RIŽIK's case for optimism: tame the machine, don't fear it

Most takes on the future of music read like a eulogy. AI replaces artists. Streaming gutted the value of a song. Algorithms run the culture. So it is worth stopping on a piece that argues the opposite. Los Angeles live electronic artist RIŽIK, known offstage as Hisham Dahud, just made his case for optimism.

His read: the industry is heading for a correction. Not away from technology, but back toward humanity.

Streaming, not AI, is the deeper break

Dahud has been around music his whole working life. His first real job was running MySpace pages for DJ Shadow and Pretty Lights, which turned into a decade in music marketing. He now teaches Artist Entrepreneurship at UCLA.

From that seat, he watched music shift from something tied to identity and discovery into something treated as a utility. Streaming dropped the barriers to entry, which was good. It also flattened songs into background supply.

That framing matters. He does not pin the problem on AI alone. He pins it on a system that turned music into content, a shift that some platforms are now pushing back against.

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Maybe the machine was never the enemy. Maybe forgetting our humanity inside of it was.

Tame the machine

Dahud’s answer is a performance philosophy he calls Tame the Machine, built on humanity, risk, and real-time creation. The human stays in the driver’s seat. The tools serve the moment, not the other way around.

He does not predict the death of music. He predicts the collapse of certain systems around it, and from that collapse, something smaller and more human: tighter communities, stronger fan connections, more intentional support, more real experiences.

It is a useful counterweight to the doom. Artists are right to watch what automation does to jobs, and right to ask hard questions, like James Blake has. Dahud’s point is that fear is not the only honest response available.