Is the Music Industry Turning Into a Board Game?

I recently watched an interview with Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno, and something he said stuck with me. His vision for music is not simply about helping musicians make music. It is about making music creation something everyone can participate in, where creation itself becomes part of the entertainment. That sounds innocent enough, maybe even exciting, but when you look at everything else happening around the industry, it starts to raise a much bigger question.

Spotify and Universal are developing tools that will let fans create licensed covers and remixes from participating artists. Universal is also working with ElevenLabs on another platform built around remixing and reinterpreting licensed music. Apple Music is already introducing more automated mixing features, and Suno is working directly with major music companies on licensed AI models. At the same time, Luminate and Billboard have introduced Smart Media Albums, recognizing physical products that unlock music and digital experiences through QR codes, NFC and other technologies.

Put all of that together and I started wondering: Is the music industry slowly turning music into a board game?

I am only half joking.

For most of my life, the relationship was pretty simple. Someone created a record, someone else bought it, and they listened to it. Maybe they stared at the cover, read the liner notes, learned the lyrics and eventually wore the thing out. The fan participated emotionally, but the artist still created the music.

That line is becoming considerably less clear. The listener is increasingly being invited to remix it, manipulate it, regenerate it, personalize it, collect it, activate it and eventually perhaps create their own version of it. Instead of simply listening to the Beatles, are we headed toward Beat the Beatles? Master Madonna? Roll Your Own Stones?

The names are silly, but the underlying business idea really is not anymore.

The music industry may be discovering that the audience of people who want to play with music is much larger than the audience of people who actually want to become musicians. That changes the economics. A great artist might sell you an album once. A music entertainment platform can potentially sell millions of people subscriptions, upgrades, licensed catalogs, creation tools, collectibles and new experiences built around that same music over and over again.

From a business standpoint, I understand why that is attractive. What I am less certain about is what happens to music itself.

We are already reaching a point where creating another song has almost no economic scarcity. Deezer recently reported periods where more than half of the new music being delivered to its platform was fully AI-generated. Think about that for a moment. We spent more than a century trying to make recording music easier, and we may have finally made it so easy that producing more music is no longer the difficult part.

Getting someone to care about it is.

And maybe that is where this gets interesting, because there is another possible outcome to all of this. While the largest companies chase catalogs, AI licensing, interactive experiences and massive consumer participation, they may leave a surprisingly large opening behind them. An opening for actual artists.

New artists. Independent artists. Legacy artists who were overlooked the first time around. Songwriters with something to say. Performers with personalities people want to follow. Records made because somebody needed to make them, not because somebody typed a clever prompt while waiting for dinner.

I am not anti-technology. Far from it. Every generation of music has been shaped by new technology, and some of the greatest records ever made exist because musicians figured out how to misuse whatever new machine somebody put in front of them. But there is a difference between technology helping people make music and music itself becoming another form of interactive entertainment.

We may be watching that line move right now.

The encouraging part is that unlimited quantity has never guaranteed cultural importance. There are more songs available today than any human being could hear in a thousand lifetimes, yet people still return to the same records that made them feel something. That tells me something important.

Maybe the next great opportunity in music will not come from making more of it. Maybe it will come from making something worth caring about.

If the industry wants to turn part of music into a game, there will probably be plenty of money in it. I just hope somewhere in all of this we remember that the best music was never created because someone wanted to pass Go and collect $200.

And for the record, I do not think I will be buying Suno: The Board Game anytime soon.