AI music is here 

0:00We are Charlie Kirk, we carry the flame, we'll fight for the gospel, we'll honor his name. AI music is everywhere. It's slopping around your algorithm and your platforms. One of them, Deezer, says 50 ,000 AI-generated tracks are being uploaded every day. Spotify is declining to comment, LOL. AI music is also charting. Breaking Rust's Walk My Walk topped Spotify's viral 50 songs in the U.S.

0:39Zania Monáe debuted on the Billboard charts.

0:45And yet, many people cannot tell the difference between AI music and music music. And if, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, that makes you want to die, son, do we have a show for you. Coming up on Today Explained, should music lovers take AI music seriously?

1:03Every year, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world flock to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. And they spend a week trying to sell each other on the weirdest gadgets you've ever seen in your entire life. This week on The Vergecast, we're talking all about everything happening at CES, from the TVs to the AI gadgets to the humanoid robots that everybody is hoping might someday do your laundry and wash your dishes. All that and much more on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts.

1:38Ian Kreitzberg is the AI correspondent for Puck. He writes a newsletter called Hidden Layer. And this year, like many of us, Ian encountered Velvet Sundown. So Velvet Sundown, they're a band that I guess they kind of, they got really popular. I say they're a band. They're an AI music project. Okay. Is perhaps more accurate. They got popular a few months ago around the summertime. And they do a kind of iteration of sort of 1970s inspired classic rock that if you're a fan of 1970s classic rock, it sounds pretty derivative. And they had a bunch of tracks exploded in popularity. Their number one song is called Dust on the Wind.

2:27Dust on the wind. Boots on the ground. Smoke in the sky and no peace found. Rivers run red. Reminiscent of a little something from, who was it, Kansas? Yes. My dreams pass before my eyes of curiosity. Dust in the wind. The way Spotify works, right? A lot of music discovery is through Spotify's playlists, and so they got music in the playlists. And they were one of these examples, as I was mentioning earlier, when there's no labels about this, they weren't talking about it. They were kind of gradually found out by people and listeners who slowly put it together. There were a couple of red flags.

3:22For instance, they released a lot of albums out of nowhere. and in very quick succession. In the span of a couple weeks, three or four records out, which is a pace that raises eyebrows. And so people started putting it together and eventually they said, you know, hey, we are an AI music project. They got a lot of press. A lot of people were checking them out. And so they were an interesting example of, you know, the idea that you can kind of dupe people into listening to fully AI-generated music, and it's not immediately apparent that this was not produced by people.

4:05We've spoken to people for this show who really love music, and some of them, you're not going to be shocked to hear this, some of them are really kind of appalled by the idea that people are listening to AI-generated music. It has no heart, it has no soul, there's no real connection between the quote-unquote artist and the listener because there is no real artist. It's artificial intelligence. But here's what I wonder. Your average listener is a person who is not a super music nerd. Your average listener is a person who's on a platform and stuff maybe is getting fed to them and they're like, oh, I like this, I don't like this.

4:39What has your reporting told you about how the average listener thinks about AI music? My answer is not one that will make those music nerds, which I would include myself as one of them, very, very happy. I think the reality is that a lot of people just don't care. When, you know, in the earlier days, this AI music didn't sound good. It didn't sound right. It was difficult to produce full tracks that were convincing. When you surpass that point, and on a casual listen, it sounds like a normal, you know, track. People don't care. The fascinating thing, though, is that when it's labeled as being AI-generated, people do tend to care.

5:21Oh. Right? That was my reaction as well. So what? So they avoid it? They don't click on it? What do they do? So they've done studies of art. So they'll show images, right? Where if you label an image as being AI generated, people tend not to like it as much as they like an image that is labeled as being created by a person. If we talk about the major players in the AI music space, What I'm coming to learn is we are not talking about individual people making music and then generating it through AI. We're talking about platforms that let you make music using AI. Who are the major players in this space?

