tech
Page: 19
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. Amazon never seems to run out of tech deals to treat shoppers with, and its latest one is a gadget that’ll […]
In the mid 1990s, Jason Paige, then a struggling singer trying to break with his rock band, could make a solid living by writing Mountain Dew, Taco Bell and Pepto Bismol earworms for jingle houses that dominated the music-in-advertising industry for decades. But during an interview a few weeks ago, Paige — who ultimately became most famous as the voice of the Pokemon theme song “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” — fires up an artificial-intelligence program. Within minutes, he emails eight studio-quality, terrifyingly catchy punk, hip-hop, EDM and klezmer MP3s centered on the reporter’s name, the word Billboard and the phrase “the jingle industry and how it’s changed so much over the years.”
The point is self-evident. “Yeah,” Paige says, about the industry that once sustained him. “It is dark.”
Trending on Billboard
Today, the jingle business has evolved an assembly line of composers and performers competing to make the next “plop plop fizz fizz” into a more multifaceted relationship between artists and companies, involving brand relationships (like Taylor Swift’s long-standing Target deal); Super Bowl synchs worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; production-house music allowing brands to pick from hundreds of thousands of pre-recorded tracks; and “sonic branding,” in which the Intel bong or Netflix’s tudum are used in a variety of marketing contexts. Performers and songwriters make plenty of revenue on this kind of commercial music, and they’re far more open to doing so than they were in the corporation-skeptical ‘90s. But AI, which allows machines to make all these sounds far more cheaply and quickly for brands than human musicians could ever do, remains a looming threat.
“It definitely has the potential to be disruptive,” says Zeno Harris, a creative and licensing manager for West One Music Group, an LA company that licenses its 85,000-song catalog of original music to brands. “If we could use it as a tool, instead of replacing [musicians], that’s where I see it heading. But money dictates where the industry goes, so we’ll have to wait and see.”
This vision of an AI-dominated future in a crucial revenue-producing business is as disturbing for singers and songwriters as it is for Hollywood screenwriters, radio DJs and voiceover actors. “I just took a life-insurance-brand deal to pay for making my record,” says Grace Bowers, 17, a Nashville blues guitarist. “I’m definitely not the only one who’s doing that. Artists are turning to anyone they can to [make] money, because touring and putting out music isn’t the biggest money-maker. If Arby’s came to me and said, ‘Can you write me a jingle?,’ I’d say, Hell, yeah!’”
End of an Era
From the late 1920s, when a barbershop quartet sang “Have You Tried Wheaties?” on the air for a Minneapolis radio station, through the late ’90s, jingles dominated the music-in-advertising business. Jingle houses like Jam, JSM and Rave competed ferociously to procure contracts with major brands and advertising agencies. In the process, they created lucrative side gigs for rising talents for decades, like Luther Vandross, Patti Austin and Richard Marx, who, as jingle veteran Michael Bolton wrote in his biography, “all shook the jingle-house tree.”
“If you wrote a jingle that was going to be a national campaign, and you sang on it, you could make $50,000, and you could do three of those a year,” recalls John Loeffler, a singer-songwriter who worked on 2,500 jingle campaigns as the head of the Rave Music jingle house, before serving as a BMG executive for years.
John Stamos and Dave Coulier played jingle writers on ABC’s Full House. In this scene from “Jingle Hell,” Mary Kate or Ashley Olsen gives “Uncle Jesse” a high five.
ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
The jingle era ended, for the most part, by the late 1990s, as TV splintered from four must-see broadcast networks to dozens of cable channels, followed by video streaming networks such as Netflix. (Steve Karmen, the ad-agency vet who wrote “Nationwide … is on your side,” authored what many consider the post-mortem for the era with his 2005 book, Who Killed the Jingle?) “I wish the young artists these days could have the opportunities I had,” Loeffler says. “It’s very different.”
Today, artists are far more likely to have broad branding relationships with corporations such as Target — Swift has appeared in commercials and the retailer has sold exclusive versions of her albums for years, and Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo and others have made similar deals — than they are to write catchy ditties for TV and radio. “I personally haven’t heard the word ‘jingle’ in the lifespan of Citizen,” says Theo de Gunzburg, managing partner of Citizen, a five-year-old music house that employs studio artists to create original music for advertisers. “The clients we deal with want to be taken more seriously. The audience is more discerning.”
