AI start-up Suno AI from Cambridge generates lifelike radio-quality music

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What a sad day for music streaming providers. They don’t know it yet, but they are doomed.

And not because everyone will be able to create something better than professional artists, but because every kid is starting to “generate albums” and pollute Spotify and other services. So if previously you could enjoy hours of related music, now you will stumble upon fast generated sounds with GPT lyrics.

And these “artists” have bio texts generated by GPT as well, praising their ingenuity and talent. With all “albums” of their entire career generated in under 2 weeks, with absolutely appalling quality. These kids never heard about mastering, they can’t write lyrics themselves, they have nothing to say in these lyrics, they can’t tell C from C# (pun intended), but here they are - artists, with sole goal to get more likes, “followers”, and as such - get millions, yachts, islands and life full of luxury. Little they know…

It’s not fun. I foresee people abandoning these services, because you can’t filter these AI creations. There are literally thousands new “works” flooding streaming services and promoted by them. Aaargh.

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MY GOD, what is this?
This is unbelievable. This is a chatgpt moment in music, for sure.

I pasted a non-formatted pitch text I’ve sent yesterday to a VC for an edutech I’m working on, and GOD how could it turn such a “non-musical” piece of text into something that’s this decent?

Truly impressive

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I can definitely see a massive flood of incoming content.

This is just another step in an incredible time lapse. I bet some people argued the same thing when people started using tools like Fruity Loops to create music instead of jamming out next to a microphone.

We will probably never see much of this content besides in the alleys of Discord, and propped up with spam on random websites. Who doesn’t want to click a button, generate shit, and profit off of it.

But soon I can see AI being a powerful tool to interface a song. Things like Dall-E 3 & Sora mean nothing to me because the content is generated as a finished product and we can’t really work on it (before in/out painting). But this tool is the start of offering controls, which will be CRAZY

Maybe it can be used to remaster tracks, maybe we can generate some beats until we find a decent one. We’re moving up to a higher level of audio creation which means the true talent will be able to create absolute master pieces.

There WILL be some effort and talent required that separates the flood of low-effort, lazy content with masterpieces. These same people will naturally gravitate towards playing their own instruments as well if it’s their passion.

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In Shakespeare’s time, being musician was the poorest trade. Not because people were dark and didn’t care about music in late Medieval time, but quite the opposite - because literally everyone knew how to play. It was close to today’s Ireland, where music is one of the core disciplines. So, you had to be exceptional to impress anyone.

I think we are going to similar time - people with bad taste acquire ability to generate “music”, and pour it into streaming services. However, there is a funny difference between TikTok / Instagram and Spotify / Youtube Music kinds of services. The ones that serve images and videos, know that everyone can do it, and that what most people do is quite substandard. With music services, algorithms are different, assuming that you can’t produce a lot in a short time and just spam the ether. So, you get quite a few (sometimes - thousands!) of views before your track goes into the mist of time. And if you generate a few tracks a day, you get never-ending stream of views, and each view - is an unsatisfied customer, who got substandard sound instead of high quality music.

Interesting observation: most people who are fervently generating music with those services (Suno isn’t the only one), don’t see the difference between their generations and professional music. They actually think that their sounds are good. And they don’t really care, if it’s good, as long as they get their views. They don’t feel the harmony, don’t hear technical problems - in best case scenario, they will just put that track into online “one-click AI mastering tool” and done with it. Noise, echoes, clicks, hisses, etc etc - they simply ignore it. Often they don’t even finish listening to their new masterpiece before publishing it.

For each track you see in Discord, 10 more are published at the same time. And it’s only the beginning of the wave. Thousands new “artists” appeared now, but a hundred thousands more will appear soon. They will overwhelm the existing pool.

So, my point here is: when someone is generating “poetry” with ChatGPT and posts this nonsense to his blog - that’s awesome, because everyone is happy. When people are publishing noise to music streaming services - that’s a problem, because now I’m paying to hurt myself.

As for the instruments - no, I don’t think that they will start playing instruments. They will get interested for a moment, but then they will realise that 88 keys is too much, 12 notes is too hard to memorize, and that it’s easier to pay generation service for 6 years than to buy a decent digital piano. And speaking of simpler instruments - a simple flute costs nearly a thousand dollars, btw…

As always, the problem is not in AI. It’s in people. We need Skynet.

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These music streaming services will need to adapt, similar to the others. There are a lot of people who post low-effort material on these platforms and never get recognition. The amount may change but this has always been an issue that these platforms deal with.

Of course they will. I’d imagine that a lot of people who are very active creating these types of songs for fun will eventually hit the inevitable brick wall that AI generations bring.

Maybe it’s fair to say that “very little” people will go past trying to generate music, but some people will want to create more, push further, explore, and find a passion in music. Maybe they’ll learn Fruity Loops, learn to play the piano.

This is very similar to programming. Lots of people “write” software without actually understanding anything of the process. They ask ChatGPT to do it, are happy with their basic implementation, or try too hard, over-extend themselves and are left completely stuck with a bunch of nonsense on their screen.

