The Music Industry

How ai is impacting for the better and potentially worse

Author

Zander Huff
February 13, 2024

Mernin. Happy Tuesdayyyyy and we’re here with our weekly GBU: Music Edition.

This time, instead of touching on the bad &&& the ugly (booooo) - we’re going to give you three good parts and how ai is impacting it the music industry.

We’ll also include a “Cautioned Possibility” at the bottom that you need to keep an eye out for.

Let’s hop in

💀 DEAD THINGS TO LIFE 💐 

The Beatles, one of, if not, the greatest groups of all time.

Just to jog your memory for you old pups out there: McCartney and Lennon paired up out of England in ‘56. They added Sutcliffe in ‘57. And then added Starr and the name “The Beatles” in ‘62. Pandemonium hit the states in ‘64 and they went on to have an over 2 decade career of hits that stayed at the top of the charts including some fan favorites of “Yesterday”, “Something”, and “Hey Jude” (quit screaming at me saying you left off “Here Comes the Sun”).

The Last song they all got together to record was in 1970 for running California Governor Timothy Leary called called “Come Together”.

or so they thought.

With the help of ai, The Beatles finished their newest and “last” song “Now and Then” after 45 years. John Lennon, who passed away, recorded this demo in 1977 but never finished the song. They grabbed the old demo, isolated his voice, and were able to finish the song.

Listen to that song here

👻 A GHOST WRITER NAMED GHOSTWRITER ✏️ 

The Grammys were the other night. Great music and artists from all over the industry.

Now, it’s no surprise that high profile artists have people that write for them. They have people that make beats. People to produce. To people to play guitar, piano, keys, even on a midi.

We’ve now seen something, a shift if you will, in the music industry.

A dude popped up

yes, that is him.

This dude has named himself GhostWriter. He claims to have been a ghost writer for major labels and “got paid nothing”.

We’re writing about him today because even though he wrote the song, he used ai generated voice tracks from Drake and The Weeknd to record the song. To make it seem like Drake and The Weeknd were on the song.

You can view the song here.

It has been hunted down and scoured from Universal Music Group. It was just reuploaded to YouTube 2 weeks ago. So no telling how quickly this will be taken down again.

“Zander, it’s up on Spotify, what are you talking about” —> that’s not Drake or The Weeknd’s voice.

This song was able to be nominated for a grammys because ghostwriter actually wrote the song. Which is crazy

The legal battles you’ll see in the coming years for “shared art” will be unprecedented.

🎶 Ai Tools in Music 💫 

  • Brain.fm - music created from scientists that increases your attention span to study (i’m going to try this out today and give a review)

  • Ecrett - will create music based on videos you give it to match mood, tone, and content in video

  • Magenta - A system of tools used for creators to optimize their work flow

  • So Vits SVC - The tool used to create the Drake/The Weeknd Song. (UI is not good) It converts an audio file and attaches the voice to it. The initial use case was for the founder to attach his favorite anime voice to characters. It definitely strayed from that.

🟥 A CAUTIONARY POSSIBILITY ⚠️ 

All hands on deck.

Starting in the next 3-4 years, it will be tougher for up and coming singer/songwriters to make it with ai. Far tougher. Like nearly impossible. Let me explain:

Ai will be able to compute at a rate of about 10,000 to 1 of a human. They’ll have access to pulling any information they need from the internet with a computing speed of under a second.

Let’s look at Spotify. Spotify has kinda sorta 4 tiers of artists. Highlighting the first two: You have the ones just getting started under 10,000 streams per month. Seeing these guys to stardum is already a needle in a haystack. You have the next group with streams under 100,000 streams per month. This group hasn’t quite yet built a solid following.

For up and coming artists - the focus needs to be build an audience and build it fast. Because if not, ai will drown out a lot of people that aren’t consistent with their craft. There will be other options for streaming music thats generated more often to give the “newer” feel to it. They will develop a listening muscle for ai artists that will outweigh human artists that can’t keep up at the speed and pace of how fast ai will produce.

TLDR: YOU NEED TO HAVE AN AUDIENCE RIGHT NOW. Ai is coming in and will be able to produce music to compete with the people that don’t have a fanbase; it will pick up steam. I really worry for artists that are just getting started doing this.

We’re going to see a change of music like we’ve never seen before within the next 5 years. For artists interested, music coming out faster than we’ve seen. Along for new characters to pop up in the space.

Excited to talk tomorrow.

Zander

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