Autogenerated Music Hits a Sour Note at One Major Airport

Some thoughts on AI- slop invading the music world and it's abrupt departure from one city's airport.

Pour one out for the former airport director here in Madison. After a long and storied run, she's out. There are plenty of reasons that her ouster was warranted, but one that should have made the list was her insistence on playing bland music in the terminal.

To be clear, the bar for "boring" here is pretty low. People are angsty enough in an airport, so no need for anything extreme. But it should at least be invigorating. Something that sets the tone for the adventure you're about to go on. Instead, we got dreary synthetic type stuff. Something so anodyne you don't notice it because it s good—or even because it's awful— but because it's so…well, nothing. In other words, the last thing you want before the sun comes up and the coffee kicks in. It honestly would've been better if Muzak still existed, and that was getting piped in. At least it was kitschy!

Whoever's filled the void has been doing a much better job. More than once over the last several weeks, I've caught myself wondering what a song was or being delighted at hearing something I hadn't heard in years. Bobby Womack's Daylight? Yes, please!

By definition, Muzak was not meant to be listened to per se, only heard— something happening in the background while you were doing something else, be it shopping, using an elevator, or transiting an airport terminal. Its replacement (actual tracks, but automated) is somehow worse. We expect a human touch to be additive. The bar's a bit higher. And I'm not saying that an airport's the place for music discovery, but it wouldn't hurt! If nothing else, hearing an old favorite—or a new one— becomes a line typed into the story of your latest life event. A little sidenote sprinkled into your memories of it all.

I've been thinking a lot about the flattening of music consumption lately—not just the literal compression on platforms like Spotify but the anonymous style that has become the default option. It's all very beige (and not an intense one). It is the musical equivalent of slop.

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