A Crisis of Meaning in Music

Is trying to find meaning in AI music like trying to find Shakespeare in a bowl of alphabet soup?

First came the internet. Then came big data. Then came the internet and big data with a baby carriage and their offspring, AI, feeding on the infrastructure of the internet and all the human-generated content that we so enthusiastically populated it with. How sweet.

What does that have to do with music? When generative AI can create songs, symphonies, and soundscapes in seconds, the possibilities seemingly endless. And yet... I find myself struggling to find meaning in it. Is it too much to expect an AI-generated song to move me the way I was moved the first time I heard People of the Sun by Rage Against the Machine or Homeless by Ladysmith Black Mambazo? Maybe. But one thing seems clear: the signal-to-noise ratio is shifting in ways that I find unsettling: more content, less substance. More noise, less signal. And AI doesn't slow this process, it pours gasoline on it.

At its core, this crisis of reveals a central tension in how we understand art, meaning, and commerce. Can we manufacture meaning through sheer volume, or is meaning something deeper, something more elusive and specific? If I look hard enough, will I find a Shakespeare sonnet in my alphabet soup? Maybe if I buy another bowl. And another.

Can we manufacture meaning through sheer volume, or is meaning something deeper, something more elusive and specific?

There’s a timeless principle in art that might provide a clue to understanding this moment: “The key to the universal is the specific.” This is a lesson every songwriter learns sooner or later. If you want to write a song that resonates universally, you won’t succeed by writing about the universe itself. Vague platitudes and generalizations fail to move us. Instead, you must focus on a single, specific object or story, one that serves as a vessel for universal experience.

Consider Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road. The song isn’t about "freedom" in some abstract sense; it’s about a young couple, a dusty screen door, a car, and the promise of escape. Through these specifics, the universal shines. Similarly, Johnny Cash’s Hurt isn’t a grand meditation on pain, it’s an intimate account of self-destruction through vivid images like a crown of thorns and a needle.

If you want to write a song that resonates universally, you won’t succeed by writing about the universe itself.

Specificity gives art its power. It anchors us in a world we can see, feel, and enter. When the listener is invited into that world, they transpose their own experiences onto it. A single object—a pair of worn-out sneakers, a broken-down car, a tree cracked under its own weight—can tell the story of everything we fear, love, and lose.

This is the paradox of art: the more specific it gets, the more universal it becomes.

Generative AI operates on an entirely different premise. Its promise seems to be this: if we generate every possible combination of sounds, melodies, and textures, surely we will create something meaningful. But this is not the way meaning works.

There’s an unmistakable hubris in this approach, a belief that sheer volume can compensate for the absence of vision. In its attempt to own all possibilities, AI adopts something of a colonial mindset, as if to say, “Let’s dominate the unknown. Let’s conquer every soundscape and musical permutation.” But meaning is not born from dominance or exhaustive iteration. It emerges from boundaries, intention, and the specific vision of an artist.

When I listen to AI-generated music, I'm struck by how good it is at being pretty good. In fact, generative AI's greatest achievement so far is that it's pretty good at being pretty good. But there's always something missing. And it's not the kind of "something" that will be fixed in the next version of the model. AI can mimic the shape of emotion but not the depth. It can tell you why jokes are funny but it can't make you laugh.

Generative AI's greatest achievement so far is that it's pretty good at being pretty good.

This crisis of meaning isn’t just an artistic problem; it’s a cultural one. In an age of infinite content, we’re becoming desensitized to art that feels hollow. The noise drowns out the signal, making it harder for genuinely meaningful work to break through. The danger is that we lose sight of the artist altogether. With much respect to the great Roland Barthes, the author is not dead. Not quite, anyway. But in our rush to automate creativity, we risk erasing the very thing that gives art its meaning: the human experience, filtered through a unique perspective.

This is one area where I think ever.fm has struck the right balance. At ever.fm, humanity remains at the core of music even as we embrace the possibilities of generative technology. The secret lies in a careful interplay between open-endedness and specificity (plus the fact that we don't generate audio; all sounds come from the artist themselves. More on that here.) In our system, the artist is the anchor. Their vision creates the boundaries that make interpretation and meaning possible. The variations we generate aren’t aimless—they populate the world of the song in ways that remain grounded in the artist’s intent. Think of it as a shoebox diorama: a sprawling song-world that you can both lose yourself in and hold in your hands. This approach respects the human scale. It avoids the hubris of infinite possibilities by focusing on the power of a single perspective. The artist’s story—enabled by technology—becomes the vessel for meaning.

[ever.fm] respects the human scale. It avoids the hubris of infinite possibilities by focusing on the power of a single perspective.

Where does that leave us? As usual, with more questions than answers. And a sense that each of us will make our own decisions about what we need and want from art. But there is one guiding light: the key to the universal is the specific. If AI music is to find its soul, it must learn this lesson. Because meaning isn’t found in the infinite. It’s found in the shoebox diorama, in the worn-out sneakers, in the cracked tree, in the rusty car. And it’s here, in the small and specific, that music will continue to connect us to each other, to ourselves, and to the universal.