Most of these people will goto forums and ask for free help. Some will post on a freelancer site and say “I did most the work, please finish, $10”. SOME will start to learn the language, and try, try harder, and eventually be able to understand what’s going on. THESE WILL BE THE SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE. The genuinely passionate people who just enjoy the art, and not the potential lazy profit that it may bring.

It’s timeless that a massive majority of lazy, low-effort people who don’t care about the actual trade more than the potential easy “passive” profit will infest it like a plague & eventually be killed off by the increasingly hard entrance threshold

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There’s also things like this,

The day isn’t far off when AI will just be able to access all of the exact same tools any current music producer has access to and more, and will be able to create perfect, high quality tracks in the same kind of workflow human producers use.

The toughest part, for so many people, will be reckoning with the fact humans in general (and by extension, they in particular) aren’t as “special” as they have been led to believe.

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Sounds pretty grim. I definitely see the threshold for entry to be brutally high, and positions available to become very thin.

Don’t disagree though.

Ah, right back to the days of slavery.

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Love the arguments here, it’s no longer about if a computer can generate (beyond) passable music, but now how good that music is. Seems some folks, are struggling to see what is really happening.

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So here is my two cents … I consider myself very creative and I love to write, especially song lyrics. I have been jotting them down from head for years. I am disabled and can’t afford to have an engineer compose the song nor hire a vocalist to sing the song. Suno has allowed me to bring those lyrics to life. Now yes, I pay the 10 dollars a month to get a good amount of song credits and yes, it does take maybe 4 to 8 versions to get a song that 1) doesn’t end abruptly or 2) has major pitch issues. I can remaster them for free with sites line BandLab and I can pay to have them remastered even more if I wanted. Because I am a Pro Plan member, I actually own the copywrite and can put these songs on Spotify, etc. through a distribution service like DistroKid. Now Suno isn’t going to break the industry, but it can offer people in my position a foot in the door to express themselves.

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That is a powerful use case for Suno helping you to be creative and write your lyrics, and get a whole song that sounds very good after running it through the Suno machine 40 or 50 times.

I’m a musician and have been a passionate songwriter since the days of Band-In-a-Box. I have songwriter friends who are very serious about the game and none of them will offer a reply when I post in a FB group, Song Feedback Group, six. years ago. IMHO, it’s a lot smarter to use powerful tools to become an even better songwriter/arranger/producer.

So l strongly suspect they’re not happy about AI enabling all kinds of hacks, amateurs, and people have a ton of fun with it. If you listen to the CEO’s talk at a big conference they did recently, he said his mission is to make people happy by helping them to have fun doing something they would never have been able to do otherwise.

My view, is that I’m great with writing lyrics and can knock out a song in a couple hours, and refine it during the Suno AI Song Factory process. What always took so much time for me was the noodling around with my guitar or a keyboard and not knowing exactly how I wanted it to sound style-wise. I always had to record the parts, at least drums, bass, and guitar, to hear if it worked or not.

Suno AI is the most powerful music production tool that can crank out 100 or more songs per hour in all different styles, and I always find a few that I really like. I can finally write the volume of songs I’ve always wanted to because I have a lot of great ideas, but the creative melody, harmony, arrangement, style, and then spending several hours a day for a few days or long, recording tracks into my DAW (Logic Pro X.)

The first seven songs I wrote with Suno AI. I’m astounded and ecstatic that Suno is so dialed-in to what make music IRL sound great, that it can write such beautiful melodies and arrangements like it did for me today in “Please Pour Me More,” “Mr. Beast,” and the “Song for Amoranth.”

If you’d like to hear them, use the URL for Soundcloud, forward slash, “reidmoto”, forward slash “sets”

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Yes, I agree, some very intelligent people are sticking their heads deep in the sand because they either feel threatened by AI making their songs and artistic expressions less valuable, or they are purists who consider writing songs with the help of an AI Chatbot is “cheating.” LOL…WAKEUP ARTISTS AND SONGWRITERS! The smart ones are going to fill the void of those who get left behind or give up due to the big, bad, AI threat.

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You know thats a great comment. I am a creative, I dont look at Suno as a tool to generate an entire track, as the digital clipping is prominent to my ears and I suspect yours. But yes its oh my goodness good when your creative side is less than perfect on a given day, you know what you want but just didnt realise it yet, when it provides in no time, you ask yourself, well this is what I could have done on a given day, ie it is right up my style. Tool not master I would keep in my reality,what ever others chose to be their is up to them. Any one wanna colab with any of this reach out, personally it excite me totally.

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It’s a powerful tool in the 21st century as a music technologist, over the years since i released my album in 2016 have been looking for how technology can make music production easier and faster. My basic knowledge in AI and Music technology makes me accept this SUNO. Is going to revolutionize how music is being produced henceforth, acceptance at first might not be comely but with v4…guys is going to blow your mind. Embrace this technology now, use it to advance your music.