AI is about to shake up music forever – but not in the way you think

Artificial intelligence is here and it's coming for your jobs. That's, at least, what you might think after considering the ever-growing sophistication of AI-generated music. While the concept of machine-composed music has been around since the 1800s (computing pioneer Ada Lovelace was one of the first to write about the topic), the fantasy has become reality in the past decade, with musicians such as Francois Pachet creating entire albums co-written by AI. Some have even used AI to create'new' music from the likes of Amy Winehouse, Mozart and Nirvana, feeding their back catalogue into a neural network. Even stranger, this July, countries across the world will even compete in the second annual'AI Song Contest', a Eurovision-style competition in which all songs must be created with the help of artificial intelligence. But will this technology ever truly become mainstream?