An organisation representing some of the world’s biggest news publishers and broadcasters has outlined some principles for generative AI. The post Digital Content Next publishes guidelines for generative AI appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The company behind popular text-to-image AI Stable Diffusion is facing its latest legal challenge, but from a familiar foe. The post Stability AI faces another Getty Images legal action in UK appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Cyanite has evolved into a business focused on AI-powered music search and tagging. Now it’s adding sampling aspects courtesy of an acquisition of a fellow German startup: Aptone. The latter […] The post AI-tagging firm Cyanite buys sample-management startup Aptone appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Musician Stefanie Sun has become an unwilling guinea pig in the latest wave of experiments with AI voice-cloning technologies. The post Singaporean artist Stefanie Sun feels under threat from AI clones appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

TikTok is testing an in-app chatbot called Tako that can answer questions about videos and recommend other content. The post TikTok explores conversational AI with tests of Tako chatbot appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus did not pull any punches in his introduction to the latest annual report by collecting societies body CISAC. The post Björn Ulvaeus warns music industry: ‘We will lose the next Paul McCartney’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

US startup Boombox is one of the companies trying to help musicians and producers store their files in the cloud. The post Boombox raises $7m for music-workflow tools (and its AI ‘Boombot’) appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

It’s clearly the season for senior major-label executives to outline what they feel is wrong with the current music-streaming economy. The post Sony Music boss warns of music streaming’s ‘meaningless volume’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

UK-based AI music firm DAACI has made its first two acquisitions, of fellow AI startups MXX and WiSL, for undisclosed amounts. The post AI music firm DAACI acquires fellow startups MXX and WiSL appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Universal Music Group has signed a partnership with AI-music startup Endel, to create mood-music soundscapes with its artists. The post Universal Music Group signs deal with AI-music startup Endel appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

A US Supreme Court ruling concerning Andy Warhol has been hailed by music industry bodies as important for our industry too. The post US music bodies hail new Supreme Court ruling on fair use appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Are you planning to talk about AI music in a positive context in the near future? You’d better not stand so close to Sting while doing so. The post Sting slams AI music, predicts ‘battle we all have to fight’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

OpenAI boss Sam Altman has said his company supports the rights of musicians to control how their work is used to train AI models. The post OpenAI boss on music and AI-training: ‘Creators deserve control’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Musician Holly Herndon has been thinking about AI music and artists’ rights for a long time, and has some advice for fellow artists. The post Holly Herndon warns artists off signing AI voice-rights deals too early appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Europe may soon become the first territory to craft and pass new legislation on the use of artificial intelligence technologies. The post Europe’s AI Act takes next step including training-data rules appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Like every other big tech company, Meta is scrambling to show that it’s at the forefront of generative AI technology, rather than at risk of being disrupted by new companies from that sector. The post Meta rolls out generative-AI tools for creating Facebook ads appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

In January this year, Google announced that it had built a new AI model capable of “generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions”. The post Google is now letting people play with its MusicLM AI tool appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Here’s more evidence for our theory that the real problem with generative AI is what humans choose to do with it. In this case, what someone chose to do was to create a bunch of deepfaked Frank Ocean tracks, claim they were leaks of real recordings, and sell them in an underground music collectors community […]

Two topics loomed large in Warner Music Group’s quarterly earnings call yesterday. First, CEO Robert Kyncl’s views on current payout models in music streaming, and second, his thoughts on the impact generative AI will have on WMG, its artists and the wider music industry. The post WMG boss Kyncl talks streaming payouts and generative AI […]

Two topics loomed large in Warner Music Group’s quarterly earnings call yesterday: streaming payouts and generative AI. The post WMG boss Robert Kyncl talks streaming payouts and generative AI appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

There was good news for AI music startup Boomy this weekend: it has reestablished its distribution pipeline to Spotify. The post AI music startup Boomy reestablishes its pipeline to Spotify appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

His latest web3 project, the Cult Pass, is described as: “a dynamic, blockchain enabled membership pass based on long-term fan engagement.” The post RAC launches NFT-powered “Cult Pass” for long-term fans appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Is a crackdown on AI-generated music by streaming services beginning? Startup Boomy’s distribution pipeline to Spotify has been cut off. The post AI music startup Boomy warns of catalogue removals from Spotify appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Audius has added a toggle switch to artists’ settings page that enables them to opt in to allowing interactions with AI-generated tracks. The post Audius wants to help artists to opt in (or out) of AI music appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Trebel Music has been building an audience for its ad-supported ‘offline music’ app in the US, Mexico, Colombia and Indonesia. The post Trebel Music taps ChatGPT to generate personalised playlists appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Electronic music brand Beatport’s evolution through partnerships continues: it announced its two latest alliances last week. The post Beatport reveals latest partnerships: TuneCore and Pixelynx appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

AI music has hit one of those moments where individual news stories come thick and fast, creating a bigger picture. The post Music AI update: Grimes, The Beatles, Sound Ventures, EU’s AI Act… appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

This is a guest post by Markus Schwarzer, CEO of AI-powered music analysis and recommendation platform Cyanite. He addresses the concern that major labels and other large music companies have shown recently  about the use of Artificial Intelligence in music and business – and the importance of stepping back and thinking carefully about as-yet unknown […]

Major labels are demanding that AI music firms be properly licensed if they are training their models on commercial music. The post UMG boss says label is ‘open for business’ with ‘legitimate’ AI music firms appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

To adapt a phrase from… somewhere in Meta’s corporate history: a billion users isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Three billion users. The post Meta now has more than 3bn daily active people using its apps appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Grimes is essentially tweeting out loud the thought process that any artist must work through if they want to work with this kind of technology. The post Grimes’ AI deepfake rules: no baby murder songs or Nazi anthems appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Ek was asked how Spotify’s new ‘AI DJ’ feature plays given the “subsequent copyright pushback from some of the major labels”. The post Spotify CEO addresses the risks and potential of generative AI appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

