve never heard of them, and, needless to say, they have never worked with me. But there they are, "officially" listed as collaborators. I have to admit, I like the concept. Working with people without ever having to meet them, talk to them, or even know they exist seems to be a rather interesting evolution of the remote-work concept.

The other two names, Alexandre Calori and Silvio Pierotti, really are part of my musical journey. They are musicians I worked with on a specific project in which I participated as a guest. They don't contribute to my work in any way. So at least half of the "team" actually almost exists. That’s a reasonably good result.

So, just to make things clear: I have no connection whatsoever with the two platforms mentioned above, I never authorized my material to be made available in this way, and I do not recognize the incorrect information presented about my credits as legitimate. As for my two new collaborators, if either of you happens to be reading this, it would be a pleasure to finally meet you. Apparently, we’ve already worked together.

WHY DO OLD RECORDINGS SOUND SO ALIVE?

There is something fascinating about acustic music old recordings. Many of them have background noise, technical limitations, instruments that are not perfectly in tune, slight variations in tempo, and mistakes that could be corrected in a matter of minutes today. Sometimes you can hear the room, the musician breathing, fingers sliding across the strings, the sound of wood, the space in which the music was recorded. And yet, or perhaps precisely because of that, there is a sense of life in them that we do not always find in modern productions.

Today, we can correct almost everything. We can tune every note, align every beat, remove unwanted noise, fix imperfections, replace sections, separate instruments, and create a recording that is technically flawless. Technology has given us extraordinary control over sound. We can make a performance sound exactly the way we imagine it should sound.

But perhaps there is a question hidden behind all this possibility: is perfection really the purpose of music?

Maybe it isn't.

Perhaps part of the beauty lies precisely in what cannot be completely controlled. A slight variation in tempo can be a way of breathing. A note that is slightly imperfect can carry more emotion than a perfectly tuned note. A little noise can remind us that the music happened somewhere, in front of someone, at a particular moment.

There is a profound difference between hearing music and feeling that someone was there.

That is what many old recordings make me feel. I am not simply listening to sounds produced decades ago. I am listening to people. People who sat in front of a microphone, picked up their instruments, took a breath, and played. Perhaps they did not play perfectly. Perhaps they never imagined that someone would be listening to that moment many years later. But that moment happened. And it was preserved.

Today, we can record the same passage dozens of times, and choose the best performance. We can travel backward and forward through a recording session and reconstruct almost anything. It is an extraordinary achievement, but there is something deeply human about the impossibility of doing that with those old recordings.

That performance happened only once.

Those hands played those strings in that particular way at that particular moment. That musician breathed in that particular way. That little mistake happened. That note slipped slightly out of place. And there was no way to go back.

Perhaps that irreversibility is precisely what gives certain recordings so much life.

Life itself cannot be edited. We cannot go back to a conversation and choose a different word. We cannot repeat a particular afternoon, bring back someone who is gone, or play a piece exactly as we played it many years ago. Time leaves its marks and keeps moving.

Maybe old recordings move us because they carry those marks too. They do not completely hide time. They allow it to be heard.

And perhaps a great recording is not the one that manages to eliminate every imperfection, but the one that preserves something no technology can completely manufacture: the feeling that someone was alive in that moment.

Maybe that is why some old songs still breathe.


(Content generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by the author.)