Music just adapts. New methods, new sounds, new genres. And it won't get easier to create music, it will just get easier to create certain parts of it (anyone can play strings now with an orchestral sampler; that was unthinkable 50y ago). It will still be brutally hard to stand out from the crowd.
This is entirely different. Your comment can easily have been generated by an LLM. Operating at scale, human comments and articles would literally become 0.00001% of all comments and articles, and on average probably would be lower quality anyway, in both breadth of “knowledge” and lack of civility. Once people come to overwhelmingly prefer digital content, all those charming platitudes about how human ingenuity / whatever can never be replaced, will melt away. “The crowd” will be 99.9999% automated processes.
Do you want a human to make your fries and smile a fake smile as they give them to you?
Do you want a human to operate your elevators? Produce your clothes and shoes by hand? You are spoiled by the thread count and consistency of machines there. Why not in digital content?
I think it's easy as an artist to put our own social position ahead of the actual goal: listeners should be able to enjoy music that evokes feeling/joy/relaxation/excitement. Whether that's 300 year old classical, a garage band or AI generated pop doesn't really matter. Lots of people had the same complaints about 3 chord DIY punk. Gatekeeping the creation of art seems elitist and anti-listener/viewer/reader...
Do people enjoy watching you give directions?
No one is gatekeeping it. Just saying your activity is only appreciated by people because an affordable robot can’t do it better yet.
That said, I imagine IRL people will always enjoy a demonstration of skill. That's a bit orthogonal to just enjoying the music on its own though since it includes an element of performance. If robot bands could put on super entertaining live shows and produce amazing (better than human) music, I'd be first in line to listen.
What this means is everything you offer as a musician will be as irrelevant as renaissance music and classical music is today for the vast majority of people.