When we talk to our community about the future of music and culture, one topic dominates every conversation: AI.
AI is everywhere, and our community is participating. 90% use tools like ChatGPT, and nearly half use them daily. But as they're embracing this new technology, they're also doubling down on defences against it. Human curators. Algorithm-free spaces. Real-world connections.
The overarching message is clear: technology should amplify human creativity, not flatten it.
Boiler Room has always operated between online and real life spaces. That dual existence gives us a specific lens on this moment. We see how technology can serve culture, but are also aware of what gets lost when the human element disappears.
What follows is our perspective on this cultural reckoning with AI, shaped by thousands of voices from our global audience and our own position at the intersection of technology and culture. This essay explores how we protect what matters as everything shifts around us.
THE SMARTER TECH GETS, THE MORE HUMAN WE WANT CULTURE TO BE
HOW CULTURE GOT FLATTER - AND HOW TO FIGHT BACK
WHY MUSIC IS THE HARDEST ARTFORM TO AUTOMATE - AND WHY THAT MATTERS.
CURATION IS THE NEW COMMODITY.
SUBCULTURE IN THE AGE OF INSTANT VIRALITY.
THE SYSTEMS SHAPING THE CULTURAL FUTURE.
THE ERA OF DEEP DOUBT.
We surveyed 1000 members of the Boiler Room community across 92 countries. 84% of responses came from our core markets: Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Japan, Portugal, Spain, UK and USA, with the remaining 16% from 82 additional territories. We also spoke directly with artists, curators and cultural leaders navigating AI's impact on music culture. Their voices appear throughout this essay
Just a few years ago, the idea that AI slop would be everywhere on the social media feed, and AI-generated songs would be reaching millions of listens on streaming platforms, would be unimaginable. But, if
the mainstreaming of artificial intelligence in recent years has taught us anything, it's that we're undergoing a paradigm shift
Everything we know about culture is changing - from the ways we listen to music online, to the rise of automated, vibes-based playlists, IRL music scenes, and the future of creativity itself. Far from just another tool or technology, however,
AI is dissolving long-held boundaries between creator and consumer, original and derivative, signal and noise. 10% of our community use AI tools like Chat GPT with over 10% using them most days.
Youth culture has always embraced
new technology. But this time, young people are demanding that it serve creativity, community, and connection, not erode them.
Research says we spend 10 days a year glued to our phones. It's no surprise that a majority of our community are experiencing digital fatigue, recognising the negative effects of algorithms and the rapid speed of change they're having on their lives.
Between the unavoidable presence of AI-generated attention bait and algorithms pushing the same kind of content to us daily, social media - once a site of experimentation and play - now prioritises surface-level engagement over real connection. This contributes to an overall disorientating and unsatisfying digital experience.
Bridging the gap between underground and mainstream culture has always been one of our main priorities. We don't always get it right and we acknowledge the responsibility and imperfection that comes with the amplification of local scenes. But, as AI becomes increasingly present in our everyday lives, we believe human creativity, taste, trust, togetherness, and imperfection are becoming more valuable.
This pro-human sentiment is echoed by our community, who agree that real world connections are more valuable than ever, and feel they want to switch off and slow down. For this reason, personal networks
that champion community, connection and creativity are providing a refuge from the digital pressures, as well as engaging in live experiences and accessing trusted voices.
Boiler Room sits at the intersection of technology and culture.
What's happening right now is a fundamental rebalancing of that relationship. This essay is our POV on where that intersection is heading
Online platforms make users consume more content, faster - think of TikTok's For You feed or Spotify's algorithmic streambait. In the social media era, culture is both flattened and gamified. The banality of vibesbased playlists has forged a culture of passive listening and background muzak, algorithmically optimised for mass appeal. For example, a 2024 report by Dazed points to how songs are becoming simpler and more repetitive, a symptom of our fried attention spans. 10% of our community say algorithms serve the same content to all their friends.
While algorithms aren't necessarily all bad - TikTok is behind the success of countless artists, with 10% of Billboard Global 200 songs going viral on TikTok before hitting the charts - the continued homogenisation
of cultural taste has incentivised young people to go beyond recommendation algorithms.61% of Boiler Room's community actively trying to consume outside their algorithmic bubble. We see this reflected in reports of vinyl sales reaching a 20-yearhigh, which hints at an appetite for greater effort for greater reward when it comes to discovering culture. Three times as many of the BR audience prefer to do their own research and really dig into things (10%) versus relying on the algorithm (10%%). Record stores also provide IRL spaces for spontaneous music discovery. The rise of digital personalities provide users with more nuanced takes into the nicher, lesser-known parts of culture.
