Joe Bonamassa sounds off on AI and the mysterious AI blues artist on the Billboard charts
Joe Bonamassa has weighed in on one of the biggest debates currently facing the music industry: the growing use of artificial intelligence and what it means for working musicians.
During a recent interview with Blues Rock Review at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival in Austin, Bonamassa was asked about AI’s impact on music. The conversation quickly turned to Eddie Dalton, an artist whose presence on the Billboard blues charts has raised questions within the blues community.
“Do you know who Eddie Dalton is?” Bonamassa asked.
Bonamassa said, “Never seen him play live, never met him.”
“He’s a legitimate artist in the eyes of some,” Bonamassa added.
But Bonamassa also made it clear that listeners ultimately have the right to decide what they want to hear.
“The fans will respond to what they respond to,” he said. “The reality of it is this: when people want to zone out, and they want to put music on in the car, if they like AI music, that’s 100% their right. There’s nothing wrong with that. If they want to put on a Marcus King record, if they want to put on an Eric Gales record or whoever, that’s their right.”
His concern is less about telling listeners what they should enjoy and more about whether AI-generated projects should compete directly with living musicians.
“Whatever they particularly enjoy, that’s 100%. This is a supply and demand business,” Bonamassa said. “Should those artists be in the same category as living people out there? No. That’s a horrible thing.”
Bonamassa believes AI use is already considerably more widespread within the music industry than some musicians may be willing to acknowledge publicly.
“Everybody’s on the honor system,” he said, pointing to artists being called out for using AI to assist with lyrics and other parts of the creative process.
Bonamassa acknowledged the rising popularity of SUNO, which is being used to create songs through AI while at the same time understanding the entertainment business.
“If someone uses SUNO to write a lyric, okay, it’s not a high crime, a misdemeanor,” he said, adding that he personally has never used it.
What he does reject is the idea that musicians can simply pretend AI has not become part of the industry.
“Unless you’re living under a rock, now, do I think, do I hear it in some music? Absolutely. Did I just listen to 200 blues records and heard it a few times? Absolutely.”
Bonamassa believes the pressure to get noticed makes AI particularly tempting for emerging artists. In an industry dominated by social media, streaming platforms and constant competition for attention, he argued that some musicians will use whatever tools are available if they believe those tools can advance their careers.
“If I can use this program to get a leg up and maybe I get a few more people out of my show, you know that’s happening,” Bonamassa said. “We’d be very remiss to just bury our head in the sand, say it’s not, because it is.”
Despite the rapidly changing technology surrounding music, Bonamassa’s broader philosophy remains rooted in something far more traditional: the ability to perform.
As AI-generated music becomes increasingly difficult to separate from human-created recordings, Bonamassa’s comments highlight a distinction that could become increasingly important: creating something that sounds convincing is one thing. Walking onto a stage and convincing an audience is another.
Watch the full interview with Joe Bonamassa below.
I totally agree with Joe on the live performance being the point if departure over AI use. Joe is my absolute favorite performer to see live at this point in my life. I was married to a well connected sound engineer for a long time, long before ai but not before auto tune. I got to hear some of the best artists the west coast produced from the 70s to the 90s. I get production, but the live delivery is the foundation of the art. Just saying.
Bonamassa’s comments about SUNO and the honor system point to a practical need for clearer credits. Listeners can choose what they enjoy while still knowing how a recording was made. That question extends to storytelling: readers approaching a fictional title such as I Can Smell You From Here may also care about authorship and creative contributions. I would like to see platforms explain those contributions clearly, alongside the separate question of how chart categories should work.
I think that if the song and artist are AI generated then the listening public should be told upon it’s release so we can decide if we want to listen to fake artists! I do not want to listen to or PURCHASE music made by an app period!
Totally agree 👍
So relevent to me right now. My musical partner sent a couple of very minimal simple song ideas to another musician we know. Shortly after he sent them back after putting them into an AI app. They were totally transformed. One sounded like a large number of recent “pop-rock” songs, if quite over the top & fussy to my ears. The second, from less than a minute of simple piano & vocal had become a harmonically complex jazzy arrangement of horns & strings. It was musically pretty impressive. I could imagine making it but it would have been a lot of writing, rehearsing & studio time with hire of string & horn sections. Way beyond any budget we have. I said to my partner, I could imagine bands using AI like this, to give them “interesting arrangements” of their basic ideas, then imitating the results.
I since discovered from session musician reports that bands already are. But to me that would amount to something fake.
The point of human music is to communicate human ideas & feelings, from our own limited viewpoint.
AI has scraped the entire internet of music to make a facsimile of this, often it seems, without honouring any notion of copyright etc. This has been the case in book publishing with a recent court action by publishers against AI co. scraping activities.
So relevent to me right now. My musical partner sent a couple of very minimal simple song ideas to another musician we know. Shortly after he sent them back after putting them into an AI app. They were totally transformed. One sounded like a large number of recent “pop-rock” songs, if quite over the top & fussy to my ears. The second, from less than a minute of simple piano & vocal had become a harmonically complex jazzy arrangement of horns & strings. It was musically pretty impressive. I could imagine making it but it would have been a lot of writing, rehearsing & studio time with hire of string & horn sections. Way beyond any budget we have. I said to my partner, I could imagine bands using AI like this, to give them “interesting arrangements” of their basic ideas, then imitating the results.
I since discovered from session musician reports that bands already are. But to me that would amount to something fake.
The point of human music is to communicate human ideas & feelings, from our own limited viewpoint.
AI has scraped the entire internet of music to make a facsimile of this, often it seems, without honouring any notion of copyright etc. This has been the case in book publishing with a recent court action by publishers against AI co. scraping activities.
thanks for sharing! [Link deleted]