> But it will also benefit indie artists, who'll be able to create record label quality tunes with much less effort, just like Stable Diffusion makes it possible for anyone to be an "artist".

I don't think this is such a glowing endorsement of why people make music and produce music. I think AI will do amazing things to improve what we have and speed up the most frustrating parts of production (noise removal, time alignment, retuning, writing harmony parts to existing melody lines. Simply look at companies like iZotope (like RX or Neutron), Hush Pro etc - I know it sounds a little 'faster horses' but I really think AI needs to remove the 'hard' part and not the 'necessary part' of being a musician/artist/audio engineer.

The 'black box' effect of AI that simply 'writes a song' feels less useful and less impactful, that's not what being an 'artist' should be about.

I have a sneaking suspicion that major record labels are likely looking at AI for more boring and partially sinister means like DRM tagging/finger-printing, more advanced content-ID etc, heck maybe even virtual artists that they can spin up in-house so they don't have to pay anyone: the perfect 360 artist, geeze.