One artist who isn’t getting too cross about the prospect of their voice being cloned for AI-generated tracks is Grimes. The post Grimes encourages people to use her voice in AI-generated tracks appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Startup Beatly Music says it’s going “back to Napster days” with a safe haven for music with AI-generated vocals based on real artists. The post Beatly Music wants to build a takedown-proof home for AI music appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

At the moment, AI music is a bit of a Wild West, and is generating some interesting experiments. Here are some of the latest. The post Today in AI: Artist APIs, AI-sis sound “mega”, and Michael Schumacher appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

This guest post is written by Martin Nedved, co-founder of AIMS, a platform of AI-based products designed to search and tag catalogues of music, and which is a supporter of next week’s NEXT summit in London. In this article, he explores the “urgent need for advanced tools to help the music industry survive and thrive”, and looks at […]

The old adage about bankruptcy is that it happens very slowly and then very suddenly. The emergence of creative music AI has taken a similar route: we have been aware of it, and listening to it, and writing about it for years, and now here it is, in the form of “Heart On My Sleeve”, […]

Universal Music Group is flexing its corporate muscles to clamp down on AI-generated music trained on commercial music without a licence. The post Report: UMG wants DSPs to block unlicensed AI-training scraping appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The recently-launched Human Artistry Campaign, which is trying to set guidelines for the use of creative AIs, has added new members. The post Human Artistry Campaign adds more music-industry body members appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Moises has come a long way since we first wrote about it in November 2019: the AI-powered stem-separation app now has 30m registered users. The post AI music-making app Moises hits 30m registered users milestone appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Every year, Music Ally publishes a spoof April Fool’s news story. This year we got ChatGPT to do the hard work for us. The post It’s 2023, so naturally we asked ChatGPT to write a bunch of April Fool’s stories for us appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Ed Sheeran has revealed that he’s been using a creative AI on his new album, and that it’s written one song entirely by itself. The post Ed Sheeran says new album includes ‘at least one’ track written by an AI appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The British government has published its latest effort to get to grips with the impact and potential of artificial intelligence technologies. The post UK’s proposed AI regulations swerve content copyright issue appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Automata Radio is a Twitch channel streaming electronic music round the clock, with ChatGPT playing a hosting role, responding to listeners. The post Twitch channel Automata Radio blends music with ChatGPT AI appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Tencent Music has been showing off its first ‘hyper-real virtual pop idol’, an avatar artist named Lucy who debuted in late 2022. The post Tencent Music talks up Lucy, its first ‘hyper-real’ virtual artist appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Generative AI startups raised $5.9bn of funding in 2022, up from $1.5bn in 2020, according to figures from investors’ database Pitchbook. The post Funding for generative AI startups is picking up pace rapidly appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Earlier this month, we wrote about a funding round for a startup called Character·ai, valuing it at $1bn. Now that round is official. The post Further details emerge on chatbot startup Character·ai’s funding appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The global music industry made $26.2bn from recorded music in 2022, according to the IFPI. That’s up 9% year-on-year. The post Global recorded music revenues grew 9% in 2022 to $26.2bn says IFPI appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Music industry companies have been speaking publicly more often about what they think about creative artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The post Music bodies join Human Artistry Campaign to set principles for creative AI appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

US music industry body the RIAA announced its 2022 figures yesterday, quickly followed up by a guest post by CEO Mitch Glazier for Variety. The post RIAA boss slams TikTok and the ‘empty knock offs’ of AI music appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Offstage is an invite-only data and analytics tool. It brings together data from different platforms (ticketing, streaming, social media etc) and provides teams with an insights tool powered by AI. The post Tools :: Offstage appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

It’s been a busy messaging morning for Music Ally. “Who even are you lol?” asked Billie Eilish, before asking us for recommendations. The post AI startup whose chatbot mimics Billie Eilish and Kanye West valued at $1bn appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

BeatBot is the latest experiment from AI music startup Splash: essentially a short-form text-to-music generator. The post AI music startup Splash launches its lyric-spitting BeatBot appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Today Music Ally published its newest Sandbox Guide to Creative AI, which looks at how musicians and their teams can use AI as part of their marketing and content strategies, and in their creative processes. But alongside these exciting creative possibilities are some complicated – and as yet not fully answered – questions. What is the nature of artistry when using […]

Music Ally kicked off the year by asking 30 of the music industry’s leading lights what – in the wide world of digital music marketing – they were looking forward to in 2023. The post The Sandbox Guide to… Creative AI appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

After Amazon Music worked with Endel on a ‘Sleep Science’ playlist for its service, now another AI music startup is using a big DSP. The post AI music startup Aimi launches 10 live music channels on YouTube appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The US Copyright Office has just made an important and interesting decision regarding copyright and creative AIs. The post US Copyright Office reaffirms its rules on AI-created content appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Spotify has made a very interesting announcement today: it’s launching an AI-powered DJ feature – as in radio DJ. The post Spotify taps OpenAI tech to create an AI-powered DJ for its service appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Many of the recent controversies around creative visual AIs – those that create images mainly – have focused on training materials. The post Music’s problem with AI training may not be the one you expect appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

AI music firm Endel has found a new frontier for its sleep tracks: Amazon Music. It has launched a ‘Sleep Science’ playlist with the DSP. The post Amazon Music adds ‘Sleep Science’ playlist from AI music startup Endel appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

In 2020 we wrote about a startup called Release Party that was hosting livestreams for musicians and helping them to sell tickets. The post Release Party rebrands as Offstage with AI-driven analytics appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The boss of the US-based National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) has been giving his views on creative AI. The post NMPA boss talks AI music: ‘This is not necessarily bad…’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

If you need another nudge on music streaming’s boom times facing their biggest challenge yet, yesterday’s WMG financials may provide it. The post WMG revenues fall but new CEO says ‘music is still undervalued’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

