You are on to the key insight here.. what is emerging is the creative consumer. I.e. I know what I want when I hear it. Or I know what I want when I see it.

This means you can hear something and say.. you know this is nice, but I would like it more if it were different in this way.

With generative tools you can do that. Personally I really like to listen to music, but I generally dislike the lyrics. I want uplifting songs, maybe about what I am doing right now to motivate me. Well with something like Suno.com.. I can just make one. Or I can work with claude or chatgpt to quickly iterate on some lyrics and edit them to create an even higher fidelity song.

The key here is that I can give a rat's ass if anyone in the world likes or cares about my song.. but I can listen to it while I work. It is exactly what I wanted to listen to or close enough.

My theory is that as the quality of these generative tools increase, we'll see the public opinion of them slowly shift. Regardless of philosophy (although discussing it is always fun), it just seems inevitable since there are so many more consumers than producers. And as you say, consumers are the ones that will primarily benefit from this new technology. As a consumer we care primarily (some could argue solely) about our own emotional reaction to the music —or more generally put, art-piece.

In practical terms I also believe that this will give rise to a lot of new consumer behavior, and, as you so aptly puts it "creative consumers" will become normal.

The ability to on-demand create more content to fill out some very narrow niche is a great example ("Today I want 24 hours of non stop Mongolian throat singing neo-industrial Christmas music"). Or maybe to create covers of songs in the voices of your favorite long dead artist. Anything from minor tweak of existing works ("I wish this love song was dedicated specifically to ME", to completely new works (Just look at how much the parody-music genre has grown since Suno and the like first appeared). The possibilities are near endless.