Agenda

AI can generate music in seconds. But who owns the song? In this keynote, 4x Emmy Award-winning journalist and songwriter Lindsey Mastis brings the conversation to life through real voices from her mini-documentary Is AI Ruining Music? It features working musicians, industry leaders, and music technologists navigating AI's growing role in creative work. Through documentary excerpts and live discussion, the keynote explores how artists are integrating AI into their creative process while confronting growing tensions around ownership, authorship, and the future of creative livelihoods.

Is AI Ruining Music? captures a pivotal moment in the music industry. It was filmed at NAMM, the largest music conference in the United States. Voices include Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Jackson Browne and multiple Grammy winner Rosanne Cash. Union leaders, film composers, DJs, and emerging artists round out the conversation. Some see AI as an existential threat to their livelihoods. Others embrace it as a creative tool that opens doors traditional music training never could. As the journalist behind the documentary and a songwriter herself, Mastis is asking these questions from the inside. The result resists easy answers, reflecting the genuine complexity that artists, technologists, and policymakers are navigating in real time.

Artificial intelligence that allows someone without an instrument or music lessons to compose and produce a full song is the technology that may replace the session musician who spent a lifetime perfecting their craft. Is it access or displacement? Opportunity or theft? Tool or takeover? The music industry is facing these questions in real time, without consensus. The decisions being formed today around ownership, consent, and creative rights will shape how AI impacts creative work for generations to come. How this technology evolves, and for whose benefit, matters on a global scale. This keynote explores the technology, the conversation, and what comes next.