News that David Guetta’s latest track features Eminem may not raise an eyebrow: the latest in a long line of big-name collaborations… The post David Guetta replicated Eminem with an AI (but won’t release the track) appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

In our report yesterday on the emerging competition around conversational AIs and online search, we noted that Microsoft was holding an event. The post Microsoft taps ChatGPT to launch its ‘new Bing’ search engine appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Here’s another story for the narrative of AI-music startups developing tools for humans’ creativity, rather than displacing them. The post AI music startup WaveAI launches a tool for human songwriters appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Nick Cave may not be a fan of conversational AI ChatGPT, but he’s certainly not scared of it. Y’know who might be scared of it? Google. The post Is the music biz ready for a world of conversational search AIs? appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

One of the big debates about creative AI technology at the moment concerns how these models are trained – especially on copyrighted content. The post UK government rethinks plans for AI-training copyright exception appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

We know startup Aimi as the company behind an app that provides adaptive electronic music using its AI system. The post Aimi’s new app lets listeners interact with its musical AI appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Google has built an AI model capable of “generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions” that “outperforms previous systems”. The post Google reveals (but doesn’t release) text-to-music AI MusicLM appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

This comes soon after a class-action lawsuit filed by three visual artists against the company, along with Midjourney and DeviantArt. The post Now Getty Images is suing Stability AI over its training appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Some big names in text-to-image AI were facing a new challenge yesterday: a class-action lawsuit from three visual artists. The post Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt face artists’ lawsuit appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

It’s a brave person who gets the ChatGPT AI to write a song in the style of Nick Cave, then sends it to Nick Cave to see what he thinks. The post Nick Cave gives ChatGPT both barrels: ‘This song is bullshit’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

We’ve been writing regularly about the emergence of ‘text-to-image’ AIs. Now there’s another branch to think about: text-to-playlist AIs. The post After text-to-image AIs now there’s a text-to-playlist AI appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

From the earliest days of the modern AI-music era, startups in this area have been keen to work with human artists. The post AI music startup Beatoven launches $50k fund… for human artists appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Only a small proportion of published books get audiobook versions, due to the costs of recording voice narration professionally. The post Apple deploys AI tech for ‘digital narration’ of audiobooks appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Music Ally talked to outgoing BPI chief Geoff Taylor about the body’s annual figures, and music streaming and industry trends in the UK. The post BPI boss warns of short-video culture’s ‘unrelenting demands on artists’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Rock band Disturbed have become one of the most prominent music artists to use image-generating AI technology to create a music video. The post Disturbed used an image-generating AI for latest music video appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The below post – by Kyran de Keijzer, Co-founder and CPO of Muso.AI – is Partner Content. At Muso.AI, we’re delivering lifetime, greatest-of-all-time, big data energy type of analytics that get creatives motivated to engage with their data again. Total streams, Shazams, charts, playlists, collaborations and more; we’re giving the power of data back to […]

A streaming service teaming up with an AI music startup to create “over 170k songs”? Sound the klaxons! The post Anghami taps Mubert for 170k AI-generated football chants appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made great strides in recent years, and one area where it is beginning to have an impact is music. The post 7 reasons why AI music was a fascinating space in 2022 appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Artificial intelligence firm OpenAI has revealed its latest project. “We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT…” The post A conversation with OpenAI’s ChatGPT about the music industry appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

British firm Jukedeck was one of the first AI music startups to launch and get some traction, back in late 2014. The post Jukedeck co-founder returns to AI music with Stability AI role appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Chinese music-streaming giant Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) has published its financial results for the third quarter of 2022. The post Tencent Music revenues fall, but its online music business is still growing appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

There’s a growing debate about whether and how visual artists should be able to opt out of their work being used to train creative AI systems. The post DeviantArt wants to help visual artists opt out of AI systems appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The new AI-music startup, like its established rivals, is pitching itself as a boon for human songwriters rather than a replacement for them. The post Staccato pitches itself to songwriters as ‘an AI Lennon to your McCartney’ appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

We’ve seen a flurry of announcements from streaming services about their catalogues reaching 100m tracks. Now Boomy has its own milestone. The post AI music startup Boomy has been used to create 10m songs appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

“Your algorithm’s like a breath of spring, your code is soft like summer rain…” These are NOT the lyrics in a new cover of Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’, we hasten to add: it’s very faithful to the original. The post AI music roundup: Holly+ does Dolly, Emergent Drums… appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

We’ve written a few times recently about Stability AI. It’s the company behind the text-to-image Stable Diffusion system, and also a backer of the Harmonai project that recently launched AI music tool Dance Diffusion. The post Stability AI raises $10m as Stable Diffusion reaches 10m users appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Video Killed the Radio Star… Diffusion transcribes lyrics from YouTube videos and turns them into prompts for Stable Diffusion images. The post Stable Diffusion used to turn lyrics into AI-driven videos appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

The recent history of creative AIs and music has been a tale of fledgling startups and huge technology companies alike. The post Google and Harmonai reveal their latest AI music models appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

Spotify has launched an open-source AI-powered tool called Basic Pitch. The post Spotify launches AI music tool, Basic Pitch appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

We’ve written a lot about AI music creation and how initial and understandable pangs of concern from human songwriters The post Splice launches AI-powered music creation platform as AI music continues to find its place appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

This is a guest post written by Dr. Ari Katorza, senior researcher and Doron Gabbay, content manager at MyPart, which uses AI music analysis for A&R and other purposes. We asked MyPart – which is also part of the Abbey Road Red incubator (pictured above) – if they’d like to use their technology to explore music in an international context. In […]

Snafu Records emerged in 2020 with $2.9m of funding claiming to be the “first AI-enabled music label”, promising algorithms that would identify promising unsigned artists. The post Snafu Records raises $6m funding for its ‘AI-driven’ label appeared first on Music Ally. Source: Music ally

