An uncertain future awaits a segment of key players – sound recording mixers and engineers – in Nashville’s powerful music industry.

That’s the conclusion reached in a recent study, “Future Unscripted: The Impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Entertainment Industry Jobs,” by CVL Economics.

While much of the study’s attention focused on California’s film industry, the section on the music and sound recording industry noted “most jobs will be displaced (by 2026) in California (470 jobs), but Tennessee (320 jobs) has the largest industry location quotient, which means its economy will feel the effects of displacement more acutely.”

Noting the huge impacts over the past two decades – from digital downloads to streaming services – the study concludes that about 1,800 industry jobs (8.4% of the existing 21,300 jobs) will be “disrupted” across the U.S. It also states that “55% of business leaders surveyed foresee Sound Designers facing the greatest degree of displacement over the next three years.”

The role of generative AI is already being felt in Nashville, say several sound engineers, singers and songwriters contacted by the Ledger about potential job disruptions over the next three years due to technological advances in AI and machine learning.

“It’s definitely going to impact music and music creation just like it’s going to impact film and film creation,” says nine-time Grammy winner F. Reid Shippen, who operates out of his Robot Lemon studio in Green Hills.

“AI is a technology and it’s a tool, right? So, I don’t know that you can say that it has a good or a bad side any more than, you know, a telephone. Is a telephone good or a telephone bad? When you’re calling for help, it’s great. When someone’s harassing you, it’s bad. It’s not actually the telephone, right? It’s the intent and the use.

“So, the thing that’s interesting about this is AI is not new. AI/ML (machine learning) has been around for a very long time, decades. The newest refinements with generative predictive transformers, large language models and stuff like that have absolutely accelerated how it impacts certain industries.

“It will undeniably impact every human endeavor on Earth. This is probably as much of a technological change as the printing press or the internet. Like, it’s really amazing. It’s really exciting. And, of course, it’s really scary because everyone’s afraid of the unknown and there’s a huge unknown here.”

Vance Powell, a six-time Grammy Award-winning producer and audio engineer who co-owns Sputnik Sound production and mix studios with Mitch Vane, says such changes are nothing new in Music City.

“The music industry will always have jobs in places that will be replaced by other things,” Powell says. “Recording studios have, to some degree, been replaced by studios in people’s houses and laptops and things like that. Nobody cried about that except for studio owners or guys like me who had to build one of their own in their own building.”

And, he warns, there might come a day when no one will be able to distinguish between what Nashville studios deliver and what AI generates.

“There will be a breakover where we won’t be able to tell the difference between a great song recorded and by somebody in a studio to a great song recorded and mixed by nobody in the cloud. So, at some point it will happen. Let’s just hope that they’re not better than we are,” Powell says.

Regulation attempts beginning

Songwriter Jamie Moore, a board member of Nashville Songwriters Association International, recently testified before the House Banking and Consumer Affairs Committee on the first-of-its-kind Ensuring Likeness, Voice and Image Security (ELVIS) Act, and sounded alarm bells about AI’s impact on Nashville.

“We are at a critical point in American history and in human innovation,” Moore says. “The development and lightspeed advancement of generative artificial intelligence has the capacity to end the business of music as we know it.”

Bart Herbison, NSAI’s executive director, says state-proposed voice protections for singers from AI “is somewhat limited because most of these are federal copyright law issues and many of them the state cannot deal with. I can’t tell you specifically whether it will do something for production jobs or that sort of thing. But at the end of the day, Congress … has got to do something or we’re going to be in trouble.”

Herbison says Congress should take action on what he calls the “four P’s – permission, payment, proof and penalties.

“That message is resonating with Congress. It’s going to take a lot to get legislation passed,” he says. “We went through piracy and that crippled this industry. We went through low streaming rates because of the rate structure (of) government laws. Technology outpaced those.

“We’re starting to make some changes in those. But if we don’t get some guardrails around AI, this game is over.”

Here’s a deeper look at some of the issues and AI concerns facing Nashville hitmakers

The next generation is here

Nathan Adam, an assistant professor of media production at Belmont’s Mike Curb College of Entertainment & Music Business, worked in the business for 20 years and even wrote a book about “using vocal tuning software and how we used that and micro-editing to adjust the sound of recordings.”

So while he knows his stuff, he doesn’t yet fully know how AI will impact Nashville’s sound recording industry.

“There’s a million ways we could look at it. In terms of how it’s going to impact our industry specifically, I mean it’s similar to like at the beginning of my career,” Adam says. “I came in right as computers were taking over – how music production, recording and editing was done.

“AI is going to continue that trend of democratizing who can make music and who can make what kind of music,” he continues. “Whether that’s going to take away specific jobs, that’s almost always the case with technology. There are certain jobs or certain skills that change what’s required to be a professional in that arena.

“The engineers in town that learned the new tools continued to flourish for the rest of their career. They learned the tools and they were able to use those and record more, or better, or at least make things that still appealed to an audience.

