fAIr trade

I was at a coffee shop in Gothenburg yesterday morning, one of those places that does everything right, or tries to. Single origin beans, direct trade with the farmers, proper technique, the whole thing. The kind of place where you can tell that someone actually cares. And they were playing AI jazz.

Not just AI-generated music, but particularly shitty AI-generated music. The tells were all there: digital artifacts in the reverb, solos that noodled through the changes without saying anything, a smoothness that isn’t smoothness at all but just the absence of friction, the lack of someone having actually decided anything. It was background music that kept pulling itself into the foreground in the worst way.

I mentioned it to a friend I was sitting with, quietly enough, or so I thought, but one of the guys from the shop overheard and came over. “Yeah,” he said, “it is AI.” And then he explained: the licensing fees for playing music in a commercial space are apparently something like three times what a regular streaming subscription costs, and then there are additional fees for public performance licensing, which add up to almost 10x the cost of a normal streaming plan. And they have two locations, so double that, and at some point they felt like the math just didn’t work anymore. I said something like, “Yeah, that sounds tricky,” which was true and also kinda useless.

We went on to talk for a little bit about how live performance might become more valuable as AI gets better, which I think is probably correct and also slightly beside the point.

But after I left the shop that morning, I kept thinking about it. If you’re running a place that’s clearly thought hard about quality and ethics and the experience you’re creating for the person sitting across your bar, and then you fill that same space with music that has no nutrition in it, no soul, something that anyone with ears and some familiarity with the form can identify immediately as not even trying — what does that say about how far the caring extends?

This isn’t primarily about whether AI music is ethical, though that’s its own conversation, and a real one, given that everything these systems learned came from actual musicians who saw none of that money. But even setting that aside entirely: this music was just bad. It felt unconsidered in a specific way that the people running the shop seemed not to notice, or not to mind.

I’m dictating some of this into my phone right now, so I’m also using AI to help organize and shape this essay itself. I’m aware of how that looks. I’m not entirely sure it changes the argument, but it does put me somewhere inside the same set of contradictions I’m trying to describe.

I went back today, with an intention to say something like: I understand the economics, and I’m not here to lecture you. But you’ve built something in this room that you care about and you want to create a good experience. The music is part of the room, and right now it’s the one thing in here telling me nobody cares. Which isn’t true. So maybe it’s worth finding a different solution, even if it costs something.

But when I arrived, the guy I’d spoken to wasn’t there. They were playing house music, and I couldn’t tell whether it was AI or not. I ordered my coffee and said nothing.