AI Music Is On The Charts. Where Does It Go From Here?

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I'm Flora Lichtman and you're listening to Science Friday.

In recent months, AI Music seems to have exited the realm of novelty act and moved into the

world of having living, breathing fans. But what's the impact going to be? Science Friday producer and

musician D. Peter Schmidt is here to investigate. Hey D. Hey Flora, AI Music got on my radar last

year because I kept getting these videos on my algorithm.

Venter of the road roller was a genius. He made a 20-ton machine,

created 60 tons of force. The secret is that the roller drum isn't a solid piece of metal.

AI generated songs, describing how various pieces of heavy machinery work.

Pretty mainstream stuff. But for the first time, last year, some AI generated songs

actually got onto the charts, like this one from Zenai Mone.

And some pretty big names in the music industry have gotten pretty vocal about using it too,

like Timberland. It's like an assistant when I do a beat and I'm like,

how would you take these drums and rearrange it this way? And I'm like,

oh, I would have never heard it that way.

So what's going on right now at AI Music companies like Suno? And is this just another tech

upgrade to the music making process or is it something else? I wanted to call up one of the

journalists I follow on this topic, Kristen Robinson, senior writer at Billboard,

who covers AI in the music industry. Hey, Kristen.

Hey, Dee. I was wondering if you also had a moment last year where you were like,

oh, this stuff has kind of gotten to another level now.

You know, I think it was around Zenai Mone, who you mentioned in the intro.

I think Zenai Mone was a real turning point, but you could point to a few different turning points.

It just kind of felt like a lot of stuff started happening really fast.

So to back up a little bit before Zenai Mone, you know, June hits.

And I find that there's this song on TikTok called A Million Colors by Vini Pre.

I was seeing it in TikTok clips with like Kylie Jenner doing her makeup to the song.

And I realized that the song sounded kind of weird. And it turned out it was an AI song.

And it was towards the top of the viral chart on TikTok.

And then that just kind of felt like the first domino.

And then things just totally got out of hand. Later that summer,

this band called The Velvet Sundown, which was fully AI-generated music,

and also AI-generated images to correspond with it,

really caught fire online. And then Zenai Mone was in September.

She became a big headline for us at Billboard because she signed a reportedly multi-million-dollar

record deal with a traditional music company called Hallwood Media, who's known for just working

with a regular artist previous to this point. And I think that a lot of people in the music industry

considered Zenai Mone's signing and the fact that her songs were starting to climb on our gospel

charts as a really big turning point when AI music has suddenly arrived.

When we say she signed with this label, who is the person getting the money here?

Okay, that's a great question. So Zenai Mone is the AI-generated avatar and character

created by a woman named Talisha Nikki Jones. Talisha lives in Mississippi. She considers herself

to be a poet, but isn't someone who knows really how to get to a finished product of a final song.

And so what they say, Zenai Mone is, is like a character for her to express her poetry through

song. And so the person signing that deal would be Talisha Nikki Jones. And so the royalties would

go back to her, and she has a manager as well. And what they would probably say is that

these AI-generated characters or personas are no different from how Damon Alburn created the

guerrillas with their little cartoon characters that kind of represented the band.

They think that this is a way for artists to maybe express themselves in genres that don't

typically follow what they're known for. So they would probably say that this leads to more

experimentation. And yeah, it's very interesting. There is a woman behind Zenai Mone.

Yeah, I mean, can you talk a little bit more about what kind of genres we're seeing AI

music kind of glum onto? We got we got gospel. We've got these like kind of weird heavy machinery

videos. What what other genres are coming up? I am seeing a lot in the gospel Christian realm.

I'm seeing country music that a million color song that I mentioned is more of like kind of a

duop throwback, you know, 50s rock song. I think what I'm really seeing is that it's going for

niche genres that tend to be fairly formulaic. Country music is not a super complex genre. Of course,

it has so much heart to it. And that's why we all love it. But the chord structure is usually

pretty simple. It's usually a verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge chorus kind of structure.

There's not a ton of experimentation going on in that genre in the lyrics tend to follow

specific tropes. And I think that makes it a little bit easier to make a realistic sounding

AI song in those genres. These are the French streaming service has done a lot of research

in this field. And they've they've said publicly that their research shows that 97% of listeners

cannot tell the difference between an AI generated song and a human made song. So I think it's very

possible that some of these AI songs are being listened to and consumed by people who are not

fully aware that they're listening to AI music. Well, I mean, do you think AI music has gotten

like quote unquote good now? Can you are you one of those 97% people who has trouble telling the

difference? Sometimes it is hard to tell. I think the big tell still is that the audio quality isn't

fully like I don't even know how to describe it. It's a little bit of a scratchyness or

it's a little digitally sounding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like pixelated. I don't even know how

to describe that. Yeah, the audio version of pixelated. I mean, yeah. And I think that that's the

big tell. And if you're in an environment where you don't have good headphones, if you're listening

on your iPhone speaker, I think it's actually pretty easy to get fooled now. I mean, I guess I would

consider myself part of the 97% although I think I can discern a lot better than your average person

just based on the nature of my job. Yes. You've talked to musicians like Imagine Heap Charlie Puth

about their use of AI. What sense do you get from musicians about how they feel about AI music?