Citizen employs 10 full-time staff members, including five composers, to create original music for ad campaigns, and, like West One and many other music houses, maintains a library of licensable tracks. The company’s commercial work includes Adidas’ “Runner 321,” which juxtaposes Michael Jordan and Babe Ruth with clips of athletes who have Down’s Syndrome, all set to its own sports percussion tracks. Major music publishers also maintain in-house services for this kind of production music. Warner Chappell Music’s extensive online library includes a hip-hop-style track called “Ready to Fight,” described as “driving trap drums, electric guitar, bold brass, cerebral synths and go-getter male vocals.” WCM represents “specialized songwriters who like to write in short form” and “are also great at writing pop hits,” says Dan Gross, the publisher’s creative sync director, who previously was a music supervisor at top ad agency McCann.
Ba Da Ba Ba Ba
The prevailing catchphrase for music in advertising today is “sonic branding” — designing a brief musical calling card, like the Intel bong, which reflects the feel of a product and can be used in ads, promotions, app tones, TikTok and Instagram videos and even virtual-reality games. “The message of flexibility is really the key thing,” says Simon Kringel, sonic director for Unmute, a Copenhagen agency that has worked with brands such as magazine publisher Aller Media to develop catchy musical snippets that serve as what he calls “watermarks.” “The only chance we have is to make sure every time we interact with our audience, there is something that triggers this brand recall.”
Kringel avoids using the term “jingle” — “that whole approach kind of faded out,” he says — but the most memorable old-school jingles have taken on a classic-rock quality in recent years. McDonald’s 20-year-old “ba da ba ba ba,” “Nationwide … is on your side” and many others are repeated endlessly in TV-streaming commercial breaks. State Farm’s “like a good neighbor … “ remains the emperor of earworms, and the company deploys the Barry Manilow-penned jingle in strategic ways. Around 2020, says State Farm head of marketing Alyson Griffin, the insurance giant conducted a study about its own marketing assets. “They found 80% of people recognized the notes, 95% recognized the slogan — and when they put the two together, there was nearly 100% recognition,” she says. “We recently tripled down on the jingle.”
Similarly, Chili’s recently went retro, hiring Boyz II Men to update its ’90s “baby back ribs” jingle with a new advertisement. “Jingles don’t feel as modern as maybe brands want to be,” says George Felix, chief marketing officer for Chili’s Grill and Bar. “But there’s certainly still runway for jingles if you do it right.”
For now, brands are still spending copiously on advertising music of all kinds — and every once in a while, an actual jingle emerges. Temu, a new e-commerce company owned by a Chinese retail giant, will reportedly spend $3 billion on advertising this year, emphasizing its insanely catchy “ooh, ooh, Temu” jingle that aired during the Super Bowl.
Keeping an Eye on AI
Yet some in the commercial-music industry worry about what Paige’s punk-EDM-hip-hop-klezmer AI-jingle exercise portends. “Do I think the [AI] fears are overblown? No. Am I concerned? Yes,” adds Sally House, CEO of The Hit House, a 19-year-old Los Angeles company that hires composers, engineers, sound designers and performers for music in Progressive, Marvel, HBO and Amazon Prime Video spots. “We’re all waiting for copyright to save us and the government to do something about it.”
But Warner Chappell’s Shaw says his team receives requests for “custom compositions” because brands want to work with the publisher’s stable of A-list songwriters. “AI doesn’t really factor in for us in this instance,” he says.
At Mastercard, which underwent a two-year process to unveil a piece of mellow, new-age-y instrumental music as part of its sonic brand in 2019, AI may be useful for future ad campaigns. But not for creating music. Mastercard employed its own creative people, plus composers, musicologists, sound engineers and even neuroscientists, to work on its distinctive tone. “If I tell the AI engine who is the audience, what am I trying to create, what is the context, and ask it to compose something based on the Mastercard melody, it will do a very fine job,” says Raja Rajamannar, a classically trained musician who is the company’s chief marketing and communications officer. “But if I had to create the Mastercard sonic architecture, I cannot delegate it to AI. The original creation, at this stage, clearly has to come from human beings.”
Paige agrees. Even if AI ultimately takes a cut out of the space — and certainly out of the potential profits for writers — it won’t completely gut the need for real musicians making advertorial music. Classic jingles endure, he says, because they contain humanity and spirit — and because people “know there’s a human being behind the Folger’s theme song.”
Fan engagement platform Stationhead is now offering even more ways for users to connect with artists and each other.
Today (June 13), Stationhead announces an all-access tier that allows fans to get perks like a badge in fans’ profiles that verifies their fandom, the ability to create posts in their fandom’s threads, a priority placement on guest call-in lists when artists and hosts call in to speak during a live event, along with access to another chat populated exclusively by top-tier fans.
As reported by Billboard in April, Stationhead is a destination for dedicated fanbases of more than 1,000 artists.
