Brandon's Head of Strategy shares why he believes the quiet death of the band is the most important thing brands should understand about AI.
When I'm working, you'll usually find me listening to music. Today, though, I'm sitting with Sam Neill's autobiography, read by the great man himself (RIP). He cites Sgt. Pepper's as the most important song of his life and this struck a chord with me (sorry for the pun, Sam). In 1964, four young men from Liverpool held the top five positions on the Billboard Hot 100 in a single week. Sixty years later, the summit of the charts belongs almost entirely to individuals: Taylor Swift, Drake, Billie Eilish, The Weeknd. The band, that messy, argumentative, gloriously imaginative unit, has been quietly retired.
The numbers read like a bass drop. A 67-year analysis of the Hot 100 found that bands claimed only around a third of the top spots across the entire period, and the decline steepens the closer you get to now. Datawrapper's charting of the same story places the peak firmly in the 1960s. In 2024, not a single band appeared among the world's ten most-streamed songs or its ten biggest artists.
None of the reasons are about talent.
1. Virtualisation
You no longer need four people in a room, an amp each and a van to move them. You need a laptop, a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation, my sonically gifted son tells me) and a bedroom. The apparatus that once made a band necessary, the physical, collective act of making a sound too big for one person, has broken down into software.
2. Marketing
One face is simply easier to sell than four. No competing egos, no touring logistics, no royalty split, no drummer who wants a solo. One artist is one story, one image, one clean narrative arc. Labels and media have always preferred a protagonist to an ensemble. I remember The Prodigy once describing their bemusement when the press kept trying to cast Keith Flint, their occasional vocalist and dancer, as the frontman. In their minds, they were always an ensemble.
3. Algorithm
Streaming platforms visibly favour solo artists and collaborations who can feed the machine relentlessly: release after release, unencumbered by anyone else's schedule or opinion. Faster, cheaper, more legible to the systems that distribute music. On every efficiency metric, going it alone is the rational choice.
And yet...
Creative tension drives distinction
A band is a negotiation. The song that survives four opinions is almost always stronger than the song that survives one. Lennon plus McCartney plus a producer willing to tell him no gave us work that neither man could have made by himself. The friction was the point. The bass player who hated the chorus, the drummer who changed the tempo, the argument that ran until two in the morning.
Take the friction away and you don't just lose the fights. You lose the creative magic the fights produced.
AI is the ultimate solo act
AI removes the last practical reason you ever needed a second person in the room. One subscription, one operator, and you can generate a brand strategy, name, visual territory, tone of voice, manifesto and a campaign competently, fast and entirely alone. It is the most powerful solo-enabling instrument the creative industries have ever been handed.
And the pull toward it is hard to resist, because the pressure is real. Clients are more time-poor than ever. Deadlines compressed, budgets scrutinised, and the need to have something credible by Thursday, not a considered response next month. When a tool promises to collapse three weeks of work into an afternoon, reaching for it isn't laziness, it's a rational response to a genuine squeeze, which is exactly what makes the drift so dangerous. The homogenising option is the fast one, and time is the thing everyone is short of.
In music production, the emerging consensus is blunt: general-purpose AI, trained on everything, regresses to the middle. The output is an average of everything it has ever heard. But, as one audio engineer put it, “acceptable is the enemy of memorable”.
The same gravity acts on brands. A model trained on the whole internet and prompted by a single person is pulled, inexorably, toward the mean of everything it has seen. It’s the branding equivalent of a factory preset: perfectly serviceable, faintly familiar, and indistinguishable from the three other brands generated the same way that week.
The value of collaboration
For decades, part of an agency's value lay in production, making things most clients couldn't make for themselves. AI is quietly collapsing that advantage. Competent production is becoming a commodity, available to anyone with a prompt and an afternoon.
The value has to move. And it moves straight back to the thing the solo artist gave up in exchange for efficiency: collaboration. The friction between a strategist, a designer and a client who each see the problem differently. The idea that has to survive the room before it earns the right to leave it. The specific, argued-for perspective that no single AI model can hold, because it isn't the average of anything. Distinctiveness has always been a product of tension, not consensus.
To be clear, I’m not arguing against AI. Used well, it's the opposite of a threat. In the hands of a band, a real collaboration of different perspectives, AI can be an accelerant. It can absorb the grunt work and generate raw material faster than any team could alone, freeing up the humans for the part that actually creates value: the arguing, the editing, the judgement, the taste.
Ultimately the point is that it was never that solo artists lack ability. It's that when the tools make working alone this easy, everything quietly drifts towards the same sound. The work that genuinely cuts through is almost always the work that had more than one mind in it, creating friction together to make a sound that's unmistakably yours.
So, the brief for bands (and brands) for the next few years is simple, and it rhymes with the oldest instinct in music:
Get the band back together.