Singapore Music Studios Lose Up to 60% of Project Budgets as Clients Turn to AI

Singapore's music and audio production studios are facing a sharp budget squeeze as clients increasingly turn to artificial intelligence for music and voiceover work. Several firms told CNA that project budgets have fallen by 10 to 40 percent, with individual projects seeing cuts of up to 60 percent over the past two to three years. The volume of content being produced is rising, but the money attached to each project is shrinking.

The shift is not just about cost — it is reshaping the perceived value of creative work. Donny Pereira, managing director of audio house plusONE, said AI has changed how clients evaluate human creative output. His firm has reduced freelancer usage by 20 to 30 percent because clients now prefer AI-generated alternatives that can be revised ten times for the cost of one human session. Tasks that once required voice actors, studio time, and multiple revision rounds can now be completed in minutes.

Yet the industry is not uniformly capitulating. Muhammad Zahin Anwari, creative director at Zynth Studios, said his firm uses AI as an assistive tool for generating rough concepts and exploring chord progressions, especially under tight deadlines — and clients still return for the human touch. Fully AI-generated music and voiceovers, he noted, often sound unnatural and lack emotional resonance. "Machines cannot experience pain. Machines cannot experience sacrifice," he said, arguing that authentic human creativity becomes more valuable precisely because AI cannot replicate lived experience.

The talent pipeline is where the deepest concern lies. As automation eats into entry-level tasks — copywriting, transcription, basic sound design — the mid-level roles that depend on those early learning opportunities become harder to reach. "If everything is automated, where do we begin?" Pereira asked. Cross Ratio Entertainment, which has seen budget reductions of 10 to 30 percent, said clients still demand services rooted in human relationships: artist development, branding, and community building.

Why it matters for Singapore: Singapore has positioned itself as a regional hub for digital content creation, with government schemes like the newly launched S$48 million media fund actively encouraging AI adoption. But this story reveals the other side of the productivity coin: creative professionals are being squeezed in real time. As IMDA pushes for more AI experimentation in media, the industry is calling for clearer ethical guidelines, stronger creator protections, and AI-specific training to ensure the next generation of Singaporean creatives does not get automated out before they can even start.