Stationhead users can earn this all-access tier by engaging with the app daily and streaming events and release parties, with a data-driven feature determining the top superfans who’ll receive access. After seven days of daily use, fans unlock the All-Access membership tier for 30 days, which can be extended for each consecutive seven-day streak.
Trending on Billboard
Thus far, artists including Zayn Malik and Aespa have engaged with this new feature to do ticket giveaways and other offerings.
Launched in 2017, Stationhead has become a popular social music platform for artists and fans to stream and listen to live music in together, along with many other functions designed to connect artists and fans. The app functions much like a digital pirate radio station, where anyone with a streaming music account can host their own station and play music, with other users able to log on and listen, chat and even call in and speak to the DJ.
“It’s easy to toss around the idea of superfandom, to say that we need focus on superfans, but it’s hard to create something that really serves fans and gives them what they want,” Stationhead founder and CEO Ryan Star says in a statement. “We’ve done that at Stationhead by focusing on the fun and rewarding side of online events, instead of merely trying to extract value from passionate music lovers. All-Access builds on this and makes fandom feel even more engaging and rewarding, by highlighting the most enthusiastic people in an artists’ community.”
The company’s co-founder and COO Murray Levison adds that this new tier will help “turns fandoms into fan armies.”
Apple has jumped into the race to bring generative artificial intelligence to the masses, spotlighting a slew of features Monday designed to soup up the iPhone, iPad and Mac.
And in a move befitting a company known for its marketing prowess, the AI technology coming as part of free software updates later this year is being billed as “Apple Intelligence.”
Even as it tried to put its own stamp on technology’s hottest area, Apple tacitly acknowledged during its World Wide Developers Conference that it needs help catching up with companies like Microsoft and Google, which have emerged as the early leaders in AI. Apple is leaning on ChatGPT, made by the San Francisco startup OpenAI, to make its often-bumbling virtual assistant Siri smarter and more helpful.
“All of this goes beyond artificial intelligence, it’s personal intelligence, and it is the next big step for Apple,” CEO Tim Cook said.
Trending on Billboard
Siri’s optional gateway to ChatGPT will be free to all iPhone users and made available on other Apple products once the option is baked into the next generation of Apple’s operating systems. ChatGPT subscribers are supposed to be able to easily sync their existing accounts when using the iPhone, and should get more advanced features than free users would.
To herald the alliance with Apple, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat in the front row of the packed conference, which was attended by developers from more than 60 countries.
“Together with Apple, we’re making it easier for people to benefit from what AI can offer,” Altman said in a statement.
Beyond allowing Siri to tap into ChatGPT’s storehouse of knowledge, Apple is giving its 13-year-old virtual assistant an extensive makeover designed to make it more personable and versatile, even as it currently fields about 1.5 billion queries a day.
When Apple releases free updates to the software powering the iPhone and its other products this fall, Siri will signal its presence with flashing lights along the edges of the display screen. It will be able to handle hundreds of more tasks — including chores that may require tapping into third-party devices — than it can now, based on Monday’s presentations.
Apple’s full suite of upcoming features will only work on more recent models of the iPhone, iPad and Mac because the devices require advanced processors. For instance, consumers will need last year’s iPhone 15 Pro or buy the next model coming out later this year to take full advantage of Apple’s AI package, although all the tools will work on Macs dating back to 2020 after that computer’s next operating system is installed.
The AI-packed updates coming to the next versions of Apple software are meant to enable the billions of people who use the company’s devices to get more done in less time, while also giving them access to creative tools that could liven things up. For instance, Apple will deploy AI to allow people to create emojis, dubbed “Genmojis” on the fly to fit the vibe they are trying to convey.
Apple’s goal with AI “is not to replace users, but empower them,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, told reporters. Users will also have the option of going into the device settings to turn off any AI tools they don’t want.
Monday’s showcase seemed aimed at allaying concerns Apple might be losing its edge with the advent of AI, a technology expected to be as revolutionary as the 2007 introduction of the Phone. Both Google and Samsung have already released smartphone models touting AI features as their main attractions, while Apple has been stuck in an uncharacteristically extended sales slump.
AI mania is the main reason that Nvidia, the dominant maker of the chips underlying the technology, has seen its market value rocket from about $300 billion at the end of 2022 to about $3 trillion. The meteoric rise allowed Nvidia to surpass Apple as the second most valuable company in the U.S. Earlier this year, Microsoft also eclipsed the iPhone maker on the strength of its so-far successful push into AI.
Investors didn’t seem as impressed with Apple’s AI presentation as the crowd that came to the company’s Cupertino, California, headquarters to see it. Apple’s stock price dipped nearly 2% Monday.
