can ai plan your music career?

By Jess Santacroce
Music Writer, Phoenix Radio

Musicians and music fans are increasingly moving away from generative AI. Rumors went around that AI could replace musicians by writing songs and singing.  It can’t, at least not at any level of quality that can be done by a real human being. AI was said to be able to teach, but it often “hallucinates” or generates false information, and cannot be relied upon to teach us accurate information about music or give music or music appreciation lessons. It isn’t even that great of a prompt generator, unable to do much that could help a musician overcome a creative block. Still, many people insist AI is the best at basic tasks. It excels at lists and planning. Can AI help you plan out your music career’s next steps?

We prompted AI with four different situations to find out.

Prompt #1: I have been singing as a hobby/volunteer for most of my life. What can I do to launch a professional career?

Chat gpt’s free version told me to record some demos, decide what type of professional singing work I want to do, promote myself as a singer online, reach out to local businesses that might hire singers, and plan my career in six to twelve steps. It also suggested I think beyond gigs and look into teaching singing and recording sung messages. Throughout all of the answers, it suggested types of business I might reach out to, including wedding planners and bars.

While none of this was wrong, it was also nothing common sense wouldn’t tell most people to do. Recording demos, looking for gigs to book, and looking for other work in your art form is the most basic way to build any career in the arts. There isn’t much else you could do.

Prompt #2: I'm a local professional musician, but I want to start teaching music classes for local colleges. What should I do?

The same bot, chat gpt’s free version, advised me to approach people at local colleges and universities directly, present what I can teach like a course, and put together a professional portfolio of work to show to the person I approach. No, AI. That is not how you find work teaching classes for local colleges in any subject. It might work for a short non-credit course at a community college, but if a musician who has been performing professional gigs around town wants to add teaching college classes to their career, they would first need to learn which colleges and universities are even hiring adjuncts in the music department at all. Next you would need to read the posting and find out if you met the minimum qualifications. At that point, you want to look at which classes are available to teach, and apply to join the school’s adjunct pool.  The bot seemed to conclude that you can just put together some materials, run up to someone in a college music department, and get steady work.

Prompt #3: My band is doing great. We get regular paid gigs. We're all working on new material. We have two albums out. The albums just never sell. How do we promote them?

“Release singles” was the first piece of advice here. The bot went on to suggest the band create different versions of the songs, such as acoustic and live versions, tell stories about the songs while performing live, promote their music online, collaborate with other musicians, bundle the album with merchandise, make videos, and buy advertising.

All of the ideas on how to do these things were pretty basic. Under one of the lists of ways to tell stories about the songs, titled, “Give them a reason to care,” chatgpt suggested a band member say “This is the song people cry to at our shows” or “Our most chaotic track-don’t play it while driving.”

Like the response to the first prompt, none of these were bad or wrong. I just cannot imagine there’s a musician in town who is not aware that they could make a video or a single, or who does not already talk about their songs during their live gigs. At best, this list could serve as a set of handy reminders of things you can do to promote your music career.

Prompt #4: I need to move my music career forward. To do this, I need to put together a band to back up my singing. How do I go about finding people to form a band?

The response to this prompt was to remind me to be specific in what I’m looking for and what type of band I want to form, talk to others in the local music scene, start with just the most essential musicians, and post an ad online. It would have been another instance of chatgpt suggesting what anyone who would ask this question would likely already know….until we get to the suggestion to look for people on craigslist, calling it “suprisingly effective if you filter hard.”

Details like this really show what chatgpt cannot do, namely reflect on things and bring in knowledge from areas outside of the topics you’re prompting it to discuss. In this case, that would be all of the horror stories people have told about relying on craigslist for meeting strangers for any purpose.

Next time you’re not sure what the next step in your music career might be, use the time you would have spent prompting AI to instead text a human musician, career coach, or someone else who might know a lot about music, career planning, or both. Maybe even invite them out for coffee or dinner and have a face to face conversation with a real person.


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