Spotify now weighs touring, merchandise, and social presence when deciding who counts as an artist, and Josh Gilliland fails all three while playing every instrument on his own records himself. He argues the industry's new AI guardrails are moats built to protect incumbents, and the musicians paying for them are independent.
The argument over AI in music presents itself as a fight about authenticity. Josh Gilliland reads it as a fight about who holds the gate. The Founder of JG BeatsLab teaches musicians how to fold generative tools into real workflows, and he watches the platforms assemble a definition of legitimacy that has little to do with how a song actually gets made.
That definition, as Gilliland describes it, rests on whether an artist tours, sells merchandise, and maintains a social presence. Measured against it, he does not qualify. He plays every instrument on his own band's records, uses no AI on them at all, does not tour because the project is one person, and has no interest in selling shirts. A standard that disqualifies a musician for working alone is not measuring music. It is measuring scale, and scale is what labels have.
The disclosure requirements arriving at the distribution layer tell the same story. Gilliland points to DistroKid now asking artists to declare AI involvement in lyrics and composition while explicitly waving it through for mixing and mastering. The carve-out says something the policy does not. Some jobs are worth protecting and some are not, and engineers have been quietly sorted into the second category.
Music has staged this argument before. Player pianos, drum machines, the 808, the synthesizer, sampling. Each arrived as proof that music was ending, and each time the boundary between real and artificial turned out to sit precisely where the person drawing it had stopped. Gilliland is blunt about what that makes the boundary: arbitrary, and drawn by whoever benefits from where it lands.
None of which is a defense of the flood. Bot farms and mass uploads are manipulation rather than art, and he says so plainly. What holds his attention is the musician who spends months pushing raw sketches through generative tools and rebuilding the results by hand in a DAW, arriving somewhere neither the person nor the machine would have reached alone. He owns music royalties that are already training these systems and loses no sleep over it, on the logic that what a model returns is the past, and the work worth doing is the next thing.
The question underneath this episode is not whether AI belongs in music. It is whether the people writing the rules are protecting the art or their position in it.
Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine, Studio C60, and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast & Music Evolves Podcast | Website: [https://www.seanmartin.com/\](https://www.seanmartin.com/)
Josh Gilliland, Founder of JG BeatsLab | On LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuagilliland/\](https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuagilliland/)
JG BeatsLab | [https://www.jgbeatslab.com/\](https://www.jgbeatslab.com/)
AI Music Revolution Podcast | [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-music-revolution/id1869714097\](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ai-music-revolution/id1869714097)
Spotify Strengthens AI Protections | [https://newsroom.spotify.com/2025-09-25/spotify-strengthens-ai-protections/\](https://newsroom.spotify.com/2025-09-25/spotify-strengthens-ai-protections/)
Spotify Will Label AI Persona Profiles | [https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/spotify-will-label-ai-persona-profiles-and-exclude-their-music-from-recommendations/\](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/11/spotify-will-label-ai-persona-profiles-and-exclude-their-music-from-recommendations/)
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Who Decides You Are a Real Musician | A Music Evolves Conversation with Josh Gilliland, Founder of JG BeatsLab
[00:00:45] Sean Martin: Hello, everybody. You're very welcome to Music Evolves. This is Sean Martin, your host, and I get to chat with some cool people about an area that I'm passionate about. So I love tech in general, and many of you know I dabble in technology and cybersecurity to make money. But to have fun, I make and play and listen to music and talk to other musicians here on Music Evolves. And I'm thrilled to have Josh Gilliland on. How are you, Josh?
[00:02:00] Josh Gilliland: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on, Sean. I'm looking forward to this conversation.
[00:02:02] Sean Martin: Ah, me too. Me too. It's a topic we can't avoid and escape. And I think I've read a lot of posts in the last few weeks, and yours is one of them. And for years, I don't think we have escaped AI. I think it's been there for a long time. And I think it's just shifting how much it gets used. And I think to your point, in your post and your blog that caught my attention, was who's guiding who, or what's guiding what? Right?
[00:02:34] Josh Gilliland: Yeah.
