Should AI Music Be Eligible For Monetization

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0:56thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start your new podcast for free today at rss.com. Music platform Tidal has just announced that they are demonetizing AI generated music. So they haven't officially banned it yet, but they are now not monetizing it anymore, which for those of you who are doing the AI music side hustle, it's probably a little bit disappointing or a little scary anyways. I know Jaden, this is Jaden's bread and butter. He loves this hustle. So today he's going to talk all about it and some of the implications for other platforms and things like that. But before we do, Jaden, why don't you tell them about our school community?

1:35Yeah. Every single week we do a live episode on our school community. For the last two years, our school community has been only exclusively a paid community. It's usually somewhere between $20 and$50 a month if we're running a discount. But for the first time ever, we are completely making the school community free to join. And you get access to five of our bonus episodes that we record every week and our live stream. So every week we do a live stream where we do another bonus episode. And that's all free for you if you join the community. And there's over 400 members now. I think in the last week, we grew by 100 members.

2:10And so there's tons of incredible people that are building stuff, a lot of amazing advice. We are probably going to make this paid again, where it's like only paid. But if you lock in the free, your account will be on the free forever. And so if you want to get access to our full catalog though, so we have like 100 different episodes where we break down how to grow and scale your business with AI tools, that is paid. So that's$20 a month, but you get access to all of the updated videos, the community, and five bonus contents for free. So if you've ever wanted to join the school community, this is your day to do it.

2:43It will be paid again in the future, but it's completely free to get started right now. There's a link in the description to the AI Hustle school community. Grow and scale your business with us. We're excited. Okay, let's talk about what's going on with Tidal because yes, as you guys know, I've been making music online and a lot of it's AI generated and I make two to$3 ,000 a month passively since I was in college. I think it used to probably be when I started out, it's probably like$500 a month and it's just slowly grown. I've released a few extra albums here and there as time goes on. It's not my full-time thing.

3:17It's very passive. I mostly just log in, withdraw the money, and move on. But it's something that has, yeah, paid me for many, many years. I've probably been paid over $100 ,000 from music. And a lot of it is AI generated. Actually, I think most of it you would call probably AI assisted. So I actually do a lot of meditations. That's kind of one of my big categories and it's just my own voice. So I'm actually reading them. It's my own voice, but I'll use AI to generate the background meditation tracks. And I've actually been doing this for years. Like there, I was using an AI music generator back in, back in college, like way before chat GPT ever existed or was even on people's radar, there was AI music generators.

3:56So this isn't something that's new. This has been around for a very long time. Yeah. But it looks like title is the first company where we kind of hit this like inflection point where so much AI generated music is coming out and it's so easy to create and it's so easy to make it sound like decent that they are going to fully demonetize completely AI generated music. Now I have a lot of questions personally on this because what they're saying is that it's like they're basically going to go detect themselves if you're completely AI generated. I know a lot of different platforms ask like I think DistroKid when I upload music they're like hey is this AI generated is AI assisted or is it not AI in it?

4:34Like they ask you those questions and you can self, I don't know, self put it in there. I mean, I don't know what the terms are. I would assume if you're trying to make money and you had a fully AI generated song, you wouldn't want to tell them. I don't know if it goes against the terms. I'm not saying what I've done. I'm just saying you can, you can tell them yourself. Allegedly they can use some tools to detect it. I'm not a hundred percent sure it's possible to detect what is 100 % AI generated and what's AI assisted. I don't know how you would do that. And the other thing is I have a lot of friends that are like legitimate music producers that make music for Apple and Microsoft and every major company you've ever heard of their commercials on TV.

5:14And they're using Suno to do all of that now almost exclusively. So I'm really like, and like they're really, they're professionals, right? So they're using it. They know what they're doing. They're making it sound incredible. They're like going in sometimes it's assisted where they'll go and add a bunch of different percussions or add different like sound effects on top and like doing different things. But like everybody is using AI in some way to help them with their music. Not everybody, but like many, many people. So I'm really curious how enforceable this is basically is my curiosity. Yeah.