With less than 1 in 5 community respondents saying they trust algorithms more than human curators, trusted experts on MusicTok or newsletters are at the forefront of the counter-movement towards human-led curation. This suggests a rich community aspect that places a greater emphasis on social networks over algorithms.
A self-described “professional music fan”, internet music personality Derrick Gee posts short-form clips and artist interviews onto his TikTok, while his Substack provides a space for further in-depth analysis. Similarly, Margeaux Labat, better known as @marg.mp3, interviews her favourite artists about their favourite artists, and shares what she's been listening to across TikTok and Instagram. This isn't just limited to influencers, however. Last year, Pitchfork announced that it would be hiring Mano Sundaresan, the former editor of independent blog No Bells, as head of editorial content, as legacy media leans into the importance of real people over page views.
But when most artists still depend on the same platforms for revenue, platforms need to design for discovery that values originality and compensates artists fairly. The popularity of New York-based Nina Protocol, a rising independent music platform, among dedicated music listeners, is a direct response to the unfair compensation of artists, which forces smaller acts to compete for attention against the algorithm. The platform uses a community revenuesharing model, which distributes funds fairly to artists and listeners. It encourages listeners to actively discover independent artists primarily from the experimental scene.
This is particularly important as ghost songs populate streaming platforms and take what little money there's left from real artists - 10% of all music delivered to streaming platforms is fully-generated, according to Deezer, while streaming farms enlist bots to endlessly listen to these ghost songs and siphon off royalties.
Every tech overreach triggers its counter-movement. For instance, pirate radio emerged as a backlash against commercial radio, and Boiler Room against the mainstream appeal of MTV.
The counter-movement to
HYPER-PERSONALISATIONis risk, scarcity, and surprise. This is something that algorithms can't predict.
The mainstreaming of LLMs, through Chat GPT and text-to-image tools, pose both exciting opportunities and existential threats to artists.
50% of our community fears their job will be replaced by AI
This follows reports of major music labels suing AI music start-ups, Udio and Suno, for alleged copyright infringement on an “almost unimaginable scale”. Think of “Heart On My Sleeve”, the Drake deepfake that accumulated millions of listens in 2023, before it was pulled from streaming services by Universal Music Group. In October, Spotify announced it will be teaming up with Sony, Universal and Warner music groups to create new AI features with the aim of protecting artist's copyright. “If the music industry doesn't lead in this moment, AI-powered innovation will happen elsewhere, without rights, consent, or compensation,” it said.
But this hasn't stopped users from using AI tools to make a profit. For example, AI artist Xania Monet, who was made using Suno, was reportedly at the centre of a bidding war between multiple labels earlier this year, with one offering a $3 million record deal. Similarly, an AI-restored Beatles song won a Grammy, sparking concerns about the value of being human in an AI era.
This isn't to say that all AI is bad. But rather that AI as a tool is dissolving the boundaries between artists and audiences. It requires strong human components such as patience, skill and taste, to create interesting results. 10% of respondents use AI as part of their creative process. When a DJ samples an audio clip from another artist, the clip is copied and recontextualised. LLMs don't reproduce training data, they interpret what the prompt represents within its dataset - artist duo Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurtst describe this process as spawning (instead of sampling).
As one community member says: “I'm learning music production...can you give me tools to make the drums less saturated… It helps break it down in a simple way without having to go through a million YouTube videos.” But, as another community member points out: “There are AI mastering tools I tried before and had no luck with. When you talk to mixing or mastering engineers, you have your own language. You can say certain words and they'll know exactly what you mean. Whereas with AI it's more tricky because you have to be very descriptive about what you want to achieve. When you talk about sound, that's very difficult to do.”
The lack of ethical frameworks to protect copyrighted music from being used to train LLMs without an artist's permission is still a major concern for artists. For example, the release of OpenAI's Sora and Meta's Vibes are both under fire for copyright infringement. Studio Ghibli has taken to suing Sora 2 for using its work to train AI models without permission. Both LLMs serve up a stream of AIgenerated content with no human creators involved, featuring lowquality slop that prioritises quantity over quality.
Despite LLM's ability to spit out content faster than ever, the results ultimately feel cheap, empty and soulless. This suggests a future where AI accelerates or enhances human creativity, but doesn't replace it. There's so much more to music than the hardware. DJing is easy to automate, but the experience of seeing a DJ perform goes beyond the music - to meet other people, to dance together, to take a break from the screen time.
One thing that remains constant is music's ability to connect us. A DJ's stage presence or their split-second decision to change gears. The energetic feedback between an artist and the crowd.
Or the live, unrepeatable human moments that come from a band collaborating to create something on stage.
These moments can never be recreated, let alone prompted. This is exactly what makes the Boiler Room archives so valuable.
