From Piano Rolls to LLMs: 100 Years of Creative Disruption
I was watching Pluribus recently, and there’s a scene where Carol is at dinner by herself. The room is quiet—too quiet. She notices the lack of atmosphere, walks over to a player piano—a piano that can play by itself—and turns it on.
It’s a small moment, but it got me thinking: how did the advent of the player piano affect the music economy, and what are the similarities to the adoption of AI today?
It turns out that the player piano wasn't just a gadget. It was the first time we successfully "automated" creative performance. The ramifications of that shift in the late 1800s look remarkably like the arc we are living through right now.
1. New Revenue & The "Mechanical" Economy
Before the player piano, if you wanted to hear music, a human had to be there to play it. This tech changed the "unit of value" from the performer to the data.
This shift created an entirely new industry (piano roll manufacturing) and birthed mechanical royalties. For the first time, a musician could "save" a recording and generate revenue while they slept. Sound familiar? We’re seeing that exact shift today as creators move from selling "services" to licensing their "data" to train LLMs.
2. The Living Room Migration (and the Loss of Community)
This is the part of the story we often forget. The player piano was a hit because it brought world-class talent into middle-income homes.
But there was a cost: The Living Room Migration. As music became an automated, private convenience, the social fabric changed. Live music social events—where the community gathered to watch a neighbor play—started to die out. We’re seeing a "Digital Migration" today. As AI makes content effortless, we risk further isolating ourselves in "content bubbles" where communal art is replaced by an automated loop.
3. The Great Displacement
The labor market of 1895 went through a violent correction. Professional piano players in bars and silent movie theaters saw their gigs vanish almost overnight.
However, the industry didn't die—it pivoted. The displacement forced a generation of musicians into music education and manufacturing for the new medium. AI is forcing a similar pivot for writers, designers, and coders today. The job doesn't always disappear, but the nature of the work transforms entirely.
4. The First Copyright War
The most striking parallel is the legal battle. The sheet music industry (the "Old Guard") was horrified by piano rolls. They saw it as theft—taking their compositions and turning them into "data" without permission.
It was a colossal battle on copyright conflicts that eventually required federal intervention. Today, as the New York Times sues OpenAI, we are simply watching Act II of a play that was written over a century ago.
What is the "Radio" for AI?
I love how easy it is to replace "player piano" with "AI" in this story, especially knowing exactly where we are in this current arc. But remember: the player piano era didn't last forever.
Despite its dominance, it was eventually made obsolete by the Great Depression and the advent of the radio. The radio offered something the piano couldn't: real-time connection and infinite variety.
As we navigate the AI arc, the question we should be asking isn't just "How do we regulate AI?" but rather: What is the "Radio" that eventually replaces the LLM?
Is it Robotics? Biocomputers? Whatever it is, we’ve seen this movie before—we’re just playing it on a different instrument.