5:44I mean, like you said, there's a huge gray area here because I mean, technology assisted music has been around forever. I mean, think it back to the 2010s, it was auto-tune, you know, with like T-Pain. He was using a computer to change his voice. And, you know, all of it is highly edited, produced, things like that. So, and then for those of you listening, Jaden had mentioned an app called Suno AI. It's an AI music generating platform, but it also has a digital audio workspace where you could, for example, upload yourself singing and then just have it create like a drum track to it or strings.

6:24So like it's not AI generated music like you're actually singing, but the some of the instruments are. So yeah, where do you exactly draw the line here? So according to Tidal, they starting July 15th, they will have a fully AI generated tracks will have a little icon identifying them but it also said they have plans extending labeling to substantially ai generated uploads later so that kind of goes back to your point jane is how do you how do you really know and i don't know it could get could get sticky so one thing that is interesting like if i hear an ai generated song because i've done so much with like suno i can i can tell especially if it's got a voice on it right like if it's an instrumental and sometimes you can tell with the guitar, but like, it's like a piano, AI generated piano.

7:12I'm not going to lie. It's impossible to tell. And also the other thing about that is like, you can use a MIDI keyboard. In fact, most people do use a MIDI keyboard, right? You plug a keyboard into your computer, you play the, you play the piano, um, or you, you have like the notes lined up and it like plays through them. And like, how's that any different than AI generated? Like the computer has tones and it just makes those tones at the places that you say, like, I don't know it to me, that is it's crazy how uh how that's any different and like you mentioned with like auto tune and all of the synthetic stuff we throw on top of voices like so much of music like edm music like you literally have like um fl studios which is you just like pushing a little button on your keyboard to say where the drum is then you push it like a button on your keyboard to like play the piano and it just like anyways it's all like systematic programmatic i don't really see how it's very much different than the sound could be identical to AI generated, although maybe it's slightly more effort than AI generated.

8:09So anyways, I do totally get the vibe and the feeling. So of like organic music and I like it right now. It's my preference. I don't like listening to 100 % AI generated music, but I actually have like, if I'm being 100 % honest, I've had like a song pop up in my feed before that I was listening to. And I was like, this is pretty good. And then I was like, oh, wait a second. This is completely AI generated. And it occurred to me after. And like, now I'm like, oh, I don't want to listen to it because it's AI generated. But if I didn't know, I would be happy. Like it was a great song. I actually, sometimes it still pops up my algorithm.

8:39I listen to it. I'm like, yeah, it's AI generated, but it's a good one. So my music that I have done, like I mentioned, a majority of stuff that I put out there is you could call it AI assisted, right? Like it's my actual voice doing guided meditations with music in the background. But I have done a bunch of completely AI generated stuff where it's like piano music, like relaxing piano music. It sounds amazing. There's no way in a million years someone could just listen to it and be like, oh, that's AI generated. It just sounds like a really relaxing piano. It sounds amazing. Pianos, I think, are pretty hard to sound bad at this point because there's probably so much training data.

9:16The guitar in AI generated, I can hear a little twang. I'm really curious how they're planning on picking this up. But in any case, there's a company called Deezer. It's really big in France. It's like the biggest music player in France, I think. I lived in France for a couple of years and that's basically what everyone listened to. They have been the most aggressive with publishing the numbers of AI generated music. They said that about 44 % of all new music uploads on their platform daily are AI generated. So you can pump out a lot of music. You can upload a lot of music. And I think, yeah, that is probably what they're trying to hold back.

9:47But like, I don't know, to me, it's kind of cool. And I'll be honest, this is actually really interesting timing for me because I have an entire album. I've been working on this thing for probably like six months. It's about 21 songs and it is, it's like, it's like gospel hymns. So they're already famous songs. I got Suno to generate them as like bluegrass folk. That's kind of my like favorite genre of music is like bluegrass folk, lots of banjos, lots of like upbeat, like clapping, thumping, that kind of stuff. And so anyways, I have this whole album I've created where it's like all these older hymns where I've heard them sung by like choirs and organs before.