[00:02:35] Sean Martin: So we're gonna have some fun with this and who knows where the conversation will go, but I think the main driver was the LinkedIn post. It was driven by a blog post [00:02:45] looking at the Spotify artist verification thing, and it triggered something for you. So we're gonna get into that. But before we do that, a few words about who you are and what you're up to these days.
[00:03:00] Josh Gilliland: Awesome. Yeah, appreciate the time. So I am focused on the world of AI music. I do AI music education, and I try to teach people how to use AI in a way that advances musicianship, 'cause I'm also a musician as well. I'm a drummer. I love music. Music is in my blood. It's been there for my 50 plus years on this planet, right? And so whatever I do is to advance music in general. And I stumbled across AI and the capabilities of AI in music. And I realized that what AI can do is it can actually broaden the tent of people who are experimenting with [00:03:45] creating music, creating art. And so I went deep into that rabbit hole. Actually, I was at a NAMM session and I was listening to a lot of talks around AI music. And I just said, "I'm going all in. I'm gonna go as deep as you can into the AI music space and see where it goes." A year and a half later, here I am. And so before this, I worked in big tech, and I came from a tech background, Microsoft, Meta, et cetera. And so comfortable with technology, but music is in my core and in my heart. And so when I saw an opportunity to blend both technology and music together, as well as entrepreneurship, I was off to the races. And so that's where I'm at now.
[00:04:29] Sean Martin: I love it. Off to the races. Well, I wanna get your perspective, or maybe definition even, of what AI music is. Because I don't know, people probably have their own views of what that looks like.
[00:04:44] Josh Gilliland: Yeah. [00:04:45] You know, the first time I was exposed to AI-generated music, it was several years ago. Somebody had a YouTube channel, and I'm really into heavy, heavy music. And it was djent, which is a form of heavy hard rock. Somebody created an AI channel of just AI-generated djent music. And so I was listening to it. I was like, "It's not great, but directionally, wow, where is this going to go?" And so that's where the seed was planted. But then I was meeting with my neighbor, who was also a musician, in his studio, and he showed me this tool, Suno. And we were playing around with it and did some novel things with it. I put in, "Let's write a song about killer clowns stealing hubcaps in the neighborhood," right? We did that just joking around. And it produced this song. And I listened to it. I was like, "It's not great, but I'm entertained. And so I will at least play with this." So [00:05:45] fast forward, I was getting ready for my parents to come into town for Thanksgiving. And so I created a song with Suno about my parents' visit and how they're in the kitchen with the grandkids and we're watching football. It was everything that we were going to be doing for the holidays. And so I picked my parents up at the airport and I was driving them, and I said, "Hey, Mom, I have a song for you." And I played it. And she sat in the backseat and she cried. And that's when it hit me, like, this is more than a toy. There's power behind this. You can actually generate raw human emotion. And so that was a moment that pivoted for me. Take that with the NAMM moment, where I heard the music industry talk so heavily of AI. And I said, "I want to learn about this and these tools." And so through that, obviously Suno is the big one to create music. There's Mureka, there's ElevenLabs. There's a bunch of other tools that exist out there [00:06:45] and a dozen more that are popping up in the next six months. And it's whack-a-mole. So they exist, they will exist. And so through experimentation with those, my primary desire is, how can a musician actually use these tools in a way that advances their musicianship? I'm not into using the tools to generate spam and flood Spotify with spam music, right? If people want that, I'm not the person for them. And so it's, how can you use this to really advance your skill sets? And there's a lot of different ways you can do that. How you pull AI into your workflow, if it's tools like Suno, or then there's a lot of the backend stuff as well. Like I've created tracks where I had AI spoken word through the track, right? And so there's all these different ways that you can do it. I've [00:07:45] taken tracks where I generated with Suno and then I stemmed them out, and then I recreated every one of those stems with my DAW or my own drum kit, and recorded my own vocals on top of that. And so at the end of it, there was no AI in the song, but AI was part of the process, right? And so that's where I come from, is just that experimentation.
