I think that begs the question, what is 'average' or 'best'? It's music enjoyed by many people. Why do they enjoy it? Because it matches their taste in music. I think we're ultimately going to get super-personalised recommendations and even original artworks tailored exactly to what we like. The true challenge in implementing this will be to find a way to 'generalise taste adaptation'. Creating a model that can adapt to any person's taste based on as little information as possible. I think that will give us very deep insights into how our preferences are formed as research progresses.
I'm sometimes scared that life will loose its spark when AI is just able to solve any problem better or faster than humans. I think music generation is scary, because music is often created using your intuition, rather than relying on general principles or strict rules alone. Intuition feels almost magical, because it feels like you somehow just know the right thing to do, without having to reason about it. If AI gained this hard-to-grasp 'intuition', that would reveal that we are just biological machines after all, and intuition is simply a sophisticated hidden pattern.
This raises deep questions: What even is creativity? How does taste emerge? Is it just the accumulation of your experiences and your genetics, or is there something else to it? If it's just experiences and genetics, AI will probably outpace humans at some point, because these are just very sophisticated patterns. And if it's not, we would have to assume something metaphysical, for which we do not have evidence.
This is a really fascinating topic, and I think it might give us new insight into the human condition. I'm excited to see where this leads us.
I tried AI music for the first time today and I can definitely see why people say it feels bland, because it does. But most of what's on the radio today feels bland to me too. You're right - I don't really care if the track playing in my favourite cafe is AI-generated or not. You're not supposed to be emotionally invested into background music, it's music for a simple purpose and for most people, AI can fill that purpose as well as a human. Licensing fees is also a great point, human music royalties are complex and expensive, while AI generated music is a monthly subscription at most.
I can't say I fully agree with you on video game/movie soundtracks, but I think AI generated assets will make game development more accessible, especially for solo developers or small teams.
So I'd just say listen to what you like, see where technology leads us. I don't think human creators will be put out of buisiness any time soon, but they might get competition especially in 'functional' music.