I remember the first time I heard a song that made me pull over to the side of the road, just to listen. It was a mess of a demo tape, with a crackled voice and a slightly off-key guitar. But I felt the human in it. That's what streaming is supposed to preserve.
Look, I get the appeal of AI songs—endless novelty, zero cost, instant access. That's neat. But if we flood the platforms, we drown out actual human creators, the ones who need those pennies per stream to eat. More importantly, we're not just consuming sounds. We're connecting with someone's lived experience. An AI can mimic a heartbreak, but it's never been hurt. It can sing about joy, but it's never felt it.
Allowing them on the same charts as human work doesn't just compete. It erases the meaning behind the music. Human songs become just another product in an endless algorithm. And that's a world I don't want to stream.