That’s a rhetorical question: of COURSE you have. Unless you’d prefer the trap veteran’s dulcet tones to read you Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Pride and Prejudice, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or Peter Pan, of course. No, Gucci hasn’t taken a surprising career leap into audiobooks narration. Instead, this is something called Project Gucciberg created by a […]

Spotify’s annual year-end Wrapped campaign packages up people’s listening in best-of playlists, but now it’s being given a remix by AI-powered A&R startup Andrson. It has launched something called ReWrapped, which people can sign in to using their Spotify accounts. Andrson then puts its audio analysis engine to work on comparing their favourite tracks from 2020 […]

Bitfury Surround says it is about to provide a platform that can take all your data, attach it to the blockchain, and standardise it. Then, you can look at this vast, interconnected set of data and figure out, for instance, the money you’ve not recovered, and who you need to get it from. Or figure out who to market to […]

This feels like a very modern story: there’s now a bot for chat app Discord that will serve up AI-generated music in the style of Chopin, Lady Gaga or Frank Sinatra. People running a Discord channel can invite the bot – Noisy – to join to provide them with a soundtrack, using the MuseNet technology launched by tech firm […]

AI music startup Popgun launched its Splash music-making app on gaming platform Roblox in May, and saw it used by more than one million players in its first 20 days. How’s it going now? Still strong. “Wow, over 21M players have now made music with Splash!” tweeted Popgun boss Stephen Phillips this weekend. “55K kids performed on stage for the first […]

Amper Music has been one of the more prominent AI music startups since emerging in 2017 as one of the first startups to take part in the Techstars Music accelerator. It launched with a tool for people to make music with its AI to use in their own creative projects, and along the way has collaborated with artist […]

Startup Endel made its name with technology generating AI music to suit people’s moods and activities. Now it has announced a partnership with a high-profile human artist: Grimes. They’ve worked together on an ‘AI Lullaby’ that will be featured in Endel’s iOS and Mac apps until 23 December. Later this year it will also be […]

Boomy is the startup that lets anyone sign up and create music using its AI tool – and then release it to streaming services. We’ve covered the company regularly (this profile for example), and now the company has launched a major update to its platform. That includes an expansion of its free tier: “Starting today, […]

Endel has been one of the higher-profile startups exploring AI-generated music: in its case, focusing on its application as music to help people concentrate, relax and sleep. Now it has raised a Series A funding round of $5m to further its ambitions. The round was led by True Ventures and its partner Kevin Rose – […]

Magenta is a research project within Google exploring the intersection of AI and creativity, including a range of music demos. The latest of those is called Lo-Fi Player, and it launched this month. It’s riffing off the increasingly popular trend for listening to lo-fi hip-hop as a study aid or relaxation tool. In this case, […]

Music radio persists in an era of hyper-personalised playlists, possibly because it offers a contrasting linear, set-and-forget experience. One of Germany’s most popular radio stations, Südwestrundfunk (SWR), has launched a new radio app with the usual live-rewind and listen again functions, but is also trying something slightly different: AI-powered, in-show song personalisation. (Article in German) If the user doesn’t […]

In June, we wrote about a pair of DJ apps getting ‘real-time stem separation’ features, so that DJs could mix with the individual elements of tracks (like vocals or basslines). One of those apps was djay from Algoriddim, where the feature was called ‘Neural Mix’. Now it’s being spun off into its own software for […]

We’re fascinated by the potential of ‘synthetic reality’, an area that brings together virtual reality, AI, ‘deepfakes’ and other technologies. Two more startups in the news this week offer some more sparks for thought on this score. Hour One is the first: a company that takes real people and turns them into virtual characters, with uses […]

The latest project representing a creative blend of artistry and AI is called ‘Spleen Machine’. It’s the work of Alex Braga, who’s both a composer and an inventor. For this EP, he invented his own AI music-making instrument called A-Mint. According to the album announcement, A-Mint creates “augmented music” after learning a musician’s style. “When A-Mint […]

CISAC is the global body representing collecting societies. Its last president was Jean-Michel Jarre, and before him it was Robin Gibb from the Bee Gees. Big shoes to fill for its next president, right? Step forward… Björn Ulvaeus. The co-founder of ABBA will serve a three-year term as president of CISAC, having been elected by […]

Aimed at electronic music fans, a new app called AiMi is using AI technology to turn existing tracks from artists into adaptive experiences for listeners. The idea: listeners set the ‘energy’ rate they want, based on a scale of 1 to 10, and the app delivers a flow of continuous music to suit their requirements. AiMi uses […]

We’ve written regularly about Australian AI-music startup Popgun, including its belief that AI could be the secret sauce for a service “where teenagers come together to make music for each other… the ‘pop stars on training wheels’ place where they make music for each other, release it and watch each other pretend to be pop […]

Squeezing new uses from existing technology sparks creative revolutions. Dancing to recorded music was weird until someone who understood the crowd started to link the right songs together in the right place, and created the nightclub. (It’s probably best not to dwell on one of the main claimants of that innovation, mind…) Fast forward to […]

We reported on the launch of Trash last June: an AI-powered video editing app launched by Hannah Donovan, formerly of Vine and This Is My Jam. Then, in January this year, her pitch won the startup showcase section of the NY:LON Connect conference in New York, with Donovan explaining that Trash had been licensing music for use in […]

In January we reported on plans to hold an ‘AI Song Contest’ for “European teams of musicians, artists, scientists and developers” working with music-generating AI systems. It turns out they weren’t just Europeans: an Australian team called Uncanny Valley was announced as the winner of the contest this week with a track called ‘Beautiful The World’. “The team trained […]

“Country music is going to be the biggest sort of paradox for AI because the underlying melodies and so on are very formulaic. But the lyrics are based on human experience. I’d be very interested how long it would take an AI to come up with this… Tammy Wynette song, D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Unless that AI spent […]

