Artificial intelligence is changing music — and fast.
The Velvet Sundown, an AI-generated band, has hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of streams on Spotify. There are now AI music platforms where users can almost instantly generate songs from written prompts.
Mike Shulman, who founded the AI music-generation platform Suno, said he wants to make music creation accessible to everyone.
“It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software," he said on the 20VC podcast. "I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music.”
Acclaimed artist Timbaland is an adviser to Suno. This past June, the producer also started an AI entertainment company called Stage Zero and signed an AI “artist” named TaTa.
There’s even a new genre for AI artists: A-Pop.
But how are Austin musicians approaching AI?
Understanding the enemy
Some musicians, like the producer and rapper Zeale, are experimenting with AI in their own music.
“I want to understand my — I don't wanna say — enemy,” Zeale said. “But I wanna understand this new, very impactful technology as much as possible.”
Zeale said he starts by creating a song from a written prompt.
“ Then I'll take that and sample it like I would any other real song that exists,” he said. “Chop the samples, manipulate them, and then restructure and make a track out of it.”
Zeale said this allows him to use samples without having to pay license fees because the original songs are AI-generated.
Other artists, like Parker Woodland singer Erin Walter, are less interested in using AI for music. Instead, they see it as a possible tool to help with the business side of things.
“ We have talked about it for things on the business and PR side, like gathering information on radio stations and media to promote and advance our first big multistate tour that's coming up in September,” Walter said.
She said the band also recognizes the environmental impact of AI. According to Goldman Sachs, one Chat GPT query consumes 10 times as much energy as a Google search.
“But at the same time, we're this indie band that's really trying to grow and go worldwide and it's impossible to do everything ourselves,” Walter said. “So we feel like we have to at least consider where we can lighten some of the workload.”
Chinasa Broxton and Carlos DeShawn Daniels from the band Tribe Mafia said they use AI to help with the band’s visuals.
AI makes creating graphics and videos more affordable for musicians. They no longer have to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for these assets. Instead, AI tools allow musicians to create these assets quickly and cheaply.
"You get it for free,” Broxton said.
Fear of the future
But even though they all use AI, all four artists expressed a level of discomfort when it comes to engaging with the technology
Some, like Daniels, worry AI will stop humans from doing things for themselves
" It's just like the Wall-E movie,” he said, referring to the Pixar movie in which humans in the future ride around on levitating chairs with permanent screens in front of their faces. “We can become so lazy and heavily depend on AI so much that nobody's really gonna be thinking for themselves.”
Walter referenced another movie when talking about her fears around AI.
”The first thing I picture is The Terminator,” said Walter, referring to the movie in which AI presents a threat to humanity. “If I could have no AI, I would, but there's no way to do that.”
Zeale said he hopes people will be mindful when it comes to the use of AI.
”Who is going to be the gatekeeper or the steward of this technology?” he said. “And how deep are we gonna let it impact our, our lives?”
These interviews are included in Episode 4 of Season 6 of Pause/Play. Listen to the full episode in the player above. You can find Pause/Play wherever you get your podcasts.
