You know, we’ve never had better tools for making music. You can write, record, produce and release a song this afternoon, from your bedroom, for nothing. The technology is genuinely remarkable.
So why are so many musicians anxious, burnt out, and quietly miserable?
That’s the question that one of my favourite YouTube creators, music industry coach Damian Keys wrestles with in his most recent video, and his answer is worth sitting with.
It’s not really about AI. It’s about what happens when you remove the journey from a process that only ever made sense because of the journey.
What Making Music Used to Look Like
Cast your mind back to the rehearsal room era. You’d spend weekends crammed into a dingy space with your mates, playing the same four songs until they stopped falling apart. You’d argue about arrangements, mess up gigs, record demos that made you cringe, and slowly, painfully, get better.
The timeline from first idea to finished release used to stretch across months (and for a major label, sometimes closer to 18 months). That felt frustrating at the time but embedded in all that waiting and working was something that doesn’t show up on a Spotify dashboard: experience, relationships and stories you’d still be telling each other decades later.
The gigs. The van. The studio sessions in rooms where something historic had been recorded. The sense that you were building something, together, over time.
That’s the thing nobody really talks about when they celebrate how easy music creation has become. The friction wasn’t just an obstacle. It was doing a job.
The Friction Has Gone And That’s a Problem
Today, the entire process Keys describes (writing, producing, mixing, mastering, releasing) can happen in 24 to 48 hours for free all with tools that produce genuinely impressive results.
That’s an extraordinary shift in a very short time. And like most extraordinary shifts, it comes with consequences that weren’t part of the pitch.
What we gained is obvious: accessibility, speed, low cost, no gatekeepers but what disappeared is harder to name, but you can feel it.
The long stretches of working something out. The accumulated craft that comes from doing things the slow way. The sense of arrival that only exists if there was actually a journey to arrive from.
Keys uses a Newton’s Law analogy that lands well: for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction.
Remove friction from a system and the pressure has to go somewhere. In music’s case, it went straight into expectations.
If creation takes 24 hours, success should surely follow within a few weeks. Shouldn’t it?
The Results Trap
This is where things get genuinely damaging.
When the process is compressed to almost nothing, the only thing left to measure is the outcome. Numbers, streams, followers and engagement rates. And because those metrics are always visible, always updating, they become the entire point.
Keys works with hundreds of musicians regularly, and he’s watching this play out in real time. Artists treating 90 days as a long time to wait for results. Framing two months of releasing music as a disappointing run. Getting frustrated that fame hasn’t materialised yet.
The mismatch here is significant. In the old model, after 60 days you’d probably still be in the rehearsal room. You wouldn’t even have recorded anything yet.
The idea that results should arrive at the same speed as creation isn’t just unrealistic, it’s a recipe for a very specific kind of despair.
Because the goalposts never stop moving. Keys makes this point clearly. It goes from wanting to make a little money, to wanting to play a certain venue, to wanting to headline festivals, and on and on. There is no finishing line.
The artists who seem to have everything (his examples are Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran) still carry enormous pressure with every release, every tour, every next thing. If you build your entire sense of progress around external results, you’re signing up for a game you cannot win.
Newton’s Law Applied to Music
It’s worth spending a moment on Keys’ central framework, because it explains a lot.
He’s not arguing that AI is bad, or that fast creation is inherently wrong. He’s arguing that systems have consequences, and that when you squeeze one part of a process, something else has to give.
What gave, in this case, was the internal reward structure of making music. The pride in craft. The satisfaction of a long project finally coming together. The sense of identity that forms when you put serious time into something.
Those things don’t survive when the timeline collapses to nothing, because they depend on duration.
Think about it like a video game. If someone hands you a cheat code that skips to the end, you can tell everyone you finished it. But you didn’t play it.
You didn’t get the experience the game was built to give you. You just have the ending, without any of the context that makes the ending mean something. The journey of playing the game provides the much needed context that makes finishing the game so rewarding
That’s increasingly what Keys is seeing in the musicians he works with. The ending, without the game equals a hollow victory.
The Dopamine Industry
Here’s the distinction Keys draws that’s probably the sharpest thing in the whole video.
The music industry, at its core, is about bringing joy to people and creating experiences. That’s the thing. The gigs, the connection with an audience, the moment a song lands with someone who needed it. That’s what makes music worth making.
What’s quietly replacing it is something different. A chase for fame and adoration, full stop. Not as a byproduct of genuine creative work, but as the primary goal from the start and increasingly, AI is being used not to make better music, but to shortcut the parts of the process that stand between an artist and that hit of recognition.
Keys calls it the dopamine industry, and it’s hard to argue with the framing.
When the goal is the high of being seen and adored, and the tools exist to chase that as fast as possible, the music itself becomes almost incidental. A means to an end.
The problem is that dopamine highs require constant feeding. And if your entire creative practice is built around chasing that feeling through numbers and fame, you’re not building something sustainable, you’re creating an environment that allows burnout.
Where Does This Leave You?
Keys ends with a question that’s simple but worth taking seriously: in 50 years, what will you actually look back on?
Not the releases. Not the stream counts. The experiences. The people. The moments that made you feel like you were part of something.
That question doesn’t mean ignore the tools available to you, or pretend the landscape hasn’t changed. It does mean being honest about why you’re making music, and whether the way you’re going about it is actually giving you what you’re after.
If you’re using AI to handle the parts of the process you genuinely don’t enjoy so you can spend more time on the parts that light you up, that’s a reasonable trade. If you’re using it to skip the entire journey because you just want the result, it’s worth asking what exactly you think you’re going to get at the other end.
The musicians Keys remembers most fondly from his own career aren’t the ones who released the most. They’re the ones he was in the van with.
The Bit You’re Supposed to Do
This video isn’t an anti-technology argument, and Keys is careful to make that clear. He uses AI himself. The point isn’t to go back to printing CDs and waiting six months for a studio booking.
The point is that music was never really about the output. It was about the doing you know, that bit in the middle that you’re now able to skip.
And here’s the thing: you can skip it, the tools are there but if you do, you need to be clear-eyed about what you’re trading away because the journey isn’t a tax you pay to get to the good part.
For most musicians who’ve built a life around this (I would certainly count myself as one of these musicians), the journey was the good part.
The question for 2026 and beyond isn’t whether AI belongs in the creative process. It clearly does, in some form, for most people. The question is whether, in the rush to reach the finish line faster, we’re forgetting that there isn’t one.
Make the music. Do the gigs. Be in the room with people. Build the thing slowly enough that it means something when it’s done.
That’s the bit. Don’t skip the bit.