The more the algorithm knows us, the more we crave the unknown. 10% of our community say personalisation is useful, but 10% don't want their data used for it. This signals a desire for curation, not prediction. As a 10% human curated platform, Boiler Room facilitates the discovery of niche scenes, prioritising quality line-ups over monthly listeners. Our network spans artists, curators, producers, designers, technicians, stage managers, and promotion partners, who all bring their local expertise to the table.
Over the past year, there's been signs of an AI vibe shift in response to the growing backlash to low-tier slop. This has resulted in mass backlash, consumer fatigue and declining trust. In response, we've observed a newer culture of online recommendation emerge that emphasises subjective personal taste, because curation is the new commodity.
In 2024, Perfectly Imperfect, the cult newsletter, launched its own social platform, which nods to an internet before “AI, soulless algo curation, psychopathic CEOs, and slop content”. The platform has a distinct visible human touch, and provides an antidote to the slickness of most online content. By spotlighting the tastes of people across
different scenes, it plays a similar role to legacy media before social media took over. It provides users with wellinformed context to act as a buffer against the digital chaos.
The return of human-led curation hints at a nostalgia for simpler times, back when the Internet brought us together, instead of pushing us apart into algorithmic echo chambers. In an era of information overload, there's an inauthenticity to social media. All content feels like an ad, and genuine connection takes place elsewhere, in the DMs or in IRL spaces. Human users play a crucial role in making sense of the rapid pace of the infinite scroll. Their unpredictability is exactly what distinguishes them from AI generated content.
10% of the Boiler Room audience think imperfection is important in making content feel real or trustworthy.
We see this in wider culture with the popularity of typos as a way to social signal a person's inherent humanness. In contrast, em-dashes are becoming less popular because of their association with Chat GPT. The revival of iPods, digital camcorders, and DIY zine culture also hint at how human-led imperfection and nostalgia serves as an alternative to the slickness of the digital world. “I really like zines, I spend a lot of money on that… I think I just love the physical format, just having something to touch,” says one community member. “It broadens my perspective on things and allows me to see new things that wouldn't necessarily get suggested.” In most cases, being authentic is way more valuable than automation
Over the last seven years, TikTok has rewired the music industry. Its ability to transform niche experiments to viral hits has created a new industry standard around musical trends. Whereas previously it would've taken years for artists to gain traction, now can take a matter of weeks, if not days. For some artists, the platform's virality machine has propelled them to stardom. But as the market saturates, platform virality can be hard to sustain. Artists are tasked with reproducing their initial success with little support. Many feel the pressure to create a certain kind of music that's designed to go viral.
With 10 % of our community feeling they need to navigate between algorithmic success and artistic integrity, it's becoming more apparent that the cultural significance of music nowadays has much less to do with its subcultural origins than its aesthetic. As one community member observes: “TikTok made it harder to have niche culture and underground stuff. Everything is made for viral content and made to discover something. It's really hard to have a subculture because of TikTok culture.”
Beneath the surface of the mainstream, however, niche culture has never been easier to access online.
There seems to be content for almost everything. This also makes it harder to find. Before social media, subcultures were formed in clubs and IRL venues. But nowadays the divide isn't so clear. Social media makes the aesthetics of subculture easily imitable. But the real magic happens in real life - in IRL spaces and on the dancefloor.
Social media algorithms distort and amplify our preferences, making it difficult for grassroots communities to thrive. Either that, or they're pulled into the mainstream too fast. Developing a musical identity takes years of subtle evolution, while honing a community and value set is better achieved out of the spotlight. Rising too fast into the mainstream, in contrast, doesn't allow for enough time for artists to develop themselves properly. The overnight pressure ofsudden exposure makes them more susceptible to poor (short term) choices, increasing the risk of fizzling out. Responding to this, platforms and brands must fundamentally rethink how they engage with these ecosystems. To preserve their values by funding grassroots spaces, compensating early-stage artists, and resisting the extractive dynamics of algorithmic culture.
For this reason, Boiler Room's evolving role is not gatekeeping but contextualising, helping scenes maintain their integrity as they surface into the mainstream. For example, Arca returning to her creative roots in Caracas for Venezuela's first Boiler Room in 2024 was a celebration of her trailblazing talent. Tokischa returned to the Dominican Republic for a live set, where she reconnected with her community, an ongoing source...
...of inspiration. Elsewhere, Yousuke's viral Boiler Room in Tokyo served as a vital moment of cultural exchange, blowing up his career as a DJ. Following Boiler Room's first broadcast in Pakistan in 2022, recent shows across Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka continued to spotlight contemporary scenes across South Asia, showing global audiences what youth culture looks and sounds like across the world from the POV of the artists shaping it.
As brands continue to experiment with AI, the impact of recent campaigns points to a more general dislike towards AI tools within our community. For example, Guess' AI model in Vogue and Mango's decision to use AI-generated avatars in its advertising campaigns signals a backlash within the creative-led industries when AI is used for marketing.