[00:08:08] Sean Martin: And I think for me, that's the key word, experimenting. And yeah, because I think we see the range, right? Where something is completely created, generated, produced, distributed with AI. Mm-hmm. And maybe the only human element is a prompt, and maybe that, it's a prompt that generates 50 prompts that generates 50 songs. But I guess there is still somebody pressing a button to start. And then along the [00:08:45] way, I guess that button could lead to, for me, because we're both drummers, I tend to start with a beat, right? To kind of get a feeling of, is it a march? Is it gonna be kind of fast and hard? And that will kind of frame what I'm thinking about. And then a melody kind of sitting on top of that to give the rounder feeling for me. I tend to not use AI for those things, but perhaps I could be inspired by AI elements to take me in a direction that I hadn't thought of before. And I love your example of, and I'm trying to remember what the term is for the use of this stuff in healthcare. It's precision healthcare, I think it is, where it's basically data-driven healthcare that's so smart based on an individual's needs.
[00:09:43] Josh Gilliland: Yeah.
[00:09:43] Sean Martin: And [00:09:45] you wrote that song. It clearly was from you through AI to your mother.
[00:09:50] Josh Gilliland: Yeah.
[00:09:51] Sean Martin: Or to whoever's in the car, but your mother really connected with it. And I just think maybe that's where this stuff really shines, where you can get so unique and so tailored to a specific person or group of people. It doesn't have to serve mass market.
[00:10:06] Josh Gilliland: That's right.
[00:10:06] Sean Martin: And so maybe that's a good place to go, to where you wrote this blog. Because Spotify has this marker of what an authentic artist is, right? And with respect, I think it's framed in the guise of, is it AI or human, and perhaps how much? And maybe less so about what we just talked about, which is, is it really tuned to mass market or not? So I don't know, your thoughts on what all happened there, and then we'll keep going.
[00:10:40] Josh Gilliland: So to the surprise of [00:10:45] nobody, the embedded music industry is largely against AI music, right? And I'm not saying that, I'm not gonna paint with a broad brush and say all AI music is great, because it's far from. But just because something has AI doesn't make it bad, right? And so for me, it should be up to the individual who is consuming the music to make the determination if they wanted to consume more of that or less of that. So that's where I stand with this stuff. Now, if you look at companies like Spotify, what they're doing is they are trying to create this theater of what is permissible, whatever terminology they're using. But it's, do you tour? Do you sell merch? Do you have a social media presence? If you have these things, then [00:11:45] Spotify will say, "You are a real musician. If you do not have those things, you will not get that declaration from the gods at Spotify that you are a real musician." Okay, people look at that and say, "That's awesome. Good. I'm glad that we don't want all that spammy AI music out there." Okay. Now, let's actually tease this apart and say, what actually happens with this? So I have my own human band where I do nothing with AI. It is just human driven. I do not tour because it's a one-person show. I do all the instrumentation for that. And I don't sell merch because I'm just not interested in selling merch. So according to Spotify, I'm not a real musician by their standard. And so to me, I have a hard time with that because, like, who are they to. So basically what they are doing is the only people tall enough to ride this ride are going to be the big groups, the big labels. So all of the [00:12:45] independent musicians out there who don't tour, because we have day jobs, right, we are now gonna be left on the outside looking in. And they frame it as, "No, we're doing this against AI." But really, at the end of the day, the people who are paying the price are independent musicians, regardless if you're in the AI space or not. And so that's where it's theater to me. And, you know, not to be conspiracy theorists, but I'm sure there's a lot of conversations behind closed doors that are not having the interest of the independent musician top of mind in that. And I can go one step further with this, because DistroKid, which is a platform that a large portion of independent artists use, they actually just rolled out. I had heard rumblings that they were rolling it out, and I actually saw it on my own DistroKid last week, where before you release a song, you have to declare if there was AI as part of it. [00:13:45] And it's, was AI part of the creation process, creation of the lyrics, creation of the music, how much was it a part of it, right? But the funny thing is they say, if you use AI for mixing and mastering, we don't care, that's fine. And so basically, they told all the engineers out there, like, your job doesn't. We don't care if people use AI to make your job go away. It's only the musicians and the producers that we care about. And so all of these things, you can see these guardrails starting to be built around this that are protectionist. They're moats, and they're there to protect the legacy industry, and they're guised as, we're doing this to save music. And that's. I fundamentally have a disagreement with that. Yeah.