OpenAI is the non-profit artificial intelligence company backed by (among others) tech mogul Elon Musk. Just under a year ago it showed off Musenet: “a deep neural network that can generate 4-minute musical compositions with 10 different instruments, and can combine styles from country to Mozart to the Beatles”. Now it’s following up with a new system […]

Spotify launched its Spotify Kids app partly to reassure parents that their children would not encounter ripe phraseology when streaming music. Now Deezer is also looking into the challenge of ensuring family listening doesn’t accidentally turn the air a distinct shade of blue. The team behind its Spleeter stem-isolating tool have added in a ‘Keyword Spotting System’ […]

Do you want to upload amazing dancing videos to TikTok like The Young People do, but are hamstrung by a lack of dancing skills? Fear not: AI is coming to your rescue. Possibly. Check out a new startup called Boogie, whose teaser website claims its technology will “generate deepfake dances with a single image” and thus […]

The latest startup using artificial intelligence technology to make sense of large music catalogues is AIMS API, from the Czech Republic. The company describes itself as “an API service that searches and recommends music within your catalogue based on reference audio tracks”. The startup’s background is in the production music world: co-founder Martin Nedvěd ran production […]

Israeli startup MyPart aims to use AI to turn the long tail of music catalogues into revenue streams that humans may have overlooked. In fact, the company wants to do more than analyse music and pull the needle from the haystack: it wants to pair the songs no human would consider with artists who never […]

German startup Loudly is taking the wrappers off its music-focused artificial intelligence technology, which it says can automatically remix tracks into different genres. The tech is being shown off on the company’s website with tracks by Becky G, Dillon Francis, Bien Monk and MØ. For example, Becky G’s track ‘Next To You’ has been remixed by the […]

AI-tagging startup Musiio has launched a new service that will make it easier for music companies to use its technology. It’s called Musiio App, and is aimed at independent labels, production houses, sync companies, DJs and other creatives. Anyone with a catalogue of music, who wants to make it easier to tag those tracks and search […]

Boomy is the startup that’s helping anyone (non-musicians included) to create AI-generated music, and then release it on streaming services. According to the company’s latest update, its users have created more than 370,000 original songs in the last year, with 70% of those people never having made a song before. The update also explains Boomy’s latest features, […]

“Begin your own journey and find yourself in our stunning retreat. Mindshower digital detox puts you back in control. RECONNECT. RECHARGE. REJUVENATE.” No, one of the daleks from Doctor Who hasn’t suddenly got on the wellness bandwagon. This was the introductory tweet from a mysterious new digital detox retreat called Mindshower. Which, as it turns out, […]

AI-generated music is an exciting but controversial topic within the music industry, but creative AI is also giving the advertising industry some ideas. One agency, Space150, has just trained an AI on the back catalogue of rapper Travis Scott, and used it to create a brand new ‘Travisbott’ track called ‘Jack Park Canny Dope Man’ […]

French startup Symphonia claims that its iPhone app is “the future of music composing”. Released this year, it uses AI to help people turn their musical ideas into actual music. “Just sing a melody. And Symphonia automatically detects the notes you sing and magically transforms them into amazing musical instruments in MIDI format,” explains its App Store blurb. “Thanks […]

There’s a theory that if music streaming wants to grab more listeners and advertising revenues from radio, it needs to become a bit more radio-like. From Spotify’s ‘Your Daily Drive’ playlist blending podcast clips and music to startups like Stationhead and Super Hi-Fi, there have been various moves on this front. Now another startup is […]

2020 looks set to be the year when a new AI-music startup (or at least a research project) pops up every week. This week’s entry is DeepJams, which falls somewhere between the two. It’s a graduate project from UC Berkeley exploring ways to use machine intelligence to augment traditional music composition. “We are applying the latest […]

In September 2019, startup studio Betaworks announced plans for an initiative called Audiocamp, promising to “invest in and mentor start-ups building on top of the latest advancements in NLP, or inventing new mobile, voice-enabled experiences and utilities, or engaging audiences in new ways of finding and supporting their next favorite audio programming, or developing new social listening […]

The artificial intelligence technology being developed by companies including Google needs to be regulated… thinks the CEO of Google (and now also its parent company Alphabet) Sundar Pichai. He published a guest column for the Financial Times yesterday that’s been widely shared since, outlining his views. “History is full of examples of how technology’s virtues aren’t guaranteed. […]

Keen followers of Björk’s career so far may have thought it was only a matter of time before she experimented with AI music, such has been her openness to new technologies. However, her new ‘Kórsafn’ project is less about using AI to generate the music itself. It’s an installation at the Sister City hotel in […]

“VR is shit! It’s shit but it doesn’t have to be. Certainly the hardware’s not all the way there yet, it’s quite bulky and if you put it on for an hour or so you’re going to get a pretty raging headache and neck ache. But the real problem is the content is shit. The […]

Taiwanese streaming service KKBox announced a partnership with Microsoft at the end of 2019, and while on the surface it was a fairly dry B2B story about cloud infrastructure, there’s more to it. So yes, KKBox will be migrating its service to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, but the press release for the deal outlined another […]

AI-music analysis startup Musiio has had a good 2019: it recently raised $1M in seed funding, is already working with a slew of clients, and is looking to raise money again in 2020. Musiio’s technology is a mixture of the advanced (AI that can listen to music) and the pragmatic (efficiently labelling catalogue). Right now, […]

We profiled startup Super Hi-Fi earlier this year. The US firm has developed technology that uses AI to make streaming services sound much more radio-like, with branded stings, artist name and track title announcements, interview clips and ads – all personalised to each individual listener. Now the company has a new partnership with a streaming-music firm: Napster. […]

Our recent interview with Stephen Phillips, CEO of AI-music startup Popgun, outlined his belief that an app for teenagers to make AI-powered music might be the ultimate ‘end-game’ for this technology. Now his company has launched… a music-making app for teenagers! Well, any-age people really: the key is that they don’t need prior musical knowledge to […]

“What’s the end-game for this? There isn’t this place in the world where teenagers come together to make music for each other. That place does not exist, and that’s nuts! That thing needs to exist, and it will exist. And getting the AI working is the price of admission to build that thing…” Stephen Phillips, […]

We reported yesterday on Amazon’s announcement of DeepComposer, a musical keyboard designed to help developers explore generative AI. Now Ed Newton-Rex, founder of one of the first AI-music startups, Jukedeck, has been giving his views on what Amazon’s announcement means. That includes the fact that it’s the fourth of the ‘big five’ tech companies to publicly […]

In Music Ally’s recent report on AI music (which you can read here if you missed it earlier this week) we cited Holly Herndon as one of the best examples of an artist leaning in to this technology for creative purposes. Now she’s published some thoughts on what AI means for musicians, in a tweet responding to […]

When most people think about the potential legal issues around AI-created music, they tend to think about the output – the music itself, and questions like whether an AI-generated track can attract copyright protection. Sophie Goossens, counsel at law firm Reed Smith, thinks that just as much attention should be paid to the input. “AI is […]

This report focuses on AI music – both in terms of artificial-intelligence systems that are creating original music, and AI-driven tools that human musicians are using for their own creative purposes. There’s lots to talk about. We’ve started by digging through the Music Ally archives to offer a timeline of modern AI music – starting with UK […]

Ever since co-founding distributor The Orchard in 1997, Scott Cohen has been known as one of the music-industry executives with an intense curiosity about new technologies and their potential applications for musicians and rightsholders – even when (or perhaps, especially when) they are disruptive to current business models and ways of thinking.

 The post WMG’s Scott […]

AI firm OpenAI made headlines earlier this year for its GPT-2 text-generating AI system, capable of being given a few sentences and then generating more text based on it. OpenAI declined to release the full system, for fear that it might be used for nefarious purposes (fake news, for example). However, after months of tests, […]

Can an AI (or a non-human) be the ‘author’ of a piece of music –or other art / content – that it has created? It’s a question that has been bubbling for a while now, from selfie-snapping monkeys to the output from the growing number of AI-generated music startups. And often, certainly from the entities […]

Startup Musiio has revealed its latest partnership for its AI-powered catalogue-tagging technology. It’s working with production-music firm Overcoast – its eleventh music-industry customer – to help the company analyse its catalogue of music and tag it correctly. “Catalogue management becomes increasingly hard as companies grow their libraries, and we are no exception. Manually tagging tracks becomes tedious […]

Musician Jean-Michel Jarre is launching an “infinite music app” called EōN, which uses an algorithm to turn beats, melodies and chords he recorded into an endless stream of music. The app is being released for Apple’s iOS devices as a paid download: it costs $8.99 and is available now on the App Store, having been unveiled […]

There are more people now talking about music-generating AIs as tools for musicians to use, rather than existential threats to their livelihoods. But if there’s one obvious area where AI could replace humans (sometimes, at least) it’s production music. Now startup Amadeus Code, which came to our attention with its AI-powered app for songwriters, is […]

Fans of music/tech startups that sound a little… out-there will enjoy Synaesthetic’s ambitions. “While listening to music is great, we have evolved to look for things we hear and want visually-enhanced musical experiences, like concerts and music videos,” is how the Boston-based company’s website explains its plans. “We are developing a new musical medium, that is […]

Music Ally wrote about Australian startup Replica earlier this year, following its participation in the Techstars Music accelerator. The company is using AI to create ‘Replica voice actors on demand” – taking recordings of someone talking, and creating a ‘replica’ voice capable of reading any text fed to it. For musicians, the company pitched the tech as providing “the […]

Endel made headlines earlier this year by announcing a distribution partnership with Warner Music Group to release albums created by its AI. Its music is thus now on various streaming services, although its AI-generated soundscapes can also be accessed through its smartphone app and Alexa skill. And now, through Amazon’s live-video service Twitch too. Endel […]

There’s plenty of new music out today: Camila Cabello, Dan + Shay with Justin Bieber, Halsey, Travis Scott, K-Pop supergroup SuperM, Juice Wrld and Skygge are among the artists dropping new tracks. Wait, Skygge? Who’s that? An avatar blending AI-powered music with a cappella recordings by legendary US folk singers like Pete Seeger, Peggy Seeger […]

As Music Ally has been covering the latest wave of AI-generated music startups, we’ve argued that one of the most interesting uses for this technology is social – a way to create background music for videos and other posts in apps like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. That’s one reason why the acquisition of AI-music startup Jukedeck by […]

Startup Auxuman’s claim to have released ‘the first-ever fully AI-generated music album’ isn’t quite right: Endel has released a string of them in 2019, while Boomy is enabling anyone to release albums created by its AI (I’ve tried that already). Even so, Auxuman’s project is interesting. The album is called ‘Auxuman Vol.1’ and it features 10 tracks by […]

If the last few years of digital controversies has taught us anything, it’s that we should probably not be clicking our way through privacy-policy screens when signing up to new services without reading them. But reading privacy policies can be… a chore. Cue a startup promising that AI can help. The startup is called Guard, and […]

We’ve written a few times about music/tech startup Musiio this year: the company uses artificial-intelligence (AI) technology to analyse catalogues of music, for purposes including search, metadata-tagging and playlisting. Now the company has announced its first commercial client: Audio Network, the production-music firm acquired by Entertainment One earlier this year (with eOne now in the process of […]

Back in May 2018, Music Ally spotted a new startup called OptimiseLab, which was building “AI technology to analyse, improve, and compose music”. Initially, it was focusing on the first of those: a tool that “accurately predicts music popularity scores and provides customised advice on song improvement”. 15 months on, and OptimiseLab has just rebranded to Resonoo, […]

