Music is about to undergo a great transformation. Another one. While artificial intelligence (AI) makes it possible to generate tons of tailor-made songs with the click of a mouse, younger audiophiles prefer to remix popular hits rather than listen to them over and over again. One wonders what place will remain for radio…
It’s the Wall Street Journal which published the news a few days ago: Spotify is considering adding mixing tools to its music player allowing its subscribers to take control, like a DJ. Access to some of these tools will be paid, but they will allow you to alter the tempo of a song, to mix pieces together and to do sequencing — modify the timbre, the intensity of the music, or add special sound effects.
At Spotify, we hope to ride the wave of homemade remixing, whose popularity is growing on the Internet in general and on TikTok in particular. The Chinese-origin social network estimates that more than a third (38%) of songs shared on its platform in 2023 had a different rhythm or timbre from the original version, up from 25% in 2022.
Spotify is reportedly in discussions with several studios to secure royalties to the artists whose songs will thus be modified by its subscribers. Some artists have seen edited versions of their songs be more popular than their own version on TikTok or elsewhere on the web, and have not been able to earn any money from them. There are remixes that have accumulated tens of millions of plays on digital platforms.
Suno and Udio: unlimited music
Streaming music services suffer from the same discoverability problem as every other digital service today. How does a music lover discover, among the approximately 50 million songs offered on these platforms, a new song, a new artist that suits their tastes?
In another era, it was the role of radio stations to offer a mix of well-known and lesser-known songs, within an often defined niche: pop, rock, classical, independent, etc.
Music lovers in need of new music will soon no longer have to worry. Artificial intelligence could take care of creating tailor-made songs for them, one after another, based on a simple request: for example, “create a country song about life on the farm”.
On sites like Suno AI and Udio, this will generate in just a minute one song, then another, and ultimately, an infinite number of variations on the same — otherwise very popular — country music theme.
Suno AI and Udio are generative AIs that their creators have fed thousands of royalty-free songs and musical excerpts to, from which they compose songs of all genres faster than it takes to listen to them, inspired by almost all styles — including Quebec music.
You can ask a Céline Dion emulator to sing about the past (very, very past) glory of Sainte-Flanelle, and you will get it. In French and/or English. Responding to a request for a “French-Canadian rock” style song, Suno AI produced a piece that Vincent Vallières would not have denied.
Unless the user provides them, Suno AI, in addition to creating the music, writes (and sings) its own lyrics. They don’t always make a lot of sense, but that’s not so bad. Anyone who has ever translated the words sung by Kurt Cobain into Nirvana’s microphone, or who has read the praise of the specialized press about the “deep, cryptic, mysterious” lyrics that CEGEP rock groups vociferated in The 1990s have already heard worse.
Radio ad infinitum
No need to ask an AI what the next part will look like. On the one hand, Internet users want to create their own versions of their favorite songs. On the other hand, AI tools make it possible to create tons of songs from a piece of text. The result: endless, computer-generated playlists.
This is the advent of tailor-made music radio stations. Think about the most diverse musical styles you know, and ask a generative AI to create songs that combine these two styles: K-pop bluegrass, Mandarin western, polka punk… anything is possible.
This is what several sites already offer. Some do it for free, others sell their services. Suno AI recently added an exploration function to its site (accessible in beta), on which the Internet user only has to indicate a musical style, no matter how strange it may seem, and a playlist will be created immediately.
Fancy some Russian ska? Celtic metal? You just have to ask…