Harmonizing the Future: ChatGPT's Disruption of the Music Industry

0:00Something that has been in the news lately is how ChatGPT is going to affect the music industry. and I think this is you know it's been in the news lately because David Guetta the famous DJ recently used ChatGPT to write him the lyrics in the style of Eminem and then he found a music AI online to write him some beats and he put the two together he played it at a concert the crowd went wild very interesting I highly recommend going and looking up the clip very viral on Twitter but you know it brought me brought up a lot of questions people have about you know AI's impact in music and where that's all going.

0:35And in this case in particular, you know, people that were kind of concerned about it, like David Guetta obviously is not going to release this to the public because he, you know, said specifically like make this in the style of Eminem. So that'd be kind of like stealing Eminem's copyright or whatever. But at the end of the day, David Guetta says, you know, AI is just another tool for music producers that kind of have their own taste and their own style that they can use. So it's, you know, that might not go public, but it's not, It wouldn't surprise me if in the future, you know, as he says, musicians are just using the best tools they have.

1:08And so in his opinion, this AI is kind of like the new frontier, the new tool that these musicians have when they're trying to create content and create music and whatnot. So very interesting. I also think that, you know, this is something for me, I have actually been using for a very long time. I think it's been about five years since I first, maybe four or five years since I've first been using AI to write music. A long time ago, I used to use AI to make, you know, like simple relaxing piano songs. I used to post those on Spotify. That was like one of my first kind of online businesses I did.

1:44And to this day, I have AI generated music on Spotify. I don't think I get paid very much or anything from it because it sounded pretty terrible at the time. I imagine in five years, it's gotten a lot better. Inevitably, I just opted for hiring my friends to just play the piano for an hour. And then I would clip that up into songs. You know, they'd say, sure, use the rights, whatever for it. They just freestyle relaxing piano music. I post that on Spotify. And to this day, I actually make, I think there's an album that makes me like 500 bucks a month of just that. So it's pretty interesting. It's definitely a space, you know, that was monetized a long time ago.

2:22So people are using. However, back then, And I really don't think that AI was that good. It all sounded kind of funny. But, you know, five years ago, if AI was generating music, it was super mind-blowing. In any case, on the podcast today, I really wanted to dive in a little bit to ChatGPT's role in all of this. And I think that it's going to be pretty profound because I have literally, I've talked to musicians before that have said they use ChatGPT to go and write the lyrics to a song. They said like, I would like a love song about a boy and a girl in a long distance relationship and yada, yada, yada.

2:54They like kind of give an outline of the idea of what they want it to be about. Chattapiti wrote the whole song. And then afterwards, and also like musicians are going to get so in depth with these prompts. They're going to like say like use really creative words, use ideas and similes that people haven't thought about. Like make it not cliche. Like people are just going to go so in depth on these, on the prompts for this kind of stuff that I really think it's going to be very powerful. And in addition, the artists that I originally talked to that did that, they were just using it to make like a TikTok, like it doesn't obviously produce music either.

3:25But afterwards, they said, write me the chords to the song. So after ChatGPT came up with the lyrics, they said, write me the chords to the song. They played it on the guitar and sang it. And the song sounded like fairly decent, completely original. Nothing I'd ever heard before. You know, you could like Google the lyrics. They were not plagiarized from anywhere. They just kind of came up based on the concepts that they gave them. So I think this is going to be a really powerful area in music where ChatGipT is actually going to be used to write a lot of lyrics. It's going to help people come up with concepts.

3:52It's going to help people come up with chord progressions and unique sounds. And also, this all comes on the back of just a couple days ago, Spotify announced that they were launching a new AI DJ. So like these big tech companies are incorporating these AI tools right into their platforms. It's going to be very big. I predict that every music company in the future is going to have AI tools built into them. Even like the distributors that are distributing this music are going to have AI tools built in for artists to, you know, maybe more quickly generate unique album covers. Like, think about it.

4:24Like these image generators, a lot of people laugh at them because they make like, I don't know, like they give you like six fingers or something sometimes. So they're not like perfect, although mid journey is pretty dang good at that. But people are going to be using these image generators to generate art and using them for album covers. Album covers are already kind of like this haphazard piece of artwork anyways with kind of random things cut out and stuff. But all of that being said, it is interesting because there was just a lawsuit settled between a book writer and the United States copyright office where they said that people cannot copyright images generated by Mid Journey.

5:02So I think that's going to play into it. You know, people won't be able to just use Midjourney to generate their artwork now, I'm assuming, unless, you know, people just do it and don't tell anyone that Midjourney generated it. And maybe they, you know, take something or maybe, you know, if they want to be completely legit, you could get Midjourney to come up with a concept, send it over to a human artist who now like has this concept and can work on it a lot faster and generate you a variation of that. So I think there'll be a lot of different things that people do specifically in the music industry.

5:30But I think this is going to be big. It's going to be big for music. It's going to be big for the artwork and all the way down to like what to title a song. You could throw all the lyrics to a song in and say, what would you call this? And, you know, get ideas from ChatGPT or say, here's my 10 tracks. Which one do you think should be like, what do you think I should call the album? You know, assuming you're not just naming it, whatever the most popular track is. So I think this is going to be pretty interesting. ChatGPT can automate a ton of stuff. And, you know, if you get ChatGPT to write you the chord progressions, you can also throw that into other AI tools that can then generate the music.

6:05So it's like ChatGPT essentially can compose music. And from what I've seen so far, like it actually does a good job of making it sound good. Now ChatGPT probably doesn't know it sounds good. It's just saying like, based off of millions of songs I've seen online, I'm trained and I think that, you know, like this progression might sound good. But it's gonna be really interesting to see what happens in the space. I think this is gonna be very disruptive for music. If there's anything I missed here, make sure to follow me on Twitter and let me know what you think ChatGPT is going to do for the music industry or let me know if there's any other topics I should cover on this podcast.