Metal-Rules.com's Marko Syrjala caught up with Canadian rocker, Aldo Nova, at this year's Time To Rock festival, held July 5-8 at Knislinge Folkets Park in Knislinge, Sweden. An excerpt of their conversation follows....

Metal-Rules.com: Going back to the current Aldo Nova projects you mentioned earlier, you have this new album, New Classic Rock, coming out sometime next year.

Aldo Nova: "Yeah, for now, it’s called “New Classic Rock,” but we’ll see."

Metal-Rules.com: So, do you think that after the album is out, there’s a chance we will see more of Aldo Nova in Europe in the future?

Nova: "Well, touring really helps because, even though I didn’t do many shows in the States last year, the few I did still had an impact. You can see that my Spotify and YouTube views went up by a couple of million. Earlier, I only had one song in the millions, ‘Fantasy,’ but now I have five songs with over a million views each, and one has surpassed two million views. So, it works. If I did 40 shows a year, it would be incredible."

Metal-Rules.com: So now that you have millions of views on YouTube, have you been thinking about how you’re going to handle all that money coming in? “Laughs”

Nova: "Right! On Spotify, you don’t make any money. And it’s even worse now. I mean, you don’t make any money on Spotify. If you get two-thousandths of a cent per stream, you’re lucky. And now, with AI, just forget about it. They’re going to have their own artists. My bass player was playing me something created entirely by AI, including the vocals and everything. He inputs a description into the program, and it generates a song. So, I think there’s going to be more of that in the future. I think record companies are going to say, 'Well, we don’t need real artists. We’re going to make avatars and AI artists,' and that’s where it’s going to go.

"But AI will never replace me. You can’t make an Aldo Nova record with AI. Nobody sounds like me, plays like me, or arranges songs like me because there’s only one of me. That’s what makes an artist unique. For example, nobody can sing like Steven Tyler or Steve Perry or play guitar like Neal Schon or Jeff Beck. You know what I’m saying?

"Individually, you can teach an AI, but it will always be just an AI. I was talking to my bass player, and it dawned on me. He mentioned using a product called Udio. I said, ‘Okay, the world has seven billion people, and let’s say, hypothetically, 75 million people are using Udio. What are the chances of creating something truly unique with that?’ He replied, ‘No, it’s my creation.’ I said, ‘But what are the chances that the next person on Udio, or one of these 100,000 people, will use the same description as you? It always ends up sounding the same. It doesn’t have an identity that sets it apart.’ So, it can’t, it just won’t work. Udio is just a program that makes music, but it doesn’t bother me because, as I said, I’ll never be replaced. There’s nobody who will ever sound like me. You can try to get Udio to sound like me, but it won’t. You can say it has the sound, but it still won’t sound like you."

Read the full interview at Metal-Rules.com.

Watch footage from Aldo's appearance at Time To Rock below: