Why I Paid Human Musicians + Artists to Create the Sonic Identity for My Podcast

Earlier this week I posted on LinkedIn about a project that my team and I have been working on for nearly a year. During the pandemic, I created a video show which many of you watched. After a smart suggestion (and fair criticism) from Chhavi about how two heads talking wasn’t really compelling on video … I decided to invest in turning the show into an audio podcast. The audio for episodes would need to be remastered, the quality improved and the format changed.

In addition, I knew I wanted a distinctive sound identity for the show including music, narration to voice the intro and a well edited conversation flow. All of this could be done with AI and as someone who writes about the future … using tech would have been the natural choice. Instead, I chose to hire human experts. I brought in a studio to record custom music. I found a former broadcast journalist to do the voice over and enlisted a sound engineer to remaster the audio.

Last week Vox published an in depth article about the future of music and AI. The big question was the one on everyone’s mind: what if AI replaces people?

The question is one I have been thinking about recently too in relation to my own experience. Why didn’t I just turn to AI to do it all? I believe in hiring and paying creative professionals for high quality work, so that’s one reason. But the other truth is that we did actually use AI … or rather, the professionals that I hired used it. That’s the message we don’t hear often enough. AI isn’t always an alternative to creative professionals. Sometimes it’s a tool that can help them deliver better work faster because they understand the one thing that most of the rest of us struggle with … when to use AI and when to put it aside.