Startup Jamiphy’s website is currently deliberately enigmatic: simply showing a logo and a screenshot of a mobile app with a musician playing guitar, and a string of emojis that look like feedback from people watching a video livestream. The company’s profile on investment site AngelList fleshes that out a bit though: Jamiphy is based in San Francisco, and […]

Music Ally has written a fair bit about artificial intelligence (AI) technology being used to generate music. What about teaching humans to play music? That’s the goal of a new San Francisco startup called Kena·ai. The company is developing what it describes as “an Artificial-Intelligence personal music teacher” capable of “giving real-time feedback on practice sessions, […]

Of all the startup demos I’ve been given over the last decade working for Music Ally, Super Hi-Fi’s is the first that involves listening to Seal’s 1990s hit ‘Crazy’ being mixed into classic jazz cut ‘Monk’s Dream’ by Thelonious Monk. Oh, and it’s an AI doing the mixing, not a human. Super Hi-Fi isn’t an […]

Sony’s Computer Science Laboratories (Sony CSL) in Paris was responsible for one of the first high-profile projects in the modern wave of AI-generated music – Flow Machines, which in 2016 was responsible for the Beatles-esque ‘Daddy’s Car’ and the Great American Songbook-influenced ‘Mr Shadow’. The following year, Spotify hired the leader of the Flow Machines team, François […]

“Our goal was never to make music that was good! Maybe someday we will, and people will say it’s good. But our goal is to make music that’s meaningful. That’s a different kind of thing…” Alex Mitchell is the CEO of Boomy, one of the youngest startups exploring the idea of… well, I would say […]

FAAM·ai is so new, it doesn’t have a website up and running yet: just a profile on investment site AngelList. That got Music Ally’s attention though. “FAAM·ai partners with the brightest artists who turn disruptive artificial intelligence into world-changing film, architecture, art and music,” explains its product description. “The firm helps pioneering artists and invests in […]

Lead: Working with D2C experts is one part of the business, but changes in how social media sites are structuring themselves can offer acts new ways to sell products to fans of all stripes. We look at where social platforms are being best used to sell merchandise, how casual fans (and not just superfans) can […]

Boomy is one of the startups exploring AI-generated music, and launched in beta earlier this year. Now it’s emerging from that beta period, with test users having already created more than 100k songs using its technology. The general public is now being invited to sign in at Boomy’s website and start creating songs. “Our data shows […]

Music Ally first wrote about Mubert in February: it was one of the latest clutch of startups working on technology to create generative/adaptive music using AI. It already has a consumer app that people can use to generate a stream of AI music, which over time promises to get tuned to their preferences. Mubert is also exploring another line of business, […]

Ed Newton-Rex was the founder and CEO of Jukedeck, one of the first startups to develop a product for AI-generated music. We say ‘was’ because since April 2019, he has been working for TikTok’s parent company Bytedance as director of its AI Lab, according to his recently-updated LinkedIn profile. That would explain recent rumours that […]

Australian AI-music startup Popgun has made a habit of showing its progress by publishing YouTube videos showing how its AI has learned to compose and play music. And now to sing it too. “For the past year we have been teaching an AI to sing. Using text and midi as input, we generate vocal tracks […]

The question of AI and machine creativity has been creeping into mainstream music industry thinking over the past few years, with the increasing use of AI to make music posing questions about copyright, originality and even playlist placing. The Sónar festival, which is taking place in Barcelona this week, is one of the first big […]

German music/tech startup Groovecat has launched a new product called Cyanite, whose pitch is “making emotions within songs visible with artificial intelligence”. It’s a tool based partly on data from the company’s existing Music Moments app, with CEO Markus Schwarzer explaining that the aim is to “offer the music and advertising industry the possibility to find […]

We know Australian startup Popgun best for its demos showing how the company’s AI learned to compose and play music (watch the video here if you need a catchup). However, it’s also been working on something else: a new service called Gloss, which is firmly in Landr’s territory of AI-powered music mastering. “Gloss uses AI to make […]

Ian Hogarth was the co-founder and CEO of concert-discovery app Songkick, before stepping down in early 2016. Nowadays, he’s a prominent figure in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) startups, including as an angel investor. His ‘AI Nationalism’ article from last year is well worth a read, on that front. But so is the latest version […]

The Guardian’s piece on the launch of a new app called Trash mentions that it’s from the ‘ex-head of Vine’, but Music Ally also remembers Hannah Donovan as the co-founder of music-discovery site This Is My Jam back in the day. Her new venture isn’t specifically about music, but it could certainly be useful for musicians. Trash […]

Earlier this year, Australian startup Replica was announced as one of the latest cohort for accelerator Techstars Music: a company using AI “to create the next generation of games, films, music, and other media” providing “millions of ‘Replica’ voice actors on demand”. Now the company has been explaining more about what it does, and how it might be […]

Earlier this year, AI-music startup Endel revealed plans to release AI-generated albums through a distribution deal with Warner Music Group. And it definitely *is* a distribution deal: headlines about Endel becoming the first AI to ‘sign to a label’ were wide of the mark. Five albums came out earlier this year: ‘Clear Night’, ‘Rainy Night’, ‘Cloudy Afternoon’, […]

Painting, Doctor Who and crowds playing Pokémon have all attracted healthy audiences on Amazon’s Twitch live-video service. Could round-the-clock AI-generated piano music be the platform’s next craze? Okay, it lacks the star (whether human or animated-monster) quality of those past trends, but music-AI startup Melodrive is giving it a whirl anyway. It has launched ‘Twitch plays Melodrive’, […]

Music Ally first wrote about startup Super Hi-Fi in September 2018, when it announced a partnership with The Associated Press “to transform AP’s daily global news content into audio-based stories that can be seamlessly embedded into any digital music service partner”. The company’s focus is on “the space between the songs” on streaming services, with technology […]