And maybe we can start with those examples first. Well, Imagine Heap has always been on the cutting

edge. If anyone who's listening here is familiar with her work, she's always been both a musician

and a technologist. She really feels that technology can make her art more impactful and take her

to new places creatively. So she's leaning in pretty hard, but she is still very concerned about

models that train AI music models on works like hers without any compensation for those who

they're training on. So she still tries to stay away from companies like Suno which currently

have models that are being trained on copyrighted material without licensing or compensation for

rights holders. But yeah, I'm seeing musicians really divide it. I don't really think you can say

like, you know, everyone's doing this or everyone's doing that. I would say that a shocking number

of professional songwriters and producers have been telling me mostly off the record that they

are using Suno as part of professional songwriting sessions now. And so a lot of them have

posited to me that there are probably songs on the hot 100 right now that have bits and pieces

of AI generated material that is not disclosed. So a little crazy to think about that.

I want to go to Suno and can you give us an idea of who the main AI music companies are?

And you know, we've talked about these meme songs. We've talked about it helping with

the production process. What exactly are they selling to people? Yeah. So when we think of like,

you know, generating songs at the click of a button, that is really dominated at this point by

Suno. It's an AI music startup. Suno is quite controversial in the music industry because

people feel very threatened by them. I obtained an investor pitch check of theirs back in November and

reported that 7 million songs are being generated on Suno every day. That kind of scale scares

musicians quite a bit just in terms of although those 7 million aren't necessarily making it on

streaming services. A lot of them are like some of them are. And that crowd potentially crowds out

works made by human musicians. So Suno is a big one. UDO is another big one. They did kind of the

same thing. You can type something into a text box and then out pops a song. UDO is now pivoting

to do AI powered remixing of already made songs. This is a very popular category in AI music right

now. Spotify is even getting into this realm soon. And basically what this means is that

with licenses in place, you would be able to take two of your favorite songs and create mashups,

maybe remove the vocals so you can do a karaoke version. You can speed it up. You can slow it down

all these kinds of things. So you can play with music that already exists.

Well, it's funny because last year, the main, the major music labels were trying to sue the heck

out of these AI music companies. Now they're partnering with them. What happened there?

Yeah. So I think the music companies are really realizing that they can't make this go away.

And so they need to find a way to extract value from it. I think another thing to keep in mind is that

very recently, like within the last decade, two of the three major music companies became publicly

traded companies. So they're probably getting a lot of shareholder or pressure to innovate, to

integrate AI and to capture value there. They don't want to be seen as weak. They don't want to be

seen like they're behind the ball. So I think that that's also, you know, one of the reasons why

they have been so willing to try to find reconciliation.

Right. The music industry has gotten left behind a lot in the past in regards to tech and

seems like they're changing their tune. So with all these recent deals,

do you have a sense of where this is all heading? What do you have your eye on this year?

Interestingly, the music AI game has mostly been dominated by startups. My take on that situation

is that I think that music is a very hard thing to generate. And it's also not something that's

a huge money maker. So I think it's been largely ignored by your open AI's and Googles of the

world until now. But Google has launched Learia 3. It's latest AI music model on Gemini.

Still not as good as sooner or a UDO. But who knows in the next year how it will develop?

And they also acquired an AI music company called producer AI. So I have my eye on Google for sure.

And I also have my eye on these new models from Sino and UDO.

Okay, we'll keep an eye on them too. Kristen Robinson is the senior writer at Billboard who covers

AI in the music industry. Thanks, Kristen. Thank you.

Okay, stay with us. Because after the break, we have one of the first musicians who

experimented with algorithmically generated music back in the 70s. And we'll hear her take on AI music.

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And now a person with a one-of-a-kind perspective on AI music, musician Laurie Speagle.

A pioneer of electronic music and also of algorithmically generated music.

And like today, it raised some eyebrows at the time. She wrote code for some of the first computer

music technologies and her 1980 album The Expanding Universe is considered one of the greatest

ambient music albums of all time. Another song from that album is even on the Voyager Spacecraft's

Golden Record. Laurie, it's so great to have you here.

Hi. Glad to be here.

Did people think what you were making in the 70s and 80s was music, kind of like this AI

conversation right now? Did you get shade when you got into this?

