It's not totally there yet but it's improving.
Is it already happening in the stock photos world?
> the music industry (....) now appears to be more profitable than ever.
Tell that to the music professionals actually producing that music.
When is the last time you heard a Stan Getz equivalent?
Maybe there is still some more raping to be done by "the industry", but the whole scene has been raped and pillaged quite devastatingly already.
There honestly seems to be a strong and enduring resurgence in live music popularity, which IMO is exciting, and I think will continue as the quality of commercial music just seems to go down the toilet year on year.
The other issue generative AI will have is the same problem most musicians have, people like familiarity, you can making incredible music and 99% of ears will have no interest in it because it's unrelated to anything they, or they're fiends have listened too while going on that summer road trip in college. Why do people still listen to Vanilla Ice?
Music is a wonderful, creative, artistic pursuit, just don't expect to make too much money out of it, and you'll be in line with reality. I play guitar for my son when he can't sleep, and it's the most rewarding thing I've ever done musically.
I used a generative AI music tool to create ~1 minute snippets of fully mixed music. The tool offers 2 fields: Lyrics and a style prompt. From the initial audio you can generate continuations from them, creating different branches and there's some syntax to specify structure too ([chorus], [verse], [outro], (instrumental) etc). The quality of the compositions is quite good, though the choices it makes can be rather random just like any generative AI but that isn't always unwelcome.
From there I picked the best and most interesting bits of audio, split them apart those apart into separate tracks (vocals, guitar, percussion) with another AI. At that point I can bring them into a music sequencer, pull them apart, time stretch, rearrange, anything. You can generate an instrumental with a lead guitar, pull it out and sprinkle it through the entire song. Re-spin vocal deliveries, mix and match them.
This is a draft of something I've been working on: https://voca.ro/15yurCvoA9yR
The main drawback is the quality, it's like a mediocre cassette tape recording much of the time and splitting it up into tracks causes some generation loss.
I mean, that's how capitalism, and in particular creative industry, has always worked. Value is captured by management, not the people who create it. The celebrities who can afford to negotiate million dollar contracts and retain rights to their work are the exception, not the rule.