10:27and they sound sort of like dreary death uh not death like uh dreary um like eulogy like funeral songs anyways i made them sound pretty cool they all sound like really good i listened to them in the car just from my suno app sometimes i love them they're great they're 100 ai generated and each one i mean so like what is ai assisted because each one i probably had to get it generated about i don't know like 20 different variations where i was like okay tone back the don't do the banjo okay add like a female and male vocalist in okay change how you pronounce this word blah blah like you know you like work with it back and forth and add different keywords and try to you know even sometimes it's the same keyword you hit generate 10 times so you find one that you like then use that as a stem to move on i have no idea what ai assisted is but they're technically all 100 ai generated and the only reason i haven't published them because i actually had this album done about two months ago is because i i always thought like hey these things sound so good like legitimately you guys if you listen to them they sound so good i'm like this thing sounds so good i should get a real person to sing them and then just get like a producer to remake the background or even i could use this ai generated background but have a real person sing on it because it would be a little bit better and a little bit higher quality but i haven't gotten around to it so i actually almost this uh last sunday but i didn't have time so i was thinking of doing it next week i almost went and posted all the songs i'm like yeah it's fine i'll just get them out there and and post them but now with this new thing i'm not really sure what to do about it because you definitely could tell that it's slightly AI generated.

11:52So yeah, maybe, maybe this will force me to hire an actual singer or get an actual singer or get my wife to sing on it or something and, and make them all. But, uh, yeah, it's going to be interesting as to what happens with AI generated music. Yeah. I mean, I think you might be one of the exceptions here where you're actually putting time and effort into these songs. I think, um, and, and, and what this article is talking about, this band is supposed to help prevent would be like the upload farm idea where you're just like take take your ai music but now you're uploading a thousand songs a day just to try to get um it's like skim some of the royalty revenue there um you know if it cost you you know less than a dollar to make a song but then you're uploading it you know like i said thousands a day that's gonna put a lot of low quality songs onto their platform which they don't want understandably so yeah but but yeah again then where do you draw the the line with what is too low of effort uh versus like um you know legitimate artistry or producing things like that i don't know it's interesting i think um do you think spotify is going to adapt a similar model they i don't think so they came out with like a with an ai kind of like thing recently and i actually think spotify is going to go even harder into ai which i'm sure some people are like groaning but i think the way they're going to do it is going to hopefully be tasteful where essentially if there's an artist you like you can basically use their voice and generate your own personal songs on your thing and that artist will get paid a royalty still for all of those so they're still getting paid you get custom stuff like for me i just think like i love johnny cash there's only a certain amount of johnny cash songs if i could have another album of johnny cash songs i'd be thrilled no music thing is gonna let you do that but if i could do that and johnny cash's estate kept getting royalties and i gotta listen to a whole new album of johnny cash i'd be thrilled So I think we'll probably see maybe a little bit more of that where it's like fans and artists.

13:50And honestly, my prediction, and I've probably made this before, is that that ecosystem will exist. Some of these, if they allow for sharing, some of these like fan created artist songs will go viral. The actual artist will go really record that and give some sort of revenue to the fan that created the original. and we'll have some hit songs that came out of this sort of like AI voice clone ecosystem where the royalties are all enabled. So the incentives are all there. People are also getting paid their fair share. But it's just like more creativity. Like you get more people spinning up new ideas for music that sounds like you and concepts that sound like you.

14:26And I mean, that's really how music is already made. It's not like Justin Bieber writes all of his music in his album. He's got like a bunch of artists that pitch him songs. And if he likes them, he'll go sing on it. So I think it's going to be that. It's just now there's going to be way more ability to pitch songs because you can have more people creating them. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, we'll have to see. But hey, if you got any value out of this episode, we would love a rating or review wherever you're listening. We really appreciate those and they help us reach more people. And then again, check out our free tier of our AI Hustle School community if you want to see what that's all about.

14:58Learn how to grow your business and make money on the side using AI. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.