I tried making music with AI

How musicians might get helped or might get replaced

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

AI is like the new attractive and apparently smart boy or girl in town. Everyone wants hang out, and get intimate with them. That’s also my case.

I tend to go to that search bar with the coloured “G” and type the name of an industry or topic and then AI (as in Artificial Intelligence) to get a glimpse of what is happening in that industry.

That morning I typed “music AI”, and there I was, browsing results drooling of excitement with every entry I saw. A list of AI powered music making tools, AI for audio advertising, mastering your songs with AI, and more came into my eyes.

As a Fruity Loops aficionado I was eager to find what could I do to create a song with AI.

I tried plugins like SplashPro Popgun available for Fruity loops, you can a very shaky video with my commentary here.

Popgun Splash pro landing page

I flirted with Amper, a music generator you can decide the music genre, duration of the track and even the type of feeling you want to get when the track is playing. See my brief review of Amper here.

However Boomy got my attention, not because is the most sophisticated of all the ones I went through. Boomy does essentially the same as Amper, but with no option for the feel of the music. What makes Boomy interesting is that it learns your taste. When you generate a song you have the option of saving that song or go to another one. If you save a song, it goes into a collection. That collection dictates what type of songs and style Boomy will show you.

Boomy’s home page

On the other hand the songs created by Boomy can be edited. You don’t like one section? Erase it. You want to change the other of a section drag and drop to another place. Edit until you are happy with the outcome.

But the best about Boomy is the business model. They have a freemium model with three tiers. Users have to pay to download their AI generated songs. Those can be used to sample and continue creating music. Boomy users can also publish their song under Boomy to different digital music services, including Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon music. And the earnings of the song are split 50/50 between the user and Boomy until reaching a certain number of streams of the song.

For me this part is key. Because Boomy is not just generating a songs. Songs become albums that can be published to the digital music services, and earn you a buck, and you might not have to even create the song.

My song generated with Boomy under the artistic name balckElf (yes, I don’t know how to type)

To give you and idea of what you can do with Boomy I generated and curated this song on their platform. Boomy also allowed me to generate the single cover.

https://open.spotify.com/track/2h9CGHB48mIlAaz9gzu1UL

What can this mean for the music industry?

If this trend of AI generated music software continues, we would see:

1. More “musicians” due the lower barrier to entry
2. More music to consume of lower quality
3. A debatable lower level of creative output by musicians
4. Change of roles or slow extinction of the labels and other intermediaries
5. More resources put on marketing and the crafting of fan experiences around the music artist
6. Faster publishing of music.

These are just guesses, they don’t intent to be correct, they intent to raise eyebrows, and find if there is a parallel with the industry you are working on. If there is, would you like a future like that? If not, what would you do about it?

I hope this writing is of some use.Thank you.