6:07There's really two major platforms here. It's Suno and Udeo. And they both do essentially the same thing, which is exactly what you just said. platforms that allow you to generate music through text prompts. Okay, so I would write in, I want a stirring early morning gospel song in the style of Rise and Shine and Give God the Glory. And then it makes me one, just like that. Say thank you. Say hallelujah. Hallelujah. Early in the morning. We will praise your name. You would get a stirring gospel song. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So let's talk about the reaction from major record labels. They see this thing on the horizon.

6:49I assume they know it is likely training on their artists. And they do what exactly? Well, they did a couple things. And we're talking at an interesting time when we can kind of look back and see the whole arc of the reaction. And so the first thing they did was they sued. A legal firestorm it's brewing today over this major clash between record companies and AI music services. The Recording Industry Association of America filing copyright infringement lawsuits today against two separate companies. The RIAA announced that major record labels are suing two of the leading AI music companies, alleging massive copyright infringement and is maybe trying to shut them down.

7:35Universal and Warner, they filed lawsuits for copyright infringement. These lawsuits were focused on two factors. The first is the inputs, and the second is the outputs. And this is where the kind of idea of fair use comes in. And so in that first, the inputs factor, right, the loose argument was basically something along the lines of, you illegally took my music, my content, my data, and you used it to create this model that you're generating revenue from. You didn't ask me if you could do that. You didn't pay me for it. And so we're suing you.

8:12Then there was the output side, which is, okay, regardless of the legality of what you did in training the models, your model produces music that is often, and they cited specific cases, quite literally, you know, identical copies of music in our catalogs. That was a more convincing argument, but both of these suits were settled recently. And now you have partnerships, you know, Universal partnered with Udeo, and Warner partnered with Suno, and Universal announced a partnership with NVIDIA to, you know, quote, transform music experience, unquote, for their fans with NVIDIA's AI. And so you see this shift where they kind of seemingly use their litigation, and these are like major companies, right, UMG and Warner, to involve themselves in these companies that were certainly, it's not hard to perceive them as threats if you're a record label, as a means of what seems to me to be hedging their business in the future.

9:22Okay, so I'm thinking about this from the perspective of the record label. I want to make money off of music, and I'm aware that AI is out there, and I have to live with it, so I'm starting to get used to it. But I also know, based on what you told me, that people don't like knowing that they're listening to AI music. They feel like there's something uncool about it. So if I'm a record label and I say I want to put out AI music because I see it as the future, how do I sell that to people? A, they don't know. What the hedge is essentially looking like from where I sit is there's a non-zero chance that in some manner, AI becomes the primary way in which people consume music-related content or just all content.

10:11And if that does happen, these companies want to make sure that they're involved in that, that they have partnerships with these companies, or that they have equity in these companies, right? That their business isn't crippled if the way people consume content changes dramatically, and we never go back, right? Now, I don't know that that would happen. And the idea of, you know, can UMG sell an AI artist, for example? Can they sell straight up AI generated tracks? That would be a hard sell. There's a lot of artists on these labels that are not a fan of what's happening here. These labels don't want to piss off their major artists because that's their current business model.

10:50And making sure you have the fandom of Taylor Swift is important to not, you know, push away.

10:58I think that kind of idea of how can we allow users or consumers, people and audience to remix something they already like, to live in it in a different way, to somehow customize it to them. I think that's what the record labels are looking at as a potential way to not alienate their current artists and not alienate and destroy their current business as, you know, a record label of people. While opening themselves up to additional opportunity in that kind of new experience, whatever that music experience looks like, while hedging themselves, you know, in case that new experience becomes the only experience or the only major experience.

11:46That was Ian Kreitzberg of Puck, he reports on AI. Coming up, a tale as old as time. A dude experiments on himself.

