The AI music startup, Suno, has raised an additional $400 million:
Suno Inc., a startup that enables people to make music using artificial intelligence, has raised $400 million at a valuation of $5.4 billion.
Suno Now Valued at $5.4 Billion
LATEST ARTICLES
Jack Antonoff Slams AI Music
Jack Antonoff has shared some thoughts on AI music:
You don’t have to write music, you don’t have to record it and you don’t have to bring out the band and play it. And yet for us, the idea of optimizing what we do is a complete miss of the entire point of what compels us in the first place. We (myself, the band and everyone I know, frankly) have never been looking for this work to become quicker or easier. We were never frustrated by the randomness and magic it takes. We do it for that exact reason – and without the process itself ::: nothingness.
Blog: The People Do Not Yearn for Automation
Nilay Patel, writing at the Verge:
[S]oftware brain has ruled the business world for a long time. AI has just made it easier than ever for more people to make more software than ever before — for every kind of business to automate big chunks of itself with software. It’s everywhere: the absolute cutting edge of advertising and marketing is automation with AI. It’s not being a creative.
But: not everything is a business. Not everything is a loop! The entire human experience cannot be captured in a database. That’s the limit of software brain. That’s why people hate AI. It flattens them.
Regular people don’t see the opportunity to write code as an opportunity at all. The people do not yearn for automation. I’m a full-on smart home sicko; the lights and shades and climate controls of my house are automated in dozens of ways. But huge companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have struggled for over a decade now to make regular people care about smart home automation at all. And they just don’t.
A thought provoking article that I quite enjoyed.
Spotify AI Hijacking Expands to Jazz
Numerous jazz musicians, including American pianist Jason Moran, and Danish musicians Carsten Dahl, Thomas Blachman, and Chris Minh Doky, face a deluge of AI-generated tracks—often entirely unrelated to their own work—uploaded to their official streaming profiles without consent.
“There’s not even a piano player on this whole damn record,” Moran, the former artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy Center, remarked on an EP titled For You. The fake album appeared on his Spotify profile and was brought to his attention by another musician friend. “It wasn’t even remotely close to anything I would make.”
Ticketmaster Teams Up With ChatGPT
Ticketmaster now has an app within ChatGPT:
The integration sits inside ChatGPT‘s Apps Directory, where users can connect the Ticketmaster app and activating it by starting prompts with @Ticketmaster. From there, fans can ask about local concerts, upcoming games or events, and receive interactive listings based on their questions. When they’re ready to buy, they’re redirected to Ticketmaster’s marketplace to complete the transaction.
Rick Beato on AI Music
Rick Beato recently shared his thoughts on AI music.
Read More “Rick Beato on AI Music”Apple Music Introducing AI Transparency Tags
The platform has launched what it is calling Transparency Tags — a system of disclosure labels that record labels and music distributors can begin applying to content delivered to Apple Music immediately, and will be required to use when delivering new content in future.
The new framework covers four key creative elements: Artwork, Track, Composition, and Music Video. The Artwork tag, applied at the album level, flags when AI has been used to generate a material portion of static or motion graphic artwork.
The Track tag — available at the track level only — is used when AI generates a material portion of a sound recording.
The Composition tag covers AI-generated lyrics or other compositional elements, while the Music Video tag applies to any visual content, whether bundled with albums or delivered as standalone.
AI Music Producer Joining Google
ProducerAI, an AI-powered music-making platform, is joining Google. As part of the deal, Google will fold ProducerAI under the Labs umbrella and power the tool with a preview version of its new Lyria 3 music-making AI model.
ProducerAI is a music-making platform that allows users to work with an AI agent to generate sounds, workshop lyrics, remix songs, and even create new instruments based on a prompt.
Spotify Goes All in on AI Coding
Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:
Has AI coding reached a tipping point? That seems to be the case for Spotify at least, which shared this week during its fourth-quarter earnings call that the best developers at the company “have not written a single line of code since December.” That statement, from Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström, came alongside other comments about how the company is using AI to accelerate development.
Spotify Tests AI-Powered Prompted Playlists
Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:
The new tool allows users to describe what they want to hear in a personalized playlist that reflects the “full arc” of their tastes, according to the company. That means the playlist focuses not only on the songs you like now, but your entire Spotify listening history from day one — something that differentiates the feature from other playlists, the company says.
Chorus.fm’s AI Use Policy 1.0
I’ve published a first draft of an AI Use Policy to define how, where, and – more to the point – where we won’t use AI.
This is a first attempt at putting my thoughts into words, and I will probably revise this over time as my own feelings about AI keep evolving. But I wanted to get something out there now, because everywhere else seems to be sprinting in the opposite direction.
Read More “Chorus.fm’s AI Use Policy 1.0”McDonald’s Pulls Down AI-Generated Holiday Ad
Joe Wilkins, writing for Futurism:
Though the abomination of an ad only has 20,000 views on YouTube, backlash in the comments was so intense that McDonald’s shut down comments over the weekend, before delisting the video entirely. (Some marketing research databases managed to scrape the clip, if you’re curious.)
Blog: People Use Tools That Help Them
Matt Birchler, with my favorite line of the week so far:
If a tool makes my job meaningfully better, AI or not, I’m gonna use it, you don’t have to convince me. Maybe some people are resistant to learn anything new, but my impression is that the gains bosses have promised have been too grand and the use cases too broad, so employees get a bad taste in their mouth.
Again, I’ll shout it from the rooftops, if a piece of software is revolutionary and will make workers’ jobs easier, they will use it. If you find you have to keep making the hard sell to your employees, maybe it’s not bringing as much value to them as you think.
Amen.
iHeartRadio Bans AI Music
iHeartRadio’s chief programming officer and president, Tom Poleman, sent a letter to staff on Friday (Nov. 21), obtained by Billboard, pledging that the company doesn’t and won’t “use AI-generated personalities” or “play AI music that features synthetic vocalists pretending to be human,” among other promises.
The pledge marks the beginning of iHeart’s new “Guaranteed Human” program, which will also see the company publish only “Guaranteed Human” podcasts, according to Poleman’s letter.
Universal, Warner, and Sony Strike Licensing Deals With AI Music Startup
For the first time, all three of the major labels – Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music Group, along with their respective publishing arms – have struck individual licensing deals with the same artificial intelligence-focused music startup: Klay.
I don’t even have anything snarky to say. I find all of this so much more soulless than the most generic copycat awful neon-era scene music.