WSA Film Music Days - The Corporatisation of Screen Music: Saving the Human Composer

Discussing similar practices, such as production-music libraries generating trailers and ad scores from a text prompt, the studios quietly weighing cost against craft, and some Hollywood composers even offering a so-called $1 score, the panelists make a case for keeping human composers at the center of the score.

The pattern we're watching evolves gradually: AI-generated or AI-assisted cues normalise first in the lowest-scrutiny work such as documentaries, daytime television, commercials, and branded content. From there, however, it will inevitably move into games, TV series and, eventually, film. At the end of that pipeline, the word “composer” risks narrowing to “prompt engineer,” working a system trained on other composers' output. Currently, AI is trained on existing copyright, and studios and production companies insist that composers must not use AI to maintain a clean chain of title, but this could change.

We're already seeing early signs of it. There are music companies out there that don't seem to celebrate the individual human spirit; they seem to treat scores as a corporate commodity rather than an art form. That produces exactly one thing: generic musical slop, and a race to the bottom. We want to build a case for keeping an individual creative and artistic human composer at the centre of the score, made before someone else gets to decide there doesn't need to be one. If you're a young composer: who do you want deciding what your career looks like? You, or an algorithm?

Language: English