I'm a Human Artist Who Invests in Music Royalties. Here's Where I Stand on AI.
I've been in bands. I've released music. I've worked on large-scale projects with real musicians, real studios, real stakes, including one that was ready to break right before COVID hit and took the whole thing down with it.
I also invest in music royalties. Which means I own the rights to songs that in all likelihood were used to train the same AI models I now teach people to use.
So when someone tells me I can't possibly understand what human artists are going through right now, I'd gently push back on that.
And when someone asks me where I stand on AI and the music industry, here's the honest answer:
I don't label industry changes as good or bad. I label them as variables that have changed. And then I figure out what to do next.
Do I think music I own the rights to was used to train AI models? Almost certainly yes. Would I want compensation for that? If someone wants to send a check, I'll take it. Am I holding my breath? Not even slightly. Am I feeling victimized? Not for a single second.
Here's why.
I've never once seen an industry stay static. Not music. Not technology. Not finance. Not anything. Every industry evolves, and the people who survive those evolutions are the ones who treat change as a variable to adapt to, not an injustice to resent.
The ones who don't make it aren't the ones who got dealt a bad hand. They're the ones who decided the hand they had was the hand they were supposed to keep forever.
Buddha understood this. Impermanence isn't a tragedy. It's just the nature of things. If your mission in life is to hold the world constant, you've already committed to a life of disappointment and suffering. Nothing stays. Not the music industry, not the tools we use to make music, not the platforms we release it on, not the rules around who owns what.
The walled garden of "the way things were" is not coming back. And spending your creative energy grieving it means you're not spending that energy on what's actually in front of you.
Now, does acknowledging change mean accepting every version of it without question? No. The compensation question for human artists whose work trained these models is real and unresolved. I'm not dismissing it. I have skin in that game personally.
But there's a difference between advocating for fair treatment in a changing landscape and refusing to engage with the landscape at all. One is a reasonable position. The other is a choice to become irrelevant.
The "woe is me" approach doesn't win. It never has. In any industry. Ever.
The musicians I respect most right now are the ones treating AI the same way previous generations treated the electric guitar, the synthesizer, the DAW, and digital distribution. As a new variable in the equation that requires them to get better, not bitter.
That's what Lane 2 is built on. Human-authored, AI-assisted. Your story, your vision, your creative direction, with the most powerful production tools in history available to execute it. Not replacing the human. Amplifying it.
I'm not teaching AI music because I abandoned what it means to be a human artist. I'm teaching it because I've been a human artist long enough to know that the tools have never been the point.
The point is the music. The tools just keep changing.
— Josh
Founder, JG BeatsLab
