TL;DR
AI can already make your type beat, mix it and sell it cheaper. If your sound isn't truly unique and nobody knows who you are, I don't think you'll survive what's coming. Is your sound AI-replaceable?
This was originally written for UK rap and drill producers, but I think it applies to anyone selling beats on YouTube, and honestly to producers and engineers in general.
A Wake-Up Call to UK Rap & Drill Producers
Doing what you're doing now won't be enough
I'll say it straight: I think most producers in UK rap and drill, and maybe in rap in general, are sleepwalking into the biggest shift this scene has ever seen.
My honest guess? For about 95% of producers out there right now, carrying on as normal won't be enough.
Maybe I'm not the most qualified person to write about this. I don't live and breathe UK rap or drill, I've never worked for a label, and I haven't studied music.
But I have relied on type beats for a long time: uploading them to YouTube and selling them to artists. I've been watching how this business works, and I think AI is about to change it in a pretty fundamental way.
I'm writing this because I want to get other people talking about AI and the effect it's going to have on this industry. I'm sure there are people with more expertise who could write a better, more informed piece than me.
Maybe I'm too pessimistic. Maybe reality is more nuanced. That's exactly why I want to start this conversation.
Type beats are becoming a starting point, not a product
An artist finds your type beat on YouTube, writes to it and records their vocals. Then, instead of buying a lease, they upload the vocals to S uno, or in the future any other AI model, and get a brand-new instrumental built around them. The instruments and vocals work together perfectly, which takes a normal producer years of music theory, experience and a good ear.
Or they upload your beat as a reference and ask AI for something similar. They change the melodies, drums, sounds and arrangement until it fits exactly what they want. Your beat becomes the blueprint for a new instrumental, without them ever buying it.
That isn't the future. It exists today. And it's going to happen a lot more, because most artists haven't even discovered S uno yet, and S uno isn't close to how good it's going to get.
You inspired the song, maybe even provided its foundation, and you get nothing. On top of that, depending on the platform's terms, uploading music can grant it certain licences to use that material. So once your beat ends up in there, you might have a lot less control over it than you think.
There might be rules or technical solutions that stop this. But people always find ways around restrictions, especially when there's money to be saved.
Technical skills are no longer your competitive advantage
Parallel compression. EQ. Making sure your 808 and kick don't fight. Knowing exactly which plugins to use, and in what order. Knowing when a mix is too busy or too empty. These took you years to learn. Well, they took me years, anyway.
S uno doesn't do any of that, and it doesn't need to. It was trained on essentially all music of reasonable quality it could find online: tens of millions of finished, mixed and mastered records. From those it has picked up exactly which frequencies clash, which chords sit well together, when to do more and when to do less, and what makes a beat bounce. What comes out already sounds mixed.
I keep hearing producers say, "Yeah, but it’s AI slop, It has no soul." Meanwhile, the models keep getting better. It's already the case that 97% of people can't tell AI music from human-made music. I think that will be 100% very, very soon.
Where I think this is going
I think this is only the start. FL Studio, which a lot of you use, now has an AI assistant that can carry out tasks inside your project. As most of you probably know, it's still pretty shit. But this is where it's heading. S uno has its own studio with a chat assistant built right into the session. This is where I think it goes next:
An AI assistant in every DAW. You type "make the chords darker", "give the drums more bounce", "make the 808 hit harder" or "match this reference", and it's done.
AI vocals become perfect. Breathing, emotion, vocal character and vibrato will all be there, even the subtle imperfections that make a voice sound human.
AI analyses your mix better than any human ever could. It spots frequency problems, sits vocals in the mix like a pro and makes every instrument work together automatically. It will hear things in your mix that no human ear ever will.
Mixing and mastering become largely automatic, handled by that same assistant inside your DAW.
One producer sounds like a whole team. Producer, engineer, mixer and session musician become one person with the right tools.
You'll need fewer collaborators than ever. For some people that's great: they won't have to rely on anyone else, or pay them. But I think it's also a real loss. The studio, working with other people, is where the best new ideas and relationships are built.
I'm not saying stop learning compression, EQ or mixing. Understanding how they work will still matter. But it won't set you apart anymore unless you have a truly unique way of mixing. That means your own presets, and a deep technical and musical understanding of why these techniques work and how the hardware behind them works.
AI can already sound exactly like your favourite artist
Another development I've noticed: people using AI to make new songs with the voices of real artists.
And they can sound exactly like them.
I think we're going to see a lot more of this. Let's say someone uses Nemzzz's voice and makes a completely new Nemzzz song from home, and it blows up on TikTok. I don't know whether TikTok will take songs like that down or leave them up. But if one takes off, I think artists will jump on it. They'll buy the idea from whoever made it, or just take it, since it's their voice anyway.
Either way, artists will start getting ideas from a whole new group of people, not from the type beat producers who are already out there.
Look at what's happening to house
Spotify figured out years ago that a huge share of listening happens in the background. People don't put on an artist. They put on a playlist for chilling, studying, working out or sleeping. Spotify built a whole business model around that, filling those playlists with cheap background music from artists nobody had ever heard of.
You can see the same thing happening in house music. Deep house and chill house playlists are filling up with AI tracks and fake artists nobody has ever met, and some of them get millions of streams. Some of that is probably real people using AI to make genuinely good tracks. And some of it, I'm pretty sure, is playlist owners making the music themselves so they can keep 100% of the masters. And listeners? They don't seem to care.
