If there is no artist I don't see how any strong following could be built. (Obviously AI will carve easily into elevator music etc.)
Who will ever look up a song and favourite it on Spotify if there are no humans behind it?
"Obscurest Vinyl" has 249,608 monthly listeners on Spotify. No one is interested in the humans behind their hit "I Glued My Balls To My Butthole Again".
That said, the quantity of music is in itself a problem. Half the value of art is in experiencing the same thing as others. It's going to get even harder with cheap generative art. The better it is, the worse the situation gets.
I've certainly had a hunch that certain songs get much more frequent rotation than others on my liked songs playlist (although I appreciate humans are notorious for picking out patterns where there are none!)
The other 90%? Background music, e.g. for daily exercise, where I mostly want upbeat music that keeps me moving and sounds good.
For the 10% I prefer humans, for the 90%, if the AI music gets good enough, I'm afraid it will do the job just fine.
But I’m also the kind of person that hardly ever goes to concerts.
I feel like more people are familiar with Miku than her music.
> success today is not about the quality of the music but instead about the audience's connection with the artist
...although I would rather say "sense of connection", since in all three of these cases there is in the narrow sense no "artist" involved at all.
More broadly, this seems a fairly uncontroversial point, given how crowded by supply our current media markets are made. Certainly it seems like it would be uncontroversial on that supply side, at least if what I hear from artists and writers and musicians in my circles is any guide.
Music is just another consumable form of entertainment for me, and if I like the song I don't care who made it.