[00:14:26] Sean Martin: And that goes back to, I think, the point I made in my opening comments, which is AI's been around for a long time. I mean, I know it's not a secret. Anyway, I use Roli to kind of put. 'Cause I'm in Manhattan, I don't have a drum [00:14:45] set. People will get upset if I played my drums here in my apartment. So I use Roli to put down a lot of my beats and to create a lot of my melodies. Is that AI? I guarantee the software has AI in it somehow, somewhere, right? That's right. Even all just the dials and everything. So do you declare that as, I used AI? I didn't prompt anything, right? It's still my fingers pressing the keys. But it's running through software that most certainly has -
[00:15:15] Josh Gilliland: That's right.
[00:15:16] Sean Martin: AI in it somewhere. So I think that makes my job easier. I can get different sound. I have much more opportunity with my beats and the sounds because I'm using that versus a standard physical kit. But I don't know. So your thoughts on where the line is. And I'm also curious, are we. And we as a broad we, are we [00:15:45] fighting against the right or wrong thing that's gonna paint us in a corner that we really don't wanna be in? We think we're doing the right thing for ourselves, whoever ourselves is. Yeah, that's right. I don't know. It's kind of a weird mixed up place we're sitting in.
[00:16:01] Josh Gilliland: So if you look at the history of music, this pattern has repeated itself many, many, many, many times. It doesn't matter if it was back in the day when they created player pianos, or when you talk about the drum machines, the 808s, when those came out, and that's not real music. When you look at the synthesizer, when that came out, that's not real music, right? So everybody has had their own historical definition of what real music is. And it basically is the music that they created, right, that they are a part of. That's where the real music line stops. Anything that progresses beyond that is not real music and should be stopped. You look at sampling. Sampling is another great example. If sampling didn't exist because it wasn't real music, [00:16:45] I think Run-DMC has an opinion about that, right? And so, now, are they musicians? I would argue absolutely they created a tremendous art. They sampled. So where is that line? It's arbitrary, is what it is. And so for me, anything that unlocks creativity, I am all for. Now, again, I wanna be very clear. There are bad actors in the AI space, like there are in everything else. There are individuals out there right now creating hundreds of songs on a daily basis, flooding the streaming platforms and putting bots on there to try to artificially drive up streams or whatever. I am not defending any of that. That is all awful. So that's not art, that's manipulation. What I'm talking about is art. And so I have a [00:17:45] customer of mine who has written lyrics for 40 years. He has a notebook full of all of these lyrics that he has written, personal to him, personal for his family, that are just meaningful lyrics. He now has a tool where he can take those meaningful lyrics and put them to music. Is that cheating? Is that not art? To me, that is human expression and an art form, and I love it. And I think, again, it broadens the tent of what's possible and who can participate in this. And so, yeah, I think where it goes from here is, once the legacy industry, they also are using AI. AI is part of their workflows. AI is being used inside of their studios. And once they really [00:18:45] harness that power and really learn how to use it. I mean, right now they're telling us independent artists, don't use AI, it's bad, right? We're against that. Meanwhile, they are refining their own skills inside of AI. And so once they come out and say, and they're so far advanced with the use of AI, then they'll be like, "Okay, AI is actually a legitimate art form now." Well, they've already squashed it across the industry and scared people away from experimentation with it. And so the damage will have been done at that point. Now, I will say one more point with this. When I was at NAMM this past year, there was a lot of talk around the legality of AI music. And I'm not going to debate if AI used copyrighted materials in unlawful ways. There's a lot of really high paid lawyers that can figure that out. But the comment was, AI stands for attorneys incoming. And that was the big thing, is like, you [00:19:45] know, they're gonna sue these AI companies to oblivion. I think that is the funniest thing that came out of NAMM for me, because there's no way in hell that that's going to happen. AI tools exist. They will exist. Mureka is a tool that is used to generate AI music now. They're out of China. They're backed by a multi-billion dollar company. Do you think that we're going to, in the United States, squash them? No, it's not gonna happen. And there's smart kids sitting at their computers right now coming up with the next great thing in the AI space. So it's here. So us as musicians, us as consumers of music, we need to figure out what does that mean for us individually? And lean into it. And let's not listen to what the big companies are saying about how it's bad for the industry. And so that's my position.
