Selling Music Making Change
"Once AI entered the picture of music production, everything changed.
And the thing about change is you got to kind of adapt with it, right?
You got to go along with the change or you're going to be left behind in this situation."
Recent opening remarks of a youtuber going by the name of Bolo Da Producer.
I'm sure you already swapped out his field of 'music production' for ours, of solution sales.
Perhaps nothing we didn't already realise. But then his following treatise offers something new;
"But the thing about it is when change usually happens, it usually happens from people who are the leaders [in the field, driving it forward] and who are capable of making that change.
Meaning [those truly invested].
Meaning the people that can actually make music.
Meaning the people who have put in years of work into their craft to bring about change and in all phases of music production from making beats to recording to mixing to all of that.
I'm including all of that in music production.
Everything has simply changed by one thing;
prompting."
In his context, he then delivers a fascinating putdown of what he considers (my word) chancers, in it for nothing but a quick trashy profit.
The later example he gives of plug-ins for recording software feels so on the money. Scathing as he is for these vibe coded unprincipled hackers. For instance he riffs on 'compressors';
"... [music] people were creating these very dope plugins that solved issues and problems outside of just compression, EQ, and reverb ... and saturation ... and delays".
Yet now, some random simply makes a "clone" of a plugin; 'copying something that has already been done and then trying to sell it'.
He then runs through a conversation he'd have with such vibe coder. Where they know nothing about the thresholds used, a total absence of real-world testing, similar lack of re-engineering nor 'any signal tones sent'.
Lamenting that such product is flooding his space. And far from benefiting from it.
He later draws parallels with the NFT scam. And while someone might have a vibe coded whatever or actual song that "does some numbers", there's;
"the one thing about AI is it has to be fed in human experience.
And one thing that you cannot do is replace a human experience with a prompt.
It cannot happen."
He concludes in a genie-out-the-bottle manner, There'll soon be a new normal. Where what matters will be those that treasure and elevate the authentic human experience.
Solution sales is being hit by the same wave of low-rent, high-output activity. Decks, sequences, “insights”, even entire proposed solutions generated by people who have never carried a complex deal, never navigated a buying committee, never lived the consequences of a fraught discovery process.
We must use AI differently.
To speed up admin drudgery, data compiling and spotting patterns. Then apply judgement that only comes from years of sitting across from sophisticated buyers. Craft no prompt can create.
Sure, we might suffer the occasional hit from someone like these 'prompt jockeys' with neither skin nor history in our game, but sustainable, longterm stellar success will come when we use IA; our Intelligence, Augmented.