Bedroom Producers Blog poll: 2,096 readers want AI music tools covered, but not software that generates songs

Bedroom Producers Blog asked its readers how it should cover AI in music software, and 2,096 of them answered. 72% gave a “hard no” to tools that generate finished music from a text prompt, the strongest rejection of the 6 AI uses in the poll.

Tomislav Zlatic, who has written about plugins on BPB since 2009, published the results on November 9, 2026. Readers also left 762 comments, and roughly 89% chose some form of AI coverage over none at all.

So BPB will keep covering useful AI tools, including plugins built with AI’s help. It will stop covering tools that generate finished music from prompts.

How Bedroom Producers Blog readers rated 6 uses of AI in plugins

Zlatic asked about 6 ways AI shows up in music software. Each one had 4 possible answers: “fine by me”, “depends”, “not a fan” and “hard no”.

Here’s how they landed, from the most accepted to the most rejected:

• A professional developer using AI to write code faster: 52% fine by me, plus 25% depends.
• A plugin using AI for one specific job, like stem separation, noise removal or hardware modeling: 49% fine by me, plus 33% depends.
• Someone who can’t code building a plugin with AI: around 54% not a fan or hard no.
• MIDI, chord or loop generation: 58% not a fan or hard no.
• Automated mixing or mastering: 59% not a fan or hard no.
• Finished music from a text prompt: 72% hard no, 88% once you add “not a fan”, and only 5% fine by me.

Zlatic’s own read is that opinions depend on what the plugin actually does. Stem splitting, the job tools like LALAL.AI do, sits on the accepted side. Text-to-song generators like Suno sit at the far end of the rejected side.

The comments show the exceptions, though. Zlatic says some readers use generated vocals they can’t record themselves, and one uses automated mastering to make up for high-frequency hearing loss.

Which brings it back to the question the poll was built to answer: what should BPB cover?

What Bedroom Producers Blog readers want the site to cover

The main question was how BPB should handle AI tools, including plugins made with AI. The largest group, 37%, wanted useful AI tools covered, with AI music generators left out.

Another 35% wanted coverage with a disclosure whenever AI is involved. 17% wanted everything covered so they could skip what they don’t like, and 11% wanted no AI coverage at all.

That puts 1,856 of the 2,096 respondents, roughly 89%, on the side of some coverage.

The word “AI” still costs a plugin readers, though. 24% said they close the tab when they see it in a description, 35% are skeptical but read on, another 35% say it depends on what the plugin does, and 5% are interested whatever the use.

Even so, 60% of the 506 readers who close the tab still wanted some form of coverage. Zlatic says the comments explain why: readers want to know what a tool does, whether it runs locally or on a server, and what’s known about its training material.

Why Bedroom Producers Blog readers worry about vibe-coded plugins

Vibe coding means building software by prompting an AI instead of writing the code yourself. A lot of the 762 comments were about plugins made that way, and the worries were practical: crashes, heavy CPU use, frustrating interfaces and a developer who can’t fix a bug.

Maintenance came up again and again. Readers want to know whether a plugin will still work after a DAW update, and whether its creator will stick around to support it.

Others pushed back. One reader wrote: “If a plugin is good, recommend it. If it’s bad, what difference does it make whether it was made by a real programmer or a neural network?”

The same day the results went up, Tuned Plugins launched its V2 vocal bundle with a “F*CK AI SLOP” campaign aimed at rushed AI-made plugins. And if you want to see what building a plugin from a prompt looks like, I covered Sonorie, which builds a working VST3 plugin from a chat description.

How the 2026 Bedroom Producers Blog poll compares with its 2023 AI survey

BPB has asked its readers about AI before. In May 2023, it surveyed 1,533 producers about AI in music production.

The 2 polls asked different questions, so the numbers don’t line up one to one. The 2023 survey asked what AI might do to producers, and the 2026 poll asked which AI tools readers are willing to see covered.

Other 2026 surveys landed on a similar split. A Muse Group survey of 1,200 musicians found 78% open to AI tools while most oppose AI replacing them, and Uppbeat’s creator report found that only 6.7% of 1,792 creators accept fully AI-generated work.

Zlatic is upfront about the limits of his own poll. The answers came from volunteers among BPB’s readers, so he doesn’t treat them as a sample of all music producers.

What Tomislav Zlatic will and won’t cover on Bedroom Producers Blog now

Zlatic says the volume is the problem. “There are literally dozens of new plugins appearing daily, and many of them share the same vibe-coded look,” he wrote.

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Nowadays, for me as an editor, working through so many low-effort plugins made with AI is becoming almost unbearable.

He won’t ban AI outright, though. Many of the professional developers he’s spoken to use AI to write code faster and understand the code they ship, so a blanket ban would cut good plugins from experienced developers.

His rule from here: “I’ll continue covering useful tools, including those developed with AI assistance, but I won’t cover tools that generate finished music from prompts.” Readers also asked him to be more selective, to explain why a release is worth trying and to label alpha and beta versions clearly.

Zlatic calls this a transitional period. He expects the “slopware wave will fizzle out at some point,” once bug fixes and customer support show which new developers are worth paying attention to.