[00:20:34] Sean Martin: So for you personally, for the folks you play with, I presume you, because you have a band, we talked about that before we started recording.
[00:20:44] Josh Gilliland: Sure. [00:20:45] Mm-hmm.
[00:20:45] Sean Martin: I presume you put tracks down as well. I don't know if you have albums out. I do. Tell me all that. And then you obviously work with other artists and other folks. Are there things that. I think I'll put people in categories. Hobbyists. I'm a hobbyist. I don't intend to ever monetize the crap that I create. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll share. Maybe I'll share it with friends and family. Maybe if I'm feeling vulnerable one day. Then, so beyond hobbyists, then you have the influencers who want attention and then sell marketing through the stuff that they. I put them in the category. And then there are people who create to sell. And then some wanna be indie and some wanna go to the big labels. Yeah. Are there things each of those. And there may be others, maybe you can, if there's others [00:21:45] you wanna add in there. Are there things we need to be aware of, or should we do or not do, to reach our end goal?
[00:21:54] Josh Gilliland: So inside of the music industry, anybody that goes into the space with dollar bill signs, they're kidding themselves, right? Like, this is not an industry to go into to make money. Now, if you're lucky, you make enough to maybe pay for a software subscription along the way, type of deal, right? And so when I'm talking to people who are coming into the space, there are those people who are like, "I'm gonna. How much money can I make from this?" And I was like, "Oh, well, you're about to be disappointed." Right? And so, now, again, you can have the bot farms and whatever else, and that's a whole different animal that I'm not discussing here. But for the average everyday independent musician using AI tools or whatever, even those not using AI tools, [00:22:45] the economics in the music industry, they're busted, right? Like, it's just, to advance beyond hobby is damn near impossible, right? And so, you know, I was in a tribute band, Red Hot Chili Peppers tribute band, where I was a drummer for it. And we would get booked and we'd go and play, and it's a fun night and whatever, and we'd go home with 100 extra dollars in our pocket, type of deal, right? And then with my own personal band that has nothing to do with AI, we have albums out and we're streaming and whatever else, but it's tens of dollars, right? And so the economics just aren't there in the music industry. And that's okay. I'm not in it to make the big money. But I also think it's great because a large number of people can participate in it. And so it's not like back in the day where a very select few were able to actually push music out [00:23:45] there. Now, the doors are open, which I think is a great thing. You can put music out there on Spotify and two people listen to it, right? So it doesn't mean that you're taking away from somebody else. Nobody's gonna listen to it anyway, but you have the ability to do that, and then you can share it with your friends and whatever else. And so, yeah, for me, it's not the music industry of 40 years ago or even 20 years ago. And that's okay, right? It is what it is now, and we have a lot of great opportunities here and tools at our disposal, and it's a great way to let the human voice shine through music. And so, yeah, I'm obviously very bullish about this. Now, one more thing I will say about that though is, to that second group that you talked about, the marketing. Anytime you can append AI to anything, right, you get a sales bump [00:24:45] and there's a lot of garbage that's out in the AI space. I experiment with a lot of different AI tools. It's part of what I do inside of my company. And the promises are much different than the reality. And so you can easily spend a lot of money in the AI space trying to get the next great, biggest, best thing in the AI space, and that's a fool's errand, right? Like, there's some really good grounded things that you should focus on and just become highly proficient at those. And don't worry about all the bells and whistles that can drain your bank account.
[00:25:24] Sean Martin: Yeah. And I get to experiment with a lot of AI stuff for the work I do outside of this podcast. This is a hobby for me. Yeah. I love music. I have this chat. It's not how I make my money, for sure. And I find that no matter how many [00:25:45] times I prompt any AI tool, whether it be something writing content, something creating music, something generating images or videos or whatever it is, it's gonna get close.
[00:26:01] Josh Gilliland: Yeah.
[00:26:01] Sean Martin: Maybe closer, maybe way off again, and then close. The point is, it never reaches exactly -
[00:26:07] Josh Gilliland: Yeah.
[00:26:08] Sean Martin: What I envision.