“And the ones that didn’t learn the new tools either moved out of the industry or moved into a different field. So I think that’s going to be the same for tools like this now, as well.”

Not many ‘jobs left to lose’

Artist/producer Prescott Harter has already seen AI affect his Nashville Demo Works business.

-- Photograph Provided

Prescott Harter, a longtime Nashville artist, songwriter and producer, is owner of Nashville Demo Works, where he sometimes provides vocals as a demo singer. He’s seen the rise and fall of industry jobs and sounds nonplused on concerning AI’s potential negative impact.

“We don’t really have a lot of jobs left to lose. Spotify and the streaming services cut Nashville by about three-quarters,” Harter says.

“I mean, as far as signed writers go, there used to be somewhere in the range of 4,000 signed writers in Nashville in the 1990s, and now I believe there’s something like 400. So having the streaming services have already put a really big dent in the revenue.”

Herbison says the Nashville songwriting job losses have fluctuated over the last two decades, usually in lockstep with technological changes.

“The actual amount has always been a debate within the industry. My estimate is there were a few thousand writers signed to legitimate publishing deals when I became NSAI executive director in 1997, who were making a living on current song activity, mostly album cuts, which for income purposes have effectively disappeared,” Herbison says.

“In the mid-2000s, that number dropped to a few hundred songwriters. It has rebounded over the past few years. … Radio singles are what pay the bills. There are many fewer of those and commercial radio plays a much smaller rotation. Even though they are climbing, a writer still cannot sustain a living on streaming royalties.”

A major concern for Harter is that studios like his could be bypassed thanks to the evolution of AI. His home studio occupies his basement and meets all the industry production standards that AI-generated music could someday match.

“I am able to make the highest-quality (recordings) necessary from this room,” Harter says. “If AI takes it to the next step where studios and all that type of stuff is hardly even necessary, it’s really going to make it so anybody can make music.

“But I’m not sure that’s a good thing, because it’s going to saturate the market with even more music. If it gets even easier for someone to make a pro quality-level recording without having to go to somebody like me, there’s going to be more people that are willing to do it because the barrier to entry is going to be lower.”

End of demo singers?

Shippen, who says he has used AI tools in recent work, says one of the first music industry jobs that could disappear is demo singers. For decades, songs have been pitched to artists based on demos featuring similar singers, giving an idea of what they might someday sing.

Not anymore.

Recording professionals like F. Reid Shippen see a turbulent future ahead as generative AI tools take over creative tasks that once took a lot of time and money.

-- Photo By Michelle Morrow |The Ledger

“I know for a fact that there’s a lot of artists right now that when they want a song pitched to them, they want to hear the song in their own voice because it’s easier for an artist to hear themselves singing on it and be like, ‘oh yeah, that’s a song I could do,’ Shippen says. “Songs are being pitched in this town right now, and the voice singing the song is whatever artist they’re trying to get to cut the song.”

Both Harter and friend Ron Wallace, a singer/songwriter who moved to Nashville in 1987 and began his Nashville career as a demo singer, have varying perspectives on the future of demo singers.

“From the standpoint of an owner of a company that (makes demo records), that would be a useful tool, to be honest,” Harter says. “That would cut costs on my end to make demos – to have to pay somebody. So I can already see that is definitely something that would affect singers.

“That being said, from the demo-singer side, that’s not good news because it’s already hard enough. And unfortunately, this industry has not gone up in value the way other industries have.”

Wallace says AI might help songwriters and independent producers who can’t afford studio costs without a publishing company backing the project.

“The technology has been there for a long time now to do that at home, whereas before you had to go into a studio (and) pay studio fees,” Wallace says. “You had to have a full band come in, pay the musicians, pay the singers. And that was big business.

“If you’re a proficient-enough musician who’s a writer, you can go home and download software into your computer and use it in Pro Tools,” Wallace says. “I think that’s a good thing because, if you’re independent and you’re not being paid (by) your publishing company for the demos, that can be a costly expense for a songwriter to take a song into a studio and pay $800 per demo.

“So in that regard, that technology I think is good.”

‘An explosion of creativity’

Shippen says he realizes the power of emerging AI tools will dramatically change creative businesses, and those with jobs like his and others like him will have to adapt.

“I think we’re looking at a pivot, a fulcrum. A breaking point for a lot of creative industries, including music,” Shippen says. “And it’s going to be interesting to see where AI goes.

“There’s going to be an explosion of creativity. There’s going to be new things that can be done that have never been done before. There’s going to be old stuff that may become irrelevant.

“Creators have a vision a lot of times, but the ability for them to express that vision in a way that’s actually functional can be difficult. Maybe we’ll be acting as more of a translator than we are right now.” Shippen shrugs. “And I’m guessing. Who knows? We could all have chips in our brains in five years. We could all discover we’re in the Matrix. You never know.”

Depending on one’s point of view, that’s either an exciting or scary observation.