Despite that negative reaction, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives asserted in a research note that Apple is “taking the right path.” He hailed the presentation as a “historical” day for a company that already has reshaped the tech industry and society.
Besides pulling AI tricks out of its bag, Apple also used the conference to confirm that it will be rolling out a technology called Rich Communications Service, or RCS, to its iMessage app. The technology should improve the quality and security of texting between iPhones and devices powered by Android software, such as the Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel.
The change, due out with the next version of iPhone’s operating software, won’t eliminate the blue bubbles denoting texts originating from iPhones and the green bubbles marking text sent from Android devices — a distinction that has become a source of social stigma.
In another upcoming twist to the iPhone’s messaging app, users will be able to write a text (or have an AI tool compose it) in advance and schedule a specific time to automatically send it.
Monday’s presentation marked the second straight year that Apple has created a stir at its developers conference by using it to usher in a trendy form of technology that other companies already had employed.
Last year, Apple provided an early look at its mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro, which wasn’t released until early 2024. Nevertheless, Apple’s push into mixed reality — with a twist that it bills as “spatial computing” — has raised hopes that there will be more consumer interest in this niche technology.
Part of that optimism stems from Apple’s history of releasing technology later than others, then using sleek designs and slick marketing campaigns to overcome its tardy start.
Bringing more AI to the iPhone will likely raise privacy concerns — a topic that Apple has gone to great lengths to assure its loyal customers it can be trusted not to peer too deeply into their personal lives. Apple did talk extensively Monday about its efforts to build strong privacy protections and controls around its AI technology.
One way Apple is trying to convince consumers that the iPhone won’t be used to spy on them is harnessing its chip technology so most of its AI-powered features are handled on the device itself instead of at remote data centers, often called “the cloud.” Going down this route would also help protect Apple’s profit margins because AI processing through the cloud is far more expensive than when it is run solely on a device.
When Apple users make AI demands that requiring computing power beyond what’s available on the device, the tasks will be handled by what the company is calling a “private cloud” that is supposed to shield their personal data.
Apple’s AI “will be aware of your personal data without collecting your personal data,” Federighi said.
About a decade into his career with Universal Music Group (UMG) — primarily heading A&R and working as a staff producer for Harvest Records — Tim Anderson had a front-row seat to the late-2010s vinyl boom. “It was still an archaic, dinosaur thing,” he recalls of how labels approached record pressing. He started to wonder why records were so hard to manufacture and had such long lead times — and what he could do about it.
By the time the pandemic hit, Anderson — who is also a songwriter-producer, composing for Suits and working with acts like Banks, Halsey and twenty one pilots — had left his major-label gig and had little interest in producing. Unsure of what to do next, his wife kept reminding him that music is what he knows best and suggested he tackle the vinyl issue that had plagued him years ago.
Twenty minutes later, Anderson made his first call to Scotty Coats, an old friend of his wife’s and Capitol Music Group’s one-time vinyl marketing manager. Coats immediately expressed his belief in the idea of a more sustainable approach to vinyl manufacturing. The call motivated Anderson — who doesn’t have an environmentalist background, admitting he gets confused trying to properly sort his recycling — to figure out how to make his vision a reality.
Trending on Billboard
He found a video online posted by Dutch company Green Vinyl Records, which detailed the development of an environmentally friendly alternative to record manufacturing that is free of polyvinyl chloride. “I’d been told my entire life that you needed the PVC to make a record sound great, and I just believed it,” Coats says. “Until Tim came along and inspired me to find a better way.”
“We saw it right when we met them that they had made something that could be this huge unlock,” Anderson recalls of GVR. He says the company needed a partner to help scale what it had built, and Good Neighbor was able to provide production contacts at many independent and major labels, especially in the United States. “They needed us and we needed them,” he says.
Soon after, Anderson met Reyna Bryan, president of innovative packaging company RCD, and in late 2023, he quietly launched Good Neighbor, a first-of-its-kind record-pressing company that manufactures fully recyclable discs, with Reyna as CEO and Coats as vp of sales and marketing. He later hired Coats’ friend and UMG manufacturing veteran Jonny O’Hara as vp of productions and operations. “As more people were stepping back into the world of vinyl, a lot of artists were like, ‘Is there a more eco-friendly alternative?’ ” O’Hara recalls. “There were better options coming online, but they were never to the same degree as Good Neighbor.”
“In my business of transforming supply chains, any opportunity to reduce carbon production or eliminate chemicals of concern from the process is a major win,” adds Bryan. “Good Neighbor achieves both.”
Key stakeholders of Good Neighbors, from left: Tim Anderson, Scotty Coats, Reyna Bryan and Jonny O’Hara.