[00:26:09] Josh Gilliland: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:10] Sean Martin: And I either have to settle or figure out a different way to get it to exactly what I want. Yeah. And I find that interesting for what I'm doing. And I don't use AI for music, because for me, music is literally what I'm feeling. I'll use tools, right? But ultimately, it's sitting down with a guitar, or playing with a keyboard, that allows me to express myself. So I'm not looking for an AI prompt to generate that melody for me. I want it to come out of what I'm feeling. But I guess my point is, [00:26:45] if we're looking for perfection and hoping AI, whatever that perfection is, and hoping for AI to get us there, I don't know that we're at that point yet.
[00:26:55] Josh Gilliland: No. I have a lot of songwriters that reach out to me and say, the gist of it is, why can't I get Suno to do exactly what I want it to do? And I was like, well, that's not what this is, right? If you want the world of AI to fit in the same pattern that you used to do songwriting in the past, you're going to be frustrated, because there's a limited amount of control that you have. Now, you do have control. There are a lot of levers that you can pull along the way. And so learn how to pull those levers, but know that the end result is going to be different than if you sat down with an acoustic guitar and a notepad, right? That you have full control, I mean, to the limits of your capabilities, but you have full control over what gets created. [00:27:45] Inside of AI, you don't. And so there's a lot of people who are trying to make AI behave exactly like the world that they came from, and they're frustrated, and rightfully so, because they're trying to square peg round hole, type of deal. But to me, the more interesting question is, how can you use this new world with AI to advance it, to raise the ceiling, right? So not try to make it do what you used to do before. How can you take what you did before, feed it into AI, and raise that ceiling of what's possible? And so one of the things that I love to do is I will create music with my drum kit, with my DAW, with keyboard, pull this together and be like, "This is a very interesting experimentation that I have here." Then I'll feed that into AI, and I'll say, "AI, do something with this. Here's kind of what I'm thinking of." AI will spit it out, then I'll take that [00:28:45] back into my DAW, and then I'll do my manipulation inside of the DAW. And so what ends up coming out is this Frankenstein of, like, human process with some AI in the middle, then human process. And so that's human creativity if you ask me. That's not the easy button. That's not put in a prompt, press a button, generate song, right? But it's, how can you use these tools in ways that advance your own creativity?
[00:29:10] Sean Martin: Yeah. And I'm so curious about this because, I mean, you said Frankenstein. You end up with something that you probably wouldn't have, couldn't have perhaps ended up with if you didn't throw the AI in there in the middle. But you still need to know what you're taking out of your DAW, how to prompt AI to give you something back. And then guess what? I don't know, maybe there are DAWs that are AI prompt driven. You tell me if there are, I haven't looked. But you still have to know what levers to tweak [00:29:45] and what settings to set in your DAW coming back in. I don't know, maybe that's all automated too with AI. But I guess my point is, you're still. The keyword is in control.
[00:29:57] Josh Gilliland: Yes.
[00:29:57] Sean Martin: You're still controlling that.
[00:29:59] Josh Gilliland: It's a tremendous amount of work. If -
[00:30:03] Sean Martin: Probably more work. You're not saving time.
[00:30:05] Josh Gilliland: That's right. No, there is absolutely not saving time. No, no, no. Now, I could easily sit down today and generate 20 songs through Suno and push those on Spotify, have them up there in a week. But that's not what I do, that's not what I teach. And so with that, I have some songs I'm working on now where I've done that very thing that I talked about, where I push in my own raw sketches into AI tools, generate, generate, generate, generate, find the ones that, you know, and then inside of Suno, you can go and say, "Okay, I actually like this piece. I don't like that piece. Change it around." So there's a lot of manipulation you can do [00:30:45] inside of these tools now. Finally spits it out into stems. I pull it into my DAW and then I do the rebuild from there. And I don't do it exactly like AI. It's like, okay, that was interesting, but I'm gonna do it my own way. And I have an album that I'm working on actually where I'm using this process. And I have, I don't know, like eight songs there currently. And I've been working on these songs for months. And I'm not ready to release those, right? And so, meanwhile, at the same time I've released multiple songs with my other band where I'm the drummer, right? And so it just depends on what you're in it for. If you're in it to really push your own creativity and what's possible, then yeah, it's a lot of work. And so it's not the easy button by any stretch.