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16:12Noel King here with Denis Bichard. He's the senior tech reporter at Scientific American. I reached Denis a few weeks into an experiment that he's been running in which he is only listening to AI music that he generates himself. Why? Because he's Denis. What? The reason I did it was because I wrote an article about AI-generated music. And in the article, I was trying to decide, can AI music really appeal to us? Can it be important to us? Can it be something that is part of our lives? and I went back and looked for a song that had always been there or had been there for a long time, which is For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield.

16:52I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down. For What It's Worth is a protest song written in 1966 in response to the Sunset Strip curfew riots in Los Angeles. It starts when you're always afraid. Step out of line, the band come and take you away And it's a song I learned to play on the guitar from my stepfather when I was a teenager. And I tried to have Suno create a protest song for me to see how I would react to it, if I would have a similar emotional resonance or whatnot. I asked for a song that was folk, warm, had male lead vocals with earnest tone, steady mid-tempo groove, acoustic, and had a vintage texture with a subtle tape hiss.

17:45Shadows fall heavy on the streets tonight And it took that and developed that into something that was quite different from what I'd actually asked for, but that still had the feeling of that time, still had lyrics that had a bit of a protest song quality. We've been waiting too long

18:08Stand together, stand tall One by one We'll break the wall If I had heard that song in a coffee shop or a restaurant, I wouldn't have known it was AI. It was very well made. But what I realized was there was just no story for me. There was no attachment to that song. So I found that there just wasn't that level of human connection to the AI song. And my conclusion was kind of, well, you know, this music doesn't have a story with which we connect. And then after I published that, I thought, hmm, well, maybe it's just because I haven't given it a chance. You know, maybe I haven't really explored this question fully.

18:49So I thought I'm going to take a month and just listen to AI music and nothing else. And I will come up with a prompt and I'll plug it in. And each prompt makes two songs. and I'll try to be as creative as possible. And I'll usually plug it in two or three times and vary it, add different kinds of instruments with it or different kinds of vocals with it and just plug a bunch of those in. For example, I asked at one point to make a song that was a mix of rap and bluegrass and I made a song called My Existence. I exist and I insist My presence in this world should mean more to you than this And I listened to that one a few times, kind of intrigued by how it made that.

19:36One that made me laugh was a song called Organ Trafficking. I'd asked for a contemporary rap song with female vocals, playful, ironic lyrics.

19:52And it comes up with this song where organ trafficking is kind of the central metaphor.

20:07I was pretty surprised. I was thinking, okay, I didn't really expect AI to do that. But then, you know, there are also moments in the evening when I kind of want to wind down, and I'll look at the prompts, and I'll think, okay, give me a song with literary lyrics, playful metaphors, soft female vocals, and acoustic guitar, and then it will give me something like Shadows of the Sun. But it tore right through and drank me up. I'm chasing shadows of the sun, running in circles till I come undone. I'm a flame that drowns in a wave that burns. Every wrong turn teaches the heart. And I've also played the things where, you know, I've asked it for bossa nova and to mix it with rap.

20:58And it gave me a song in Portuguese called Entre o Seu Fogo.

21:09I think one of the things I've realized is that a lot of the music I listen to that is mainstream, that is, I would consider kind of heavily processed music, music that's designed to have a large market. it doesn't feel very personal to me anyway. So I realized that in that particular context, it didn't feel very different a lot of the time. Do you think if someone had handed you a playlist and 10 songs, five are AI, five are not, do you think you'd be able to tell the difference? No, I don't think so. Wow. And what does that tell you? I mean, it tells me the AI is getting very good. It is certainly telling me that.

21:49One thing I noticed during this process was that a lot of the AI music that is popular, that people are listening to on Spotify, that has millions of listeners, it often is creating songs that are very soulful, very gritty. You know, it's like Zania Monáe or Solomon Ray or Kane Walkers, Don't Tread On Me. I'm filled from blood, sweat and pain Sunshine, thunder, wind and rain Stand my ground, don't tread on me Kane Walker's not a person, it's an AI avatar, right? Or Breaking Rest, Living on Borrowed Time. Laugh at the scars that prove I'm alive We're all just living

22:38On borrowed time Those