Will computers replace EDM and elevator music? I don't know, maybe, who cares?
It seems like the formula for an acceptable song is well understood. With the necessary push provided by Spotify these songs get streams in the millions easily. Perhaps it's cheap enough to have this music produced that they don't even have to move on to machine generation.
You can't generalise to pop in general, because being a pop headliner is as much about glamour, lifestyle, fashion, and branding as it is about music.
No one wants an imaginary Bowie album, because it's a glamour-free proposition - a curiosity at best, most likely irrelevant.
People have been trying to make an Idoru for decades for now, and they always fail. You can only sell fantasy and identification when they're implicit. When you try to attach them to an artificial marketing concept it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief and make the fantasy stick.
They're all going mad for an imaginary Abba concert
edit: I'm imagining what they would say. I'm not here to offend Bowie fans.
until it's new again, because young people of today are going to become old too and their kids are going to think tik tok hits are old, but will remember when their grandparents took them for a walk in the park listening to David Bowie.
I'd like to think the future is the opposite -- artists/bands managing themselves as disparate entities, forming around small labels or even their own labels, and having someone in charge to bring the resources they need to bear for touring or performance related stuff so that they can focus on their music.
On the flip side, Eve Selis is an example of an artist who broke on the scene during that time and maintained control over her art https://www.eveselis.com/ I agree that it would be great if more artists followed that path.
The Internet leveled the playing field for many years.
The industry has found that social media's dominance allows them the opportunity to distract independent artists from releasing their own quality music and also distract the public from hearing indie music through the illusion that social media helps them to be seen more.
The real question that anyone who works on these platforms needs to ask themself is "Is the platform really helping me?"
The only way they help people now is if you choose promoted ads, and it takes a ton of money for an unaffiliated indie label to break into their main feed on each single post, and that's true for any of the platforms that facilitate sponsored ads.
As long as it's generating everything on past data it won't. New stuff is interesting because it doesn't sound like old stuff, and usually that takes over and further mutates. I'm not a fan of trap, but it wouldn't have existed if everything was generated by the current gen of software. It moves fast towards an optimum of the current generation, but we're not at actual AI, so I don't think what you describe will happen (at least yet).
Bands have been creating music like that since forever. Most of small bands are like this.
I'd imagine trying to ever-broaden the concept of "derivative works", so your "completely new that sounds like Bowie" falls within their catchment.
Or aggressive license mandates on the data set used to train your ML model, so you aren't legally allowed to use it to produce competitive products in the first place. (In that scenario, I can imagine a run on used-CD stores as people rush to get unencumbered source material for that purpose).
On the other hand, it definitely feels like chasing local maxima. Yeah, they can try to fence in "the best song David Bowie never wrote", but that will just drive experimentation to unowned corners of the market. The AI-driven music industry might be a pivot on the scale of going from, say, Mozart to EDM in a matter of years.
I like your analogy of the tidal wave but without computers being able to generate the culture I don't see it coming.
Take football [or soccer]. Whole sports seasons can be simulated and are in games like Championship Manager. But these have never changed the collective & cultural shared experiences of real world sports.
In what way?
This is already a thing in shoes, clothes, handbags, watches... Yet the original brands thrive. I'd counter that listening to "cheap knockoff" music will have a similar appeal (or lack thereof).
I don’t imagine many people subscribing to an AI who can generate and release countless songs on it’s own without some sort of filter to discern desirable content from undesirable.
Barring some large development, having a human to curate the generated material will be a requirement for success, or else drown your audience in a torrent of unchecked content.
When the software world can convincingly create new songs that sound like the hit songs people like, but sufficiently different to dodge copyright law, then it's game over.
We don't blink an eye at efforts to do things like complete one of Beethoven's symphonies. But that is going to be increased treading a thin line when it's something like create a new album by pseudo-David Bowie. And arguably over that line when it's extending the hit debut album of a living artist who just isn't recapturing that magic.
A wall of disruptive change is barreling towards the creative industry (as well as many other industries), and yet most are blissfully unaware, fighting over marginal changes to their status quo - maybe looking at demonstrations of what can be done today saying "that's neat, but it doesn't replace me" without properly looking at how quickly the other is improving.
Copyrights are about to become worthless, and so the fight over their management is going to be a short lived victory no matter who wins.