Is AI-generated music going viral next?

Published on

February 1st, 2023

Author

Cristina Bunea

Category

News

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Musical ability: nature or nurture? Soon enough, it might not really matter.

You’ve heard about AI writing articles, essays, and viral LinkedIn posts. But what about music? While the topic might strike a chord (pun intended) for technophiles, AI-generated music, like many of the other areas AI touches, can become litigious real quick.

A fun tool that generates Drake songs about anything in under a minute launched a couple of days ago. drayk.it uses GPT-3 to write the lyrics based on the prompt you give it. With the help of voice synthesis and “some music magic sauce,” it generated a song about launching on Product Hunt.

While ChatGPT and DALL-E were all the rage this past year, let’s not forget about OpenAI’s MuseNet from 2019. The deep neural network powered by GPT-2 generates 4-minute musical compositions with ten different instruments and can combine styles from country to Mozart to the Beatles.

Google’s been a player in the space, too. While we might’ve not heard much about Magenta Studio lately, last week the Google Research team published a paper on MusicLM. The model generates 24 kHz music from rich captions such as “The main soundtrack of an arcade game. It is fast-paced and upbeat, with a catchy electric guitar riff. The music is repetitive and easy to remember, but with unexpected sounds, like cymbal crashes or drum rolls.”

We’re about to see a lot of debate around IP laws. Who owns machine-generated music? Those who write the code and process the data? Those who write the prompts? As Robin Thicke would say, “I hate these blurred lines.”

Let’s discuss.

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This article was first seen in Product Hunt's Daily Digest newsletter. Join over half a million other subscribers in being the first to read about the newest, trending products. 

Comments (25)

Aleksander Frankowicz

Serial Wannabeneur. PM @Muzaic.studio

As the product manager of AI's next music product yet-to-be-launched, I would like to say that I am fascinated by the hype. And I sincerely hope that the issue of intellectual property rights will be a thing, because we made a bet with fate some time ago and solved the problem in a completely different way, without using anyone's work. If the IP of stuff to train models is a real obstacle in the way of building AI models, we have an advantage. If not, we are way behind, because our music resource is created much more slowly (we record everything ourselves). In any case - it will be a ride!

Share 1yr ago

Aleksander Frankowicz

Serial Wannabeneur. PM @Muzaic.studio

@sylvercassart it will be ready in April!

Share 1yr ago

Sylver Cassart

Product & Design

@ofrankowicz Be interested in your next AI music product!

Share 1yr ago

Sylver Cassart

Product & Design

@ofrankowicz I'll keep an eye out!

Share 1yr ago

LisaKim

Community Builder & Entrepreneur

The thought of this is absolutely mind-boggling! AI has come a long way but I am a firm believer that Human Emotions - the true essence of all arts - can never be imitated to the level of perfection. Thanks for the article, it was a really fun read!

Share 1yr ago

Frinny

AI finds music SFX& edit audio for video

The issue of copyrights has been a serious one for centuries. And the music quality from AI as well. Music is about the emotion and all the practice, talents and skills from musicians. AI copyrights are uncertain based on current technology, including AI-generated images' legal documents. All of that should remain the platforms' property, despite the fact that creators and prompt crafters work on those things day after day. So that A.V. Mapping just launched on Product Hunt yesterday! License music directly from musicians. And AI recommend music from video and images in seconds. Welcome to check it out!

Share 1yr ago

Luke Tyler

designstripe + Electronic Musician

Even as a music producer, there's plenty of ways to embrace AI's role in music generation. The first one that comes to mind is generating samples where I don't have to worry about sounding the same as someone else from a stock library, or getting cleared if I got them from an artist. But the ownership debate could be stumbling block for that use case. It will be interesting to see how it impacts stock libraries, too!

Share 1yr ago

Patrick

likes grits

The companies that make instruments don’t keep the rights to an artist’s music because they used their product. Why would this be any different?

Share 1yr ago