HOW MEDIOCRITY TOOK OVER THE GRAMMYS:

Is music getting worse? Rick Beato is a musician, producer and critic with more than five million YouTube subscribers. His answer would be: yes, pretty much. In a recent video, he compares the 2026 Grammy Song of the Year nominees to those of 1984. There are a few bright sparks among the slate of new songs, but Beato regards most of them as derivative, unoriginal and unlikely to be remembered past the end of the awards show. In contrast, 42 years on, all the 1984 nominees – Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” among them – are firmly embedded in the popular music canon.

One could ask the same question about science: has it gotten worse? My answer, I have to say, reflects Beato’s for music. As in popular music, bright sparks do still show up in the stream of science. But, as with popular music, nearly all of what passes for “science” these days is dull, derivative, repetitive and forgettable, unlikely to make an impression past the deadline for the next grant application.

Beato has a compelling explanation as to why popular music seems to be getting worse. His thesis is simple: the culture and economics of the music industry have cheapened creativity and incentivized mediocrity. New technologies are accelerating this decline.

Could something similar be behind the cheapening of science? “No” would be the reflexive answer of most in the industry – and probably laymen, too. But both music and science are, at root, creative arts: Einstein liked to imagine what it would be like to ride a photon; August Kekulé dreamt that the structure of benzene was like an ouroboros, a snake swallowing its own tail; Francis Crick and James Watson imaginatively turned the DNA double helix outside in to arrive at a structure no one else thought possible. Science advances more through these flights of creative fancy than through all the millions of scientific papers academics publish each year. As in the field of music, creativity in science has been debased like a tin nickel. Mediocrity is incentivized.

Science and music have begun to converge in the form of AI. In a recent YouTube clip, producer/engineer Warren Huart noted:

Songwriters are using AI to write tracks. They’re using the AI to write tracks. Maybe they’re manipulating it. Maybe they’re taking an individual vocal, etc. But I have heard and seen and experienced it, and people are playing instruments to those tracks.

Now, I think [AI music generating platform] Suno stopped the ability for people to download stems, but you could still put in your track idea—make it a death metal song with Hawaiian bloody blah blah—output it, and then Izotope [RX] it and remove all the stems that way. And then real musicians—yes, real musicians—are then replaying the parts.

That is happening each and every day in our industry, and with people you know: with producers you know, with engineers you know, with mixers you know, with songwriters you know, and with artists that you know. That is how songs are happening.

There will be more material being made than ever before. Artists who are successful will be pumping out more music than they’ve ever done before because now, some of the heavy lifting—the initial ideas—will be done by AI. And it’s happening now, for real.

So not just the sort of country song that went to number one in a digital playback of a country music chart or wherever it was—that’s just the beginning. There are already songs that you are hearing that started off as AI, and maybe they’ve been replayed, maybe they’ve been manipulated, but that is where our industry is at for real.

According to Billboard in late November, “In just the past few months, at least six AI or AI-assisted artists have debuted on various Billboard rankings. That figure could be higher, as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell who or what is powered by AI — and to what extent.” How prolific will AI-generated music become going forward?