Have you ever seen this band?
The new band “Velvet Sundown” has been making waves in the music industry this past month after a Reddit thread went viral depicting this group as a A.I. band. This conversation only helped the band receive more exposure gaining over 1,000,000 streams across platforms like Spotify and Deezer. This band is an example of how far A.I. music tech and quality has come, as the realism of the band is virtually indistinguishable in most cases from an actual live band.
However, this is not the first time a supposed A.I. song has received popularity, just a few weeks ago “A Million Colors” by Vinih Pray charted on TikTok. This new wave of music is creating discussions on how to regulate A.I. music in comparison to real musicians.
We, here at JAMBOX Entertainment Studios, are electing to embrace this new change in music technology. We have recently recorded rapper artist ‘Jonzel’ who did his entire 6 song EP through the A.I. Software Suno. The entirety of the vocals and production were created by A.I. while Jonzel wrote the lyrics and fed them into Suno. He also live overdubbed (hype tracks) like a DJ hyping over a record.
It is remarkable to witness how far A.I. music has come in such a short period of time. Just a year ago when A.I. music was first starting to make headlines, it was criticized for sounding too fake, generic, and obviously non-human, but not anymore. Jonzel’s new EP sounds like music of the future with intricate hip-hop production that could easily be mistaken for someone with decades of experience.
A.I. music is only going to continue to improve in ways which may on one hand greatly expand out musical boundaries, but on the other hand will probably put many engineers, producers, and recording artists out of work.
Many producers are trying to get ahead of the game and dive into A.I. before this new tech overwhelms them.
Grammy-award winning producer Timbaland launched a new A.I.-focused entertainment venture, called Stage Zero with its first A.I. artist, TaTa. The music Stage Zero creates relies on a collaboration with A.I. software Suno to create, what Timbaland and his team like to call, A-Pop – a new genre of music. “I feel like right now everything is discombobulated,” Timbaland says. “Which aligns with everything in the world. Ain’t no song right now—and y’all gotta admit—that’s grabbing you. Ain’t no theme song for people’s [lives].This whole election divided us,” Timbaland said at the time. “What I mean by that is it divided the music. The music sounds bland, it sounds boring—it lacks excitement. But… I just think that its dangerous to let important people go unchecked when they say shit like “oh, modern music artists aren’t doing a good enough job at pleasing me so I went out and found a computer program that gives me exactly what I want.” Now that’s soulless.
”Timbaland’s partner, Mudaliar added: “The artists of tomorrow won’t just be human, they’ll be [intellectual property], code, and robotics that are fully autonomous.”
As a singer/songwriter, I am disheartened at the amount of A.I. I am witnessing in the music industry. There are already thousands of talented artists that have been honing their craft for years, desperate to make a mark in an already over-saturated industry. Now these individuals, myself included, are being forced to not only compete with our peers but also A.I. software that can write and create 10x faster and with more precision. While the music industry struggles to regulate the introduction of A.I. Music, it is up to the people to decide how they will receive this new genre of A-Pop. Will the public disregard A.I. Music because it lacks the emotional and physical connection a fan makes with an artist, will it intrigue audiences that are curious of technology’s newest advancement or both. Only time will tell, but it is clear that A.I. music is going to change the music industry in ways we cannot yet fathom. I can only hope it will not push out the throngs of talented songwriters, vocalists, producers, and engineers that are trying to make a living doing what they love.
This being said, The new interest in A.I. music has the sharp techs at JAMBOX Studios willing and ready to incorporate new A.I. services to its customers. These new offers will include A.I. beat and song creation, mixing, mastering, and music production.
Olivia Gomez
JAMBOX Entertainment Studios
