Are people asking for this to exist? There isn't a big enough pool of talented humans willing to work for low pay, widely available cheap recording gear and free musical educational material, that music needs to be made even cheaper and soullessly?

I'm not against some AI uses, I use LLMs myself where it makes sense, but music is one of the things that we were told AI would free up all our time to do!!

Yes. I'm having fun making an indie game, which will most likely never see the light of day, let alone profit. I'd definitely pay cents to dollars to have fitting background music. There's no chance I'd pay for a human musician.

> Are people asking for this to exist? There isn't a big enough pool of talented humans willing to work for low pay, that music needs to be made even cheaper and soullessly?

Hiring someone is work and takes effort, and can take a few tries. People, especially solo creators, generally don't want to bother, and are excited at what they can now do without requiring people to fill in skills they haven't acquired. This ironically goes for creatives as well!

I think it's been telling past week, when Astra demonstrated a step change in 3D modeling/art abilities. I have a few friends who are indie game devs, and who had been excited about AI because it allows them to create without requiring programmers all of a sudden. And they reacted with dismay to Astra - like what many programmers were feeling two years ago. But previously they had not quite been able to empathize and were in no way hiding their enthusiasm about making games without being handicapped by programmer inavailability.

This won't replace pop stars; those remain analog because they sell better. This is why South Korea for example went all-in on the idol system of kpop: South Korea had pervasive broadband before most other markets, so when MP3 came along physical album sales crashed over night. Music companies shifted to the most analog product they could think of: People. (I'm almost literally quoting J.Y. Park.)

It might well replace the session musician you hire to sing the demo tape that's delivered to those pop stars to model their performance on, though.

The moral debate also isn't entirely new to music production, with software emulations having replaced many physical instruments and having put plenty of instrument or gear makers out of work.

Counter-example: This is pre-AI, but I also have a friend who runs a very successful small company in a niche he's all but cornered. When he started he needed a programmer, and he found this almost-no-cost kid working from his parents' home in a small village in Argentina on a platform like Fiverr or something. It worked out so well he offered to make him a 50% partner, and now they're both incredibly well off and the kid, now in his 30s, is the richest man in his village. This could be you, but chances are you'll give the money to Sama or ElevenLabs because it's the path of least resistance.

Well, a coworker recently rigged up eleven's api to a coffee machine sensor. It now sings, loudly, an original composition to the effect of "make a new pot you asshole" whenever it gets low. We've gotten country, symphonic metal, southern hip hop, smooth british singing, accusatory broadway musical, 20's-style jazz singer, and more - it's different every time.

While the advisability of this particular project is up for debate, I do think it's something that could only exist with an API like eleven's.

This is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than paying for a song to be created from scratch by a human.

I have a friend who came to me and said "i found a new french musician/singer that i really liked on <some platform>. Her voice is really good". and a day or two later he said "god dammit, it turned out to be AI"

So yes, there'll be demand, no people won't often know it.

I don't care about AI bands and wouldn't listen to the music by itself for pleasure, but for video game music? Or soundtracks to sub-AAA/hollywood productions that can't afford someone who's won an Oscar/Golden Globe? I don't see a problem with it, and I play an instrument (it's in my lap right now!) and am involved in my local music scene. Samples, VSTis and autotune already killed commercial music, and this isn't going to change anything for people who do it because they love it.

Yes, people are asking, have you noticed the huge number of users?

> we were told AI would free up all our time to do!!

You were told you'd do it for your soul, not money, so the AI can't block it. And your specific religion might not even codify that AI assistance kills the soul ("it's just a tool"), so there is no this downside either.

Yes, the popularity of Suno indicates that people are asking for this to exist. I know a number of people who regularly generate songs in Suno.

I think it also creates music that would have never existed like a song for our beer league hockey team.

Think of it as an extension of a dj . Instead of downloading the music , you refer , bend , and create your own . The quality of entire electronic music will balloon due to this .

Yes nobody is producing early 90s punk with the same intensity and dinosaurs never died, sorry nofx, so now I have my personal playlists.

Take a hard look at the people who are super into this stuff. Ignore the people who have a direct financial interest in it. Look at the people who are left, who are truly enthusiastic about AI-generated music as users.

In my experience they are inexplicably excited by how easy it is to make something shitty.

Not everyone is a born musician, just like not everyone is a born writer, sprinter or mountain climber. But it takes a certain kind of person to hit the "easy" button and still feel like they accomplished something.

Yes absolutely. Like me.

Engineer on ElevenMusic (so discount accordingly). I like to think of the model as an instrument - something you can sit with for hours and get better at. The people who stick around the most treat it that way (they write their own lyrics, upload half finished songs as reference, bring their own voice back from old recordings etc..). For example my dad was in a band in the 80s and stopped writing music and it's fun to see him make it again.

Every time a barrier drops (samplers, synths, autotune, GarageBand, sample packs) this argument gets made and it is partly right. Plenty of what gets made on our platform is complete slop but if your only contribution to a song was a "make a pop song" prompt that's what you deserve. You are right that nobody was ever short of music - but many people are short of a way to make it so we build for them.

Lots of music is just filler. It’s not intended to be really listened to, but to break up silence.

this is for things like elevator and lobby music, background music for infomercials etc... it's simply not economically plausible to hire a person, plus it's a hassle, and royalty free libraries are a hassle to use.