I recently read an article discussing whether AI-generated music should be played on the radio. It featured thoughtful concerns from musicians worried that artificial intelligence could make it harder for human artists to be heard.

I understand those concerns.

But they are not the reason V2Melody exists.

I have never uploaded my musical arrangements to Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, or any other commercial streaming service. I haven't even posted them to my own YouTube channel, despite having built an audience there over many years before I retired.

Instead, I created my own streaming service.

That decision wasn't accidental.

The music on V2Melody is not intended to compete with professional musicians. It exists for one reason only: to encourage people to discover poetry.

The poem always comes first.

If someone visits V2Melody because they enjoy a particular musical arrangement but leaves remembering Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, or John Clare, then the project has succeeded.

Without artificial intelligence, V2Melody simply would not exist.

There are now thousands of musical arrangements on the site. Every one began with a poem I chose because I believed it deserved another audience. Every arrangement was guided by my own musical tastes and countless hours of experimentation, rewriting prompts, listening critically, rejecting ideas that didn't work, and trying again.

The technology made the project possible.

The decisions remained human.

That distinction matters.

Throughout history, human beings have built tools that extend what they can do. The printing press allowed ideas to spread beyond the reach of a single voice. Cameras preserved moments that would otherwise have vanished. Aeroplanes let us fly where our bodies could not.

Artificial intelligence is another such tool.

Like any tool, it can be used thoughtfully or carelessly.

For me, it has become a bridge to literature.

Most people will never read twenty thousand poems. Yet they may listen to one song while driving to work, become curious about its words, and discover a poet they might otherwise never have encountered.

If that happens, AI has not replaced poetry.

It has led someone towards it.

I have enormous respect for musicians who devote their lives to writing, performing, and recording original music. V2Melody is not trying to occupy their space.

In fact, it occupies a space that barely existed before these tools became available.

It is a retirement project, an educational project, and above all a labour of love.

My ambition has never been fame.

It has never been chart positions or streaming numbers.

If I wanted that, I would be uploading every arrangement to every major platform and chasing algorithms for attention.

Instead, I quietly add another poem to V2Melody.

The project lives on its own website because I want visitors to encounter the poem, its history, its author, its meaning, and its musical interpretation together. The music is part of a larger invitation to read more deeply.

That is something AI has made possible for me.

Far from replacing human creativity, it has allowed me to spend my retirement immersed in the work of hundreds of poets from across the centuries, learning from them and, I hope, helping a few more readers to discover them.

If the result is that one more person falls in love with poetry, then I consider the experiment worthwhile.