3 predictions for the future of music | Michael Spitzer

• What is the future of music? Does it have a future? It's a possibility that with this incredible ubiquity and accessibility of music through the internet, that eventually all our music becomes homogenized into a single thing, into a gray, homogeneous object. I don't think that will happen for one very important reason: Every artist wants to be distinctive.

There's a competitive drive which forces people to always turn their back on fashion and create something new. A second reason is that music has always been an extraordinary tool to express human identity. With the proliferation of genres, there are thousands and thousands of genres and sub-genres. And as long as people have an identity and are different, they will create music to reflect their personality.

Given that humans have had music for at least 40,000 years, it'll be foolish to be pessimistic about its future, that we might worry about the next decade, the next century. But this is only a pinprick, you know, in the great scale of things. So I think there's no danger of music becoming homogenized.

So what is the future of music? I have a few predictions. One is that music will become ever more instrumentalized or to have a function. I could almost imagine somebody prescribing you and injecting you with exactly the right kind of sound to treat a condition, depression, or some other kind of emotional disorder.

My other prediction would be an ever greater integration with technology. COVID has served to accelerate a cultural change, and we see that in the extraordinary world of the internet, as a way of taking music away from musicians and giving it to normal people. So through various digital stages and platforms, we can both create music in our homes and share it.

And we are regaining the participatory condition of music, which was the norm thousands of years ago, where we all had an equal stake in creating and enjoying music. We shouldn't forget that technology is not sinister, that all musical instruments are tools. The original bone flute was a piece of technology. It serves to extend human capacity. It extends the voice or the fingers.

So Watson Beat, which is a computer program, which allows musicians to create these sonic possibilities, that's no different really to any other musical instrument which extends our, in this case, imagination. But once the instrument or the machine has thrown up these possibilities, it's the role of the human subject to make decisions, to pass, to edit, to select, to shape all the things that the computer has given us.

So I see that relationship between humans and machines becoming ever more integrated and ever more imaginative in the future. And I would like to add one rather bold prediction. In the future, music may not be just about sound. It may involve tastes and colors and our bodies and frequencies currently not available to our quite narrow spectrum of hearing.

We'll be able to amplify, to extend our hearing range. I think it's fair to say that just as, you know, what Stockhausen or Beyoncé is achieving today would've been completely out of the ken, out of the comprehension of a Mozart or a Beethoven a few centuries ago. We can't even begin to imagine the possibilities awaiting us in the future.