I make this comparison because I think it shows something fundamental: most listeners won't even realise it's AI. And even if they do, they won't care. I've noticed it myself with friends in the car. When they put on AI music, they often can't tell. I still could, at least until a few months ago. But they didn't care. I think this is especially true when it comes to instrumentals. Listeners might care whether the artist is real. Almost nobody cares who made the beat.
Music is music. Even if the instrumental is made by AI, it still moves people. It still hits the pleasure centres in their brain. It still makes them feel something, makes them emotional, sometimes even changes how they see life. That's what music is really about, and it's all listeners care about: good music. And AI can make good music.
YouTube is about to get a lot more crowded
On Deezer, half of all new uploads are already fully AI-generated. Now picture that on YouTube: AI "producers" running multiple channels, uploading every day, with the same genre, the same quality and no burnout. How are you going to compete with that?
YouTube is cracking down on mass-produced channels by taking away their ad money. But that won't stop them. Type beat channels don't make their money from YouTube ads. They make it from selling leases. As long as artists keep buying beats, those channels will keep uploading.
And YouTube will probably not be able to tell the difference anymore. That means these channels could keep flooding the platform without necessarily being recognised as AI-generated content.
The economics of unlimited music
What happens to the value of music when there's practically no limit to how much can be made?
Two developments will massively increase the number of beats and songs out there:
More people making music. The barrier for ordinary people to start making music is collapsing. They won't have to learn plugins. They won't have to illegally download a load of plugins. They won't have to learn an instrument. Loads of people gave up at exactly those steps. Now they don't have to. That means far more producers, and far more competition.
More music per person. AI lets every producer and artist make far more music than before. The supply of music is going to explode, and it will grow much faster than the number of people listening.
Think about what that means for producers. When artists have thousands of alternatives, why would they pay the same prices for beats? Even IF artists still want to buy beats, the competition will drive prices down a lot.
I think we're heading towards a situation where making good music is no longer the difficult part. Getting people to actually listen to it will be.
And this goes beyond selling beats. More music means more competition for streams, playlist placements and social media attention. Even talented producers could struggle to make a living, simply because there's so much music competing for the same attention.
Your relationship with the artist won't save you
Yes, relationships matter. But be honest. Say an artist can get a beat that's just as good, maybe better, in seconds and for almost nothing. Say they can tweak it until it's exactly to their taste without plugins, without a DAW and without knowing a single chord. How long does loyalty last then?
Who I don't think will survive
- Type beat producers who just program drums over a melody.
- Loopmakers who don't have an extremely unique sound.
- Producers whose only selling point is "I can make a clean rap or drill beat."
Rap and drill are formula-heavy genres. The tighter a genre's rules, the easier it is to copy. And let's be honest: most rap and drill isn't musically that complex. You don't need an insane amount of music theory, and most producers in this scene don't have it either. That makes it a very easy genre to copy.
So what's left?
Here are the questions I think every producer should be asking themselves right now.
1. Is your sound really that unique?
Would it be impossible, or at least difficult, for an AI model to recreate it? And I don't mean today's models. I mean the ones that will be ten times better in a few years. Would people instantly know it's you when they hear one of your beats, even without your tag? Could they pick your sound out of a handful of beats?
If I'm honest, I think most UK rap and drill producers I know don't have a sound unique enough to save them. I can quickly think of a few names with genuinely unique sounds. But most are easily replaceable.
2. Do people know who you are, or just your producer tag?
Do they know your face? Your character? House producers DJ and play gigs. Most rap producers are invisible.
This has always been important. Most people want to know who they're working with. But I think it's going to become increasingly important for producers to put themselves out there, create content and show people that there's a real person behind the music.
3. How are you going to show your talent when people can't just hear it anymore?
I think the hunger for real talent will be bigger than ever. People will be flooded with AI music, and that will make them value real talent more than they used to: real performances, reels that show you actually making music, using analog hardware, showing your creative process. Basically, anything that sets you apart and shows there's a real person with real skills behind the music.
4. What are your main income streams?
Are you diversified enough? If all you do is type beats, I don't think that's going to go well for you. You need multiple sources of income: selling plugins or sound kits, working in the studio with artists, and more.
I think only the very best producers will become more valuable. That means the ones who can write songs, the ones who set trends instead of following them, and the ones with a real musical vision and an extremely unique sound. That's the skill that matters most now.
AI can copy drill, but it could never have invented it. Drill happened because people in London took Chicago drill and road rap and turned them into something nobody had heard before. The next new sound will come from people, not prompts.
And I don't think this is something we can fight, or even should. AI companies like S uno and Udio are already signing deals with the major labels, and labels never really cared about small producers and artists anyway. So I think the best way forward is to use AI as efficiently and as uniquely as possible.
Be the one who creates that new sound. Be a person people know, not just a product they download.
If you take one thing from this, make it this: start developing an extremely unique sound of your own. Not next year. Now.
I might be wrong. I hope I am. After all, people said Auto-Tune would replace talented singers, and that drum machines would replace drummers. I could name a ton of developments like this, and music never died. There was always money to be made. The truth is, we can't know. But people have to start talking about this, and find ways to work with these new developments and build them into what we do.
If I'm right, the producers who start adapting today are the ones who'll still be here in five years.
So tell me: is your sound AI-replaceable? And what are you doing about it?