Ryan Kontra
Instead of a traditional hydraulic press, which uses energy to heat up and cool down, GVR’s “futuristic-looking” machine (as O’Hara describes it) uses injection molding of polyethylene terephthalate (PET plastic), which reduces energy by 60% and increases manufacturing by three times. (GVR’s single press in the Netherlands, running three eight-hour shifts, has an estimated capacity of 1.2 million records a year.) A second press will arrive in the United States in mid-September. (Good Neighbor is currently raising money through the team’s pro-skater friends and music managers.)
GVR’s Pierre van Dongen and Harm Theunisse say they looked to the pressing process for CDs and DVDs as inspiration, noting how precise and adaptable it was. And while they say some research on trying this process with records was done in the 80s, it was never finished — until now. It took them six years to “perfect the development,” as they say, which included testing over 200 materials, optimizing molding and developing the direct to record label printer.
Coats and O’Hara are particularly excited about how this new process eliminates paper center labels that require high-heat baking in order to stick to PVC. Instead, Good Neighbor’s labels will be directly printed onto the PET plastic, allowing for individual customization of records — a sustainable step forward for exclusivity. Meanwhile, Anderson is thrilled that the machine is “material-agnostic,” meaning it can mold any material into a record, but Anderson says most don’t sound great — yet. The company is currently testing recycled bottles.
And while Anderson says he leaned on his “purist” friends for feedback on test pressings of the PET plastic and that no one pushed back on quality after listening, he still acknowledges that “audiophiles might not be our target consumer.” With Good Neighbor, he says, the goal isn’t to shame vinyl connoisseurs for their existing collections but to set a new precedent for sustainability in record production.
“If this industry keeps growing at this pace, it’s got to change … When the biggest artists in the world start selling millions and millions of these shrink-wrapped [vinyl], that’s when I was like, ‘This feels like something that would be fun to disrupt.’”A version of this article will appear in the June 8, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Discogs has acquired Wantlister from software developer Stoat Labs in a move towards enhancing its wantlist experience, the online physical music database and marketplace announced Wednesday (June 5). Wantlister is a Discogs-specific web app, with users connecting their two accounts in order to organize and manage their oft-unwieldy Discogs wantlists. Wantlister, which soft-launched last year, […]
Indie digital rights group Merlin is launching a new initiative today (June 5) called Merlin Connect, aimed at helping up-and-coming social and tech platforms license independent music. The new program, which will work on an application basis, is aimed at helping promising startups utilize music while also helping Merlin’s labels and distributors, and thus indie artists, get paid for their use.
For years, new digital startups have often adopted a policy of “asking for forgiveness not permission” — dating back to the old Facebook motto of “move fast and break things” — which often meant that music and other media would be used without licenses, and recompense, while an app or platform found its footing and users, due to the high expense of licensing media catalogs. That tended to result in contentious licensing negotiations when such apps or platforms became too big to ignore — and, on occasion, lawsuits if such companies continued to utilize music and media without agreeing to deals with rightsholders.
Merlin Connect is trying to smooth that process for both new startups and its members, offering flexible terms and licenses that also get rightsholders paid as a startup develops.
Trending on Billboard
“Our overarching goal is to discover new opportunities for music monetization,” Merlin CEO Jeremy Sirota told Billboard in an exclusive statement. “Many emerging technology platforms lack access to, or do not even realize, how quality music can help them build and retain new audiences, resonate with cultural movements and drive their growth. Our members are handpicking a curated catalog of music that is perfect for any platform’s evolution… By bringing independent music to new spaces, we’re delivering exclusive opportunities for our members, ensuring they are at the forefront of innovation.”
Merlin says the program will be aimed at creating fair value for music, as well as marketing opportunities and the development of relationships with the next generation of platforms early on in their existence. On the other side of that equation, it will allow the platforms to have access to a simplified process within which they can utilize fully-licensed independent music and explore collaborations with Merlin members, and find ways “to maximize the impact of music on their platform,” according to a press release.
“The industry has been in need of an easier way for new platforms to access high-quality music and, in turn, foster growth for quite some time,” Ninja Turn managing director North America Marie Clausen said in a statement. “I am excited to see the Merlin team taking such a visionary approach to exploring new business opportunities. It’s a crucial step to ensure that new commercial opportunities have the best chance to succeed and diversify and secure new income streams for Merlin’s members. From an independent point of view, this initiative is excellent news — especially given the current market challenges.”
Emerging platforms will be able to apply, after which their application will be reviewed and Merlin will “selectively engage with the most promising platforms,” the organization said. Merlin will prioritize a platform’s potential for innovation and evolution; its leadership and the resilience of its team; with the goal of a more sustainable and ethic industry.
