AI in Music Production: Corporate Capture of Creative Tools Exacerbates Inequality in Cultural Labor
Original framing: “Music Producer Hit-Boy on AI Democratizing Creativity” — Bloomberg
Underground producers, traditional musicians, and artists from the Global South are systematically excluded from AI policy discussions, despite bearing the brunt of its harms. The *UNESCO Global Report on AI in Culture* (2025) highlights how Indigenous and Black artists are underrepresented in AI training datasets, leading to biased outputs that misrepresent their cultures. Meanwhile, gig economy platforms like Fiverr and SoundBetter have turned creative labor into piecework, with AI tools further depressing wages for marginalised creators.
The discourse around AI in music production reveals a fundamental tension between technological possibility and structural injustice, where the language of 'democratization' obscures the enclosure of cultural labor under platform capitalism.
Historical patterns of exploitation—from the sheet music industry to the gig economy—are being replicated in digital form, with AI acting as both a tool and a Trojan horse for corporate consolidation. Indigenous and marginalised voices, whose knowledge systems are systematically extracted without consent, offer the most urgent correctives, demanding frameworks of reciprocity and sovereignty. Meanwhile, the trickster’s laughter exposes the absurdity of claiming AI 'liberates' creativity while corporations sue fans for sharing culture. The path forward requires not just technical solutions but a reimagining of ownership, where artists and communities—not algorithms—control the means of cultural production. This demands policy interventions like cultural sovereignty frameworks, cooperative AI training pools, and revenue models that prioritize human creativity over algorithmic efficiency.