There was a lot of heavy anti-computer sentiment back then because computers belonged to the most

oppressive of organizations only. They weren't personal computers yet and it was the government,

the banks, the insurance companies, the military who had computers and the computers innocent things

that they were inherited. The image of the oppressiveness of their controllers in the public

because computers, you know, it was, they were called, they were inhuman, they were hustles in the

arts. They were not the warm cuddly little laptops that we aren't used to at this point.

So that I was often accused of dehumanizing music. But of course, technology is the most human

thing around. I mean, we are by far the animal that does the most technology.

You know, I think in the in the late 70s you worked on an algorithm to kind of replicate

box harmonic style. Yeah, the, you know, box is just a superlative ideal for me and inspiration.

And so I studied the harmonic progressions of the box corrals extensively and wrote a, you know,

way simplified compared to the mind of Bach algorithm that basically generated harmonic

progressions that, that I felt were meaningful.

Yeah, and obviously he's a super-mathematic kind of composer and it makes some sense to be like,

how can I translate this into an algorithm? I mean, the other, the other side of the,

the modern AI music site is, you know, there have been, there have been new studies of people

who use these large language models experiencing something called de-skilling where, you know,

you end up starting to rely so much on these models that you kind of end up outsourcing a lot

of your own skill to them and then that skill attributes over time. And yet different skills are

evolved during that process because the, the writing of the props for an AI system is in itself

at the very first stage of becoming an art form, I think. But it's quite different from the moment to

moment generating of sound in response to your momentary emotions that the, the self-expressiveness

of playing, playing music. And that is something that, that the way AI is being doing by giving a

prompt and then waiting for a fabricated result is quite different from, I mean, the, the expressive

nature of playing an instrument is, it's visceral, it's tactile. I mean, I've heard some music producers,

you know, have talked about using Suno, one of these products and AI music because they,

they don't want to be left behind and I've seen that language being used with other AI tools.

What do you make of that in terms of, I mean, did you, did you feel like you were going to get left

behind, you know, back in the 70s if you didn't engage with, you know, computer programming and

making fresh music? Just the opposite. I was kind of way out ahead to the point where it was impossible

to explain to people what I was doing. I was not, I don't left behind. I was like on the lunatic

fringe. I couldn't explain to people. People say, oh, you did music. What kind of music do you do?

And I would say, well, I'm using computers and they would immediately, like, their expression would

change and they'd want to change the subject too. In the arts, it's not a matter of keeping up,

it's a matter of something honest and authentic coming from inside of you that you can embody

in an experience external to you that you can share with other people.

Everybody's trying to, like, give up what is new. That's not what makes high quality artistic

expression. It has to be from inside of you. The music itself is what's important and that's not

something which is reliant on any individual technology. It's gone through many centuries of

evolution of different technologies at it. It's still obvious to us what's really good music from

the Renaissance that moves us and grabs us, or the early 20th century or whatever. It's what it does

for us, you know, what music does for us. It's important. So I don't think it's really worth

worrying about keeping up with that. It's just how you use it.

Yeah. Well, it seems like so many things with AI is forcing us to ask, like,

these really basic questions about the things that we like and why exactly we like them.

I know you were just talking around that, but I mean, what does music mean to you?

I don't know. I mean, the question of that I posted at the beginning, the question of

what the purpose of music is for people and what parts of what music does to us are these

AI is able to satisfy. They obviously can generate music like material on demand,

but it's not necessarily the expression of emotion or feeling. I really do want to play with

them a bit more. I know that the writing of prompts is a very indirect way of making music,

much like writing all those little dots on staff paper with a pencil. And then you get back a

result, which is not what you had anticipated, because they're not really interactive. Emotions

are kind of, you know, we don't understand them very well yet, but they are rock bottom and

essential component of music. And this is where the AI's kind of fall down. They don't have them.

And while they will probably figure out how to trigger them and evoke them, eventually,

and really good prompt writers might be able to do that, it still is very much in its

inventory. These non-interactive, generative parrots, I guess you could call them. They speak

the language that they have read all over the net or throughout the repertoire, and they

parried it back, but they don't understand it on the gut levels that we humans experience it.

Laurie Spiegel, a pioneer of electronic music and algorithmically generated music.

Thanks for being with me, Laurie. Thank you for having me.

By the way, one of Laurie's best known pieces of software, Music Mouse, which she made in 1986,

recently got re-released on modern computers. It's like an interactive instrument you play with

your mouse, where you basically drag your mouse around a musical grid, and it makes these fun

chords and melodies. If you want to try it out, you can find a link to it on our website,

sciencefrieday.com slash music. Thank you, Dee. This fantastic episode was produced by Dee

Peter Schmidt. And listeners, if you have thoughts or feelings on this or anything else that we

cover, you were always here for it. 877 for Sci-Fi. Thank you for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

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