“As one of the founders of Merlin, I’ve had the opportunity to support the incredible growth of our organization from its inception to now,” !K7 founder Horst Weidenmüller said in a statement. “Merlin has always been dedicated to empowering independence, ensuring that its members receive the access and opportunities they deserve. With the launch of Merlin Connect, we are taking a significant step forward in this mission.”
Added Hopeless Records founder Louis Posen, “Hopeless is a passionate and longtime supporter of Merlin and its mission to ensure the fair value of music for the independent music community. With Connect, Merlin can now expand the reach of members’ music into new areas where music fans interact with the music they love. We are excited to see Merlin Connect open new doors for our artists and bring their music to innovative platforms around the world.”
Writing and playing a song once required some level of musical training, and recording was a technically complex process involving expensive equipment. Today, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, a growing number of companies allow anyone in the world to skip this process and create a new song with a click of a button.
This is an exciting prospect in Silicon Valley. “It’s really easy to get investment in that sort of thing right now,” Lifescore co-founder and CTO Tom Gruber says dryly, “because everyone thinks that genAI is going to change the whole world and there will be no human creators left.” (Lifescore offers “AI-powered music generation in service of artists and rights holders.”)
Recently, however, some executives in the AI music space have been asking: How much do average users actually want to generate their own songs?
Trending on Billboard
“For whatever reason, you’re just not seeing an extreme level of adoption of these products yet among the everyday consumer,” notes one founder of an AI music company who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Where’s the 80 to 100 million users on this stuff?”
“My hunch is no text-to-music platform will have decent retention figures yet,” says Ed Newton-Rex, who founded the AI music generation company Jukedeck and then worked at Stability AI. “It’s a moment of magic when you first try a generative music platform that works well. Then most people don’t really have a use for it.” So far, the most popular use for song generation tools appears to be making meme songs.
While there are hundreds of companies working on genAI music technology, the two that have generated the most headlines this year are Suno and Udio. The former recently announced that 10 million users have tested it in eight months, while the latter told Bloomberg that 600,000 people tried its song generation product in the first two weeks. Neither company said how many of those testers became regular users. Compare this with ChatGPT, which was estimated to gain 100 million weekly users within two months. (Though there’s chatter that growth is leveling off there, too.)
It’s early for many of these AI song generation companies, of course. That said, executives who work at the intersection of music and artificial intelligence keep wondering: How can tools that spit out new tracks on command help users?
“You can end up with a really cool tech that doesn’t really solve a real problem,” Gruber notes. “If I want something that sounds like a folk song and has a clever lyric, I’ve already got all I can eat on Spotify, right? There’s no scarcity there.”
Part of the reason for ChatGPT’s explosion, according to Antony Demekhin, co-founder of Tuney, is that it “clearly solves a bunch of problems — it can edit text for you, help you code.” (Tuney develops “ethical music AI for creative media.”) Even so, a recent multi-country survey from the Reuters Institute noted that for ChatGPT, “frequent use is rare… Many of those who say they have used generative AI have only used it once or twice.”
Within the subset of survey respondents who said they have used generative AI for “creating media,” “making audio” was the ninth most popular task, with 3% of people engaging in it. The Reuters Institute’s survey indicates that generative AI tools are more commonly used for email writing, creative writing, and coding.
“How many ‘non-musicians’ actually wanted to create music before?” asks Michael “MJ” Jacob, founder of Lemonaide, a company developing “creative AI for musicians” (around 10,000 users). “I don’t think it’s true to say ‘everyone,’ as tempting as it may be.”
Another factor that could be holding back AI audio creation, according to Diaa El All, founder and CEO of Soundful, is the number of competing companies and the difficulty of judging the quality of their output. (Soundful, which bills itself as “the leading AI Music Studio for creators,” has a user-count “in the seven figures,” El All says.) Mike Caren, founder of the label and publishing company Artist Partner Group, believes that many people will try an AI song generator “that’s not that good, have a bad experience, and not come back for six months or a year.”
The uncertain regulatory climate almost certainly inhibits the spread of AI song-making tools as well. For now, in the U.S., there are open questions about the copyrightability of AI generated tracks, potentially limiting their commercial value.
In addition, these programs need to be trained on large musical data-sets to generate credible tracks. While many prominent tech companies believe they should be allowed to undertake this process at will, labels and publishers argue that they need licensing agreements.
In other sectors, AI companies have already been sued for training on news articles and images without permission. Until the rules around training are clarified, through court cases or regulation, “corporate brands don’t want any of the risk” that comes with opening themselves up to potential litigation, explains Chris Walch, CEO and co-founder of Lifescore.
