CENTRAL to my thoughts this week has been the fact that in the coming months, the experience of seeing Jeff Lynne and the Electric Light Orchestra live will soon be one for the memory bank of history – for he is currently on his goodbye tour.

At the grand age of 77, and exactly a year at the time of writing since the death of his long-serving and immensely talented sidekick Richard Tandy, its hard to begrudge Mr Lynne his semi-retirement in retreating to the place where he says he’s happiest – the studio. After all, he says he’s still going to make music, and that in itself is good news for those of us who love music.

The debate on if Jeff Lynne is one of the greatest music producers for another time (hint: he is) is probably for another time but its yet another reminder that as we get older, the era of music we grew up with and cherished is coming towards its close. After all, we’re all getting old.

Thankfully, the music will always live on and the access to it has never been more diverse thanks to the advent of the digital era but we find ourselves asking a question – will we remember the music of today in fifty years time in the same way we remember our Electric Light Orchestras, our Fleetwood Macs, or the bands that shaped how we viewed the world as a kid? The answer, I’m afraid I suspect is no.

A big part of the reason for that is it would seem that music, particularly mainstream is more homogenised now than it’s ever been. Pop music has always had an element of uniformity, but even then, you can tell your Spice Girls from your Atomic Kittens. But as for the music of today, it seems to be more formulaic than ever to the point where you can’t really tell which is which.

The reason I ask if we will remember it, with a few exceptions aside is that music these days is the equivalent of a bottle of milk. With the exception of the day it goes off, each time you pick up a bottle of milk, you know what it’s going to be like because it’s the exact same as what came before. And who fondly remembers a bottle of milk?

It will be interesting to see what becomes of AI in music – I was fiddling with one of them music AI apps the other day, just to see if I could get a pop song out of ‘I like to relieve myself in kitty litter, I hate X so bring back twitter’ and a couple other lines I’ve forgotten. The answer is yes. And it was quite good.

But there was absolutely no creativity to it. Just someone bored with a phone app. It’s music by robots. I wonder what Kraftwerk would make of such automation when you consider they spent most of their career as humans making “robot pop”.