Have you heard the acronym ‘PAI’ yet? It’s one to remember, standing for Personal Artificial Intelligences: digital avatars based on real people, with AI technology powering their interactions with humans. Gizmodo has an interesting profile of a startup called Oben which is working on this technology. “This startup, with its 100 plus employees, is betting that in the future, […]

British artist Nao has a new video, produced by Sony Music UK’s 4th Floor Creative division in partnership with Microsoft. The video is for Nao’s track ‘Orbit’, and gets fans to put in their birthday to generate a video driven by their astrological sign. There’s more interactivity as the video continues, with fans’ input adjusting the […]

Have you heard of OpenAI? It’s a non-profit artificial-intelligence company backed by Tesla founder Elon Musk and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman among others, with a claimed mission to “ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work – benefits all of humanity”. […]

Music Ally has interviewed Popgun CEO Stephen Phillips before a couple of times (here and here) – he’s a reliably-interesting thinker about the future for AI-generated music. Now he’s been talking to Soundcharts for the analytics company’s new series of video interviews. “We really love the idea that all of this is just playing on a broader trend of […]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal interest in AI voice-assistants is well known: in 2016 his personal mission for the year was building an AI ‘butler’ named Jarvis. Now the social network is working on a voice assistant to serve its 2.32bn users around the world. CNBC was first to report on the plans yesterday, claiming that a team […]

If you, like us, are curious about the implications of music generated by artificial-intelligence, then we can thoroughly recommend the latest article by The Verge journalist Dani Deahl. She’s been talking to lawyers about some of the “messy questions” around authorship of AI-generated music, particularly when the AIs have been trained on a body of copyrighted […]

Mood-music playlists have become a popular part of the streaming ecosystem. Check the growing audiences of Spotify’s ‘Peaceful Piano’ (5.2 million followers), ‘Sleep’ (3.2 million) and ‘Deep Focus’ (3.1 million) playlists, as examples.Artists whose tracks get on to these playlists can get impressive, long-lasting spikes in their stream-counts. But recent headlines about an artificial-intelligence startup […]

The news that a series of albums generated by the technology of startup Endel are being released through Warner Music is spreading far and wide. There are some clarifications being made about how the relationship has been presented, though. It’s not a ‘record deal’, for example: it’s a distribution partnership. Journalist Cherie Hu has done some […]

We reported last week on startup Endel’s announcement that its music-creating AI had signed a major-label deal with WMG. As the news spread, some artists have been having their day, including electronica artist Holly Herndon. “Well that escalated quickly, although it seems like this is simply a repackaging of procedural generation composition systems that have […]

Music Ally has for some time been covering the emerging wave of startups exploring AI music: algorithms trained on catalogues of existing music, with the aim of then being able to create their own new melodies – and even entire tracks. Thus far, the most prominent commercial model for all this has been that espoused […]

Google has been exploring the potential for AI-created music for a while now. Today, it’s making its latest experiment public, and in a high-profile way: in one of the ‘Doodles’ promoted on the homepage of its search engine. It’s an AI-powered Doodle that celebrates composer Johann Sebastian Bach. “An interactive experience encouraging players to compose a […]

We wrote about AI-music-creation startup Boomy in January, after spotting its profile on an investment website. The company then opened up its private beta-test earlier this month, enabling people to play with its system to “generate beautiful, creative songs in seconds with artificial intelligence”. Now founder Alex Mitchell has published a blog post explaining a bit more […]

In January, we discovered a new startup trying to use artificial intelligence to create music: Boomy. It was touting technology to “generate beautiful, creative songs in seconds with artificial intelligence – for your fans, your friends, your business, or just for you” with the promise of a web-based private beta, and mobile apps to follow. Yesterday, Boomy opened […]

Artificial intelligence is a hot ticket in the music industry and is spinning off in a variety of exciting new directions. It is being used to create music but also to power recommendations, to better understand the contexts of listening and to patch the leaks in the hull of metadata. It is, therefore, the Swiss […]

British startup AI Music has been talking since last year about its plans for ‘shapeshifting’ music – using AI to shift recordings between different genres and moods. Recently, the company released its first demonstration app, showing how music listeners can interact with its technology. The app is called Ossia, and for now it’s available as […]

Lead: as synchronisation grows in importance, a new wave of tools is emerging to make that whole process work seamlessly and smarter, covering both micro-licensing and pitch management. We look at the key players here, what they do and where they are taking synch – plus consider how AI is set to shake things up […]

We’ve been writing and thinking about artificial intelligence (AI) creativity in the context of music for a while now. There’s a fascinating story at the moment about another facet though: AI’s ability to write news stories and fiction. Nonprofit research company OpenAI has created a new AI model called GPT2, which is (according to the […]

Abbey Road Studios wants to recruit more teams with women founders to its Abbey Road Red startup accelerator, according to the studios’ MD Isabel Garvey. “We are acutely aware that we have no female founders, and very few women in our founder teams, and we are trying to be a little more diverse,” said Garvey, […]

“I think we’re looking at a new way of doing music, which is a collaboration between human expertise, human taste, and human raw talent in creating music and recording it, with the machine’s ability to combine those things and generate music all day long. And make it sound like a human made it.” “Just imagine […]

Singapore-based music/tech startup Musiio has raised $1m in seed fundingfrom investors including Wavemaker Partners, Exponential Creativity Ventures and other angel investors. The startup uses artificial-intelligence technology to analyse catalogues of music for a range of clients. As its CEO Hazel Savage explained at the recent NY:LON Connect conference, the company can power automated search through […]

We’ve written about startup WaveAI in recent months, with its plans to launch an AI-music-creation app called Alysia. This week, the app went live on Apple’s App Store for iPhones and iPads. It’s pitched at music fans as well as musicians: they can choose background music in a range of styles and genres, then generate […]