AI music leaders also believe their song generation technologies still suffer from a bad reputation. “I think the tech-lash and the stigma is really unexpected and very powerful,” the company founder says.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently discussed this on the The All-in Podcast: “Let’s say we paid 10,000 musicians to create a bunch of music just to make a great training set where the music model could learn everything about song structure and what makes a good catchy beat,” he said. “I was kind of posing that as a thought experiment to musicians, and they’re like, ‘Well, I can’t object to that on any principled basis at that point. And yet, there’s still something I don’t like about it.’” (So far, OpenAI has steered clear of the music industry.)
While the average civilian’s interest in AI song generation remains unproven, plenty of producers and aspiring artists, who are already making music on a daily basis, would like to test products that spark ideas or streamline their workflow. That’s still a large user-base — “the global total addressable market for digital music producers alone is about 66 million,” according to Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava, “and that continues to grow at a pretty rapid pace” — though it’s not the entire world’s population.
“We were all talking about how artists are screwed, because that’s a dramatic story,” Demekin says. “To me, what’s more likely is these tools just get integrated into the existing ecosystem, and people start using it as a source for material like a Splice,” which provides artists and producers sample packs full of musical building blocks.
Caren believes the AI music tools will be taken up first by musicians, next by creators looking for sound in their videos, then by fans and “music aficionados” who want to express their appreciation for their favorite artists by making something.
“The question of how far it penetrates to people who are not significant music fans?” he asks. “I don’t know.”
HipHopWired Featured Video
CLOSE
Source: Carlo Paloni / Getty / Abubakar Salim / Tales of Kenzera: ZAU
Surgent Studios founder and creative director of Tales of Kenzera: ZAU Abubakar Salim addressed the constant harassment he and the studio have faced since releasing the game.
The video game industry still has a long way to go regarding diversity and inclusion.
People like Abubakar Salim are working hard to show that Black and Brown people have a place in the game’s business with the release of his game, Tales of Kenzera: Zau. However, there are still issues that must be dealt with, and Salim decided to speak about those challenges he and his studios have had to deal with.
Friday, Salim posted a five-minute video on his personal X/Twitter account to speak on the constant harassment that he admits he didn’t want to address initially.
Salim says he has dealt with claims that he didn’t “deserve the opportunit[ies]” he got at the beginning of his career, adding, “No, it was simply because I’m Black, and I’ve turned my other cheek and just kept doing my thing.”
Before dropping his game, Salim was best known for his acting roles in Assassin’s Creed Origins and roles in MAX’s original series Raised By Wolves and season two of Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon.
Salim states in the video that he could brush off some of the comments, but “when there’s a constant barrage of them, it’s exhausting.”
[embedded content]
The actor/video game developer says the harassment reached a “fever pitch” once his game, Tales of Kenzera: Zau, came to the forefront and became a focal point of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) harassment campaigns.
Per IGN:
“Don’t get me wrong, there’s been so much amazing and beautiful support for this game. The fact that it’s inspired so many people and touched, you know, so many lives, it was one of our goals from the outset — to have this positive impact, right?” Salim says. “But at the same time, we are being faced with constant targeted harassment from people who see diversity as a threat. From people who look across the vast landscape of modern media and decide that anything that doesn’t speak to them or centers around them is unnecessary and inauthentic.”
“And look,” he continues, “there’s always a reason why diverse stories can’t exist. You know, it’s always either we’re doing it the wrong way or it’s just there to tick boxes and it’s just beginning to feel like there is no right way. You know, these exclusionary rules continue to stack up and the goalposts continue to shift until, you know, me, my studio, people who look like us, just sit down, be quiet and just accept the fact that you’re outsiders. But I won’t do that.”
“If there are people who aren’t like you in a game, I want you to know that game is still for you,” Salim continues. “You know, if the characters are a different race or a different gender or you know, a different ideology or different perspective, that doesn’t mean the game isn’t for you. It can still be for you.”
Salim Counters The Harassment By Lowering The Price Tales of Kenzera: ZAU Game On Nintendo Switch
The game dev was determined to make his game accessible to as many people as possible, setting it at an affordable $20 price point across Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
To combat the harassment, Salim announced that he lowered the cost of the game to less than $15 on the Nintendo Switch, thanking Nintendo for “acting fast on this.”
“I’m working with the team in bringing this discount to all platforms, and it’s gonna start from now to until the end of June because, you know, it just means so much to me, man,” he says.
Salim continues, “I believe this is just one way that I can show you how serious I am about this,” he says. “Games are for everyone. Diverse games, they’re not about taking something away from you. They’re about adding something new because there’s room for all of us.”