Only 10% of Boiler Room's audience say they don't mind if brands use AI for advertising and content if the human creators are properly compensated (compared to 10% of the general population). For example, H&M paid real models for the rights to create their digital twin. But was also accused of contributing to job losses, with AI tools cutting campaign costs by upwards of 10% . Despite guardrails being put in place to protect creatives - the AI Act introduced in the EU in 2026 that will require AI images to be labelled - preserving human agency over automation remains a core belief within our community.
That said, we need to distinguish between companies using AI for economic reasons and the possibilities of these AI models as an emerging artform. For example, early adopters in the music industry are using AI to experiment with new models of ownership. Think of Grimes' experimentations with AI-generated alter egos to Sevdaliza's collaboration with AI voice model Myvox. Or Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon's ongoing experimentation into human and machine collaboration. Such examples point to more ethical ways that AI can be used as a creative tool, instead of simply automation as an end goal.
But wider concerns about the ethics of AI aren't specific to the creative industries. They have wider implications for society, such as the environmental cost of using AI tools in an era of climate crisis. Half of Boiler Room's community try to limit AI use because of its carbon footprint. This signals that sustainability must become part of creative innovation. The environmental damage caused by the rapid development of AI has also been shown to negatively impact the global south more than the west.
AI models have been proven to replicate existing inequalities within society, exhibiting gender and racial biases. But AI can also offer opportunities for economic empowerment outside the western bubble. 10%of Indian BR respondents think AI could help them to start a new business compared to 10% in the UK. The impact and perspective of these systems depends on where you're based in the world. A similar attitude can be sensed in global perspectives towards AI in general.
According to a Stanford report, a large majority of people believe AIpowered products and services offer more benefits than drawbacks in countries like China (83%), Indonesia (80%), and Thailand (77%), while only a minority share this view in Canada (40%), the United States (39%), and the Netherlands (36%).This, however, doesn't distract from the human curated musical ecosystems thriving outside of western algorithmic norms. Whether it's the soaring success of Nyege Nyege festival in Uganda or collectives such as Dialled In shining a light on South Asian club culture.
We are entering a new cultural era where authenticity, human taste, and IRL connection are becoming premium. In this moment of Deep Doubt, authorship and authenticity, fact and fiction, are becoming increasingly hard to tell apart.
Almost 10% of our community believes that we are heading toward aFUTURE where no-one will be able to tell what is real.
Technology is advancing so fast, it's hard to keep up with the seemingly endless conveyor belt of new trends and releases, which themselves feel increasingly empty and meaningless. In the face of an increasingly enshittified Internet, we need new models that defend and elevate humancreativity. As a cultural leader, Boiler Room is navigating this shift - amplifying scenes with care, continuing to invest in grassroots spaces, and contextualising movements as they
in the face of increased automation. Think of Rosalía describing her highly-anticipated LUX as a “human album”, featuring an orchestra of acoustic instruments. The return of shoegaze and guitar music more generally in experimental scenes also places greater emphasis on humanled creation.
In wider culture, Hinge joined Substack recently, launching No Ordinary Love, described as an “anthology of imperfect love stories” from “fresh literary voices”. Films such as A24's Heretic have begun to add 'No AI Was Used' statements to their end credits. Even when AI is used as a tool, it will likely be as Brian Eno predicted when he said: “Whatever you find weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit, all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.”
AI will keep shaping music and youth culture, but it's IRL spaces that cut through the noise. The value of real-world community, connection, and creativity are a crucial part of this. As one community member observes: “I feel like it's getting more popular to get away from social media. A lot of clubs are doing no phones on the dancefloor now, which I think is really dope… People are going to want more space away from the Internet.” This allows artists and creators the offline space to hone their craft and community before online exposure. “It's very important for me to be able to stay away from just the digital world, something that feels intentional and curated and not just suggested to me because I like it,” another points out. “It broadens my perspective on things and allows me to see new things that wouldn't necessarily get suggested.” Club culture has always been a tool for community and resistance. It's only in coming together that we can fight the isolating forces of the algorithm. In this context,
club culture pushes against the boundaries of an increasingly homogenous online landscape. Niche communities provide a well-needed alternative to digital connection, which prizes hyperindividualism above all. In contrast, live performances are key to offline authentication; they're the only way to truly feel the energy and authenticity of an underground scene.
As a platform, Boiler Room uses technology for distribution; its true identity has always been centred on human curation and to build spaces where creativity, connection and community still lead. Technology is an ever-evolving tool, an interface that connects us to our community.
AI is reshaping the cultural landscape, but it's our priority to safeguard the human qualities that bring us together.