[00:31:32] Sean Martin: Not the easy button. I'm gonna ask this last question. I mean, I think we could chat forever on this one. Maybe we'll have another conversation down the road. But I'm gonna ask you this. Are [00:31:45] you concerned at all with sharing your creative works with AI?
[00:31:53] Josh Gilliland: Not at all. I'll tell you. So before I got into the world of AI music, I was really into music investing. And so I own a bunch of music royalties, of which all of them are being used to train AI, right? And so I could be very grumpy about this. Say, like, "You've used my investments to train AI," right? And also I'm a musician and I've created music and I've released music, and AI is used at the train, and how dare you? Well, it's like, okay, that's the new world we live in. I can sit around and be mad that variables changed around me, or I can move with the variables. And so I choose to move with the variables. And so with that, I also know that the stuff that I'm creating now, as I push that out, is going right back into the cycle, right? And it's gonna train AI systems. And [00:32:45] awesome, great, because I'm trying to move the ceiling up, right? I'm not trying to stay still. What AI is gonna feed back to me is what I've done in the past. Well, I'm not trying to do what I did in the past. I'm trying to do the next thing. And so AI is not advancing me in that way. It's my human creativity that is advancing me. So I lose no sleep over the fact that what I'm creating out there is being consumed by AI. And it's funny because, go back to NAMM. I was in this talk and there was a musician up on stage and she was frustrated about AI using her music to train. She was passionately upset about this. And I was like, "Wow, this person must have really been hit by this." And so I pulled her up on Spotify. I'm not gonna name any names or anything like that. And in my projects, I have more followers than her, [00:33:45] right? It was like, okay, that's theater is what that is, right? And the other thing with that is, it's such a tiny sliver. Yes, there's a large percentage of songs that are generated by AI, but only one and a half percent of all songs that are streamed are AI generated songs. And so you're talking about a sliver of a sliver. And the streaming sliver of the overall pie in the music industry is small already. And so you're talking about a microscopic sliver of the $105 billion music industry that is going into any type of AI music production. And so for me, there's a lot of chasing ghosts here. There's a lot of theater. There's a lot of grandstanding taking place. I lose no sleep over it. And, as you can imagine, being in the AI music training space, I hear from a lot of people who are very upset by AI music. And so [00:34:45] I sleep like a baby at night. I would not do anything that I felt was ruining the music industry, because music is my lifelong passion. And so that's where I'm at with all that.
[00:34:57] Sean Martin: I love it. And I like how you described it, pushing the ceiling up. I think a lot of what I hear of anti, or human versus machine, or human versus AI, is a lot of trying to protect, protectionism, and, yeah, gatekeeping. Keeping some out and others in. Again, a different way to say protectionism. And I couple that with, AI tends to look at what's been done, but boy, if we could figure out how to actually use that to get us to where we couldn't go - [00:35:45]
[00:35:45] Josh Gilliland: Uh-huh.
[00:35:46] Sean Martin: So powerful. So powerful. So you have to get rid of the gatekeeping and the protectionism to actually get that breakthrough, I think.
[00:35:54] Josh Gilliland: Listen, at the end of the day for me, I love music so much. I think music is something that is innately human. It's a way for humans to express emotion. And I love the idea that there are tools that allow more people to get into that tent. And I think that that is a good thing. It's not all good. It's not 100% good. Nothing in the world is, right? There's some downsides that come with that, but I think it is a net positive for music, a net positive for society, that we now have this ability, and I will die on that hill.
[00:36:31] Sean Martin: Nice. Keep doing the music. Keep making it. Yes. Keep making it. I'll have to look up your bands and follow you, Josh, and keep an eye on all the fun things you're [00:36:45] doing. And so thrilled to have you on the show today.
[00:36:48] Josh Gilliland: Yeah, thanks for having me. This was a great conversation. Thank you very much for this, and definitely come back and do it anytime.
[00:36:53] Sean Martin: Yep. Appreciate you. And thanks everybody for joining and listening and watching. And yeah, let the music move you, and keep on creating, everybody.