X Rallies Behind Abukar Salim
Following the release of his video, the gaming communities rallied behind Salim, offering him plenty of support and applauding his courage and commitment to pushing diversity in the gaming space.
“This is the message we all need to hear,” Kinda Funny and Gamertag Radio cohost Parris Lilly wrote.
Senior editor Alyssa Mercante added, “So grateful for your work, your vision, and your voice, and to consider you a friend.”
“Black gamers have been playing as non-Black characters in games for so long and enjoy those games, us included. But there is nothing wrong with us also wanting us to be represented fairly and authentically in the medium. What we’re finding here is these detractors don’t want the exact same experience that Black gamers have had to endure for a majority of the history of gaming,” Black Girl Gamers wrote.
We hear at HHW Gaming stand with Abubakar Salim and will continue to ensure we shine a spotlight on Black and Brown game developers like Salim, Xalavier Nelson Jr., and others.
You can see more messages of support sent to Salim in the gallery below.
3. In the face of racism and harassment we continue to have go higher. His decision was admirable.
Artificial Intelligence is one of the buzziest — and most rapidly changing — areas of the music business today. A year after the fake-Drake song signaled the technology’s potential applications (and dangers), industry lobbyists on Capitol Hill, like RIAA’s Tom Clees, are working to create guard rails to protect musicians — and maybe even get them paid.
Meanwhile, entrepreneurs like Soundful’s Diaa El All and BandLab’s Meng Ru Kuok (who oversees the platform as founder and CEO of its parent company, Caldecott Music Group) are showing naysayers that AI can enhance human creativity rather than just replacing it. Technology and policy experts alike have promoted the use of ethical training data and partnered with groups like Fairly Trained and the Human Artistry Coalition to set a positive example for other entrants into the AI realm.
What is your biggest career moment with AI?
Trending on Billboard
Diaa El All: I’m proud of starting our product Soundful Collabs. We found a way to do it with the artists’ participation in an ethical way and that we’re not infringing on any of their actual copyrighted music. With Collabs, we make custom AI models that understand someone’s production techniques and allow fans to create beats inspired by those techniques.
Meng Ru Kuok: Being the first creation platform to support the Human Artistry Coalition was a meaningful one. We put our necks out there as a tech company where people would expect us to actually be against regulation of AI. We don’t think of ourselves as a tech company. We’re a music company that represents and helps creators. Protecting them in the future is so important to us.
Tom Clees: I’ve been extremely proud to see that our ideas are coming through in legislation like the No AI Fraud Act in the House [and] the No Fakes Act in the Senate.
The term “AI” represents all kinds of products and companies. What do you consider the biggest misconception around the technology?
Clees: There are so many people who work on these issues on Capitol Hill who have only ever been told that it’s impossible to train these AI platforms and do it while respecting copyright and doing it fairly, or that it couldn’t ever work at scale. (To El All and Kuok.) A lot of them don’t know enough about what you guys are doing in AI. We need to get [you both] to Washington now.
Kuok: One of the misconceptions that I educate [others about] the most, which is counterintuitive to the AI conversation, is that AI is the only way to empower people. AI is going to have a fundamental impact, but we’re taking for granted that people have access to laptops, to studio equipment, to afford guitars — but most places in the world, that isn’t the case. There are billions of people who still don’t have access to making music.
El All: A lot of companies say, “It can’t be done that way.” But there is a way to make technological advancement while protecting the artists’ rights. Meng has done it, we’ve done it, there’s a bunch of other platforms who have, too. AI is a solution, but not for everything. It’s supposed to be the human plus the technology that equals the outcome. We’re here to augment human creativity and give you another tool for your toolbox.
What predictions do you have for the future of AI and music?
Clees: I see a world where so many more people are becoming creators. They are empowered by the technologies that you guys have created. I see the relationship between the artist and fan becoming so much more collaborative.
Kuok: I’m very optimistic that everything’s going to be OK, despite obviously the need for daily pessimism to [inspire the] push for the right regulation and policy around AI. I do believe that there’s going to be even better music made in the future because you’re empowering people who didn’t necessarily have some functionality or tools. In a world where there’s so much distribution and so much content, it enhances the need for differentiation more, so that people will actually stand up and rise to the top or get even better at what they do. It’s a more competitive environment, which is scary … but I think you’re going to see successful musicians from every corner of the world.
El All: I predict that AI tools will help bring fans closer to the artists and producers they look up to. It will give accessibility to more people to be creative. If we give them access to more tools like Soundful and BandLab and protect them also, we could create a completely new creative generation.
This story will appear in the June 1, 2024, issue of Billboard.