The part of the music business most affected by generation is not recorded artistry but production music, the functional catalogue used behind video and in commercial spaces. It absorbed the technology quickly for structural reasons.
What production music is bought for
A buyer needs a piece of a specified duration, mood and instrumentation that will sit behind something else without drawing attention.
Nobody is asked who wrote it, and the listener is not intended to notice it as music at all.
A product bought purely for function and never credited is the easiest possible case for a generated substitute.
Why the market was already commoditised
Production libraries had been competing on price and searchability for years before any of this, with enormous catalogues and subscription access.
Composers writing for those libraries were already producing to a brief with tight conventions, which is precisely the constrained task models handle well.
The economics had also compressed, so the incremental saving from generation was smaller than it looks and the disruption still substantial.
How licensing made generation attractive
Clearing music for commercial use involves territory, term, media and renewal, and mistakes are expensive.
A generated track with a straightforward commercial grant removes an administrative burden that buyers disliked more than they disliked the cost.
The clarity of that grant depends on the provider's terms and on unsettled questions about training data, which is a risk buyers have largely accepted rather than resolved.
Why the catalogues adapted rather than resisted
Libraries own distribution, search and customer relationships, none of which generation replaces.
Several have added generated material alongside commissioned work, using it to fill gaps in the catalogue where demand was thin and commissioning uneconomic.
That preserves their position while reducing what they pay for new material, which is the outcome an intermediary usually reaches when supply gets cheaper.
What survives at the top of the market
Work where the music is meant to be noticed has held up, including scoring for narrative film, brand themes and anything requiring a recognisable identity.
Those jobs involve conversation, revision against a director's response and judgement about what a scene needs, none of which is a generation task.
The effect on composers has therefore been uneven rather than general, falling hardest on the volume work that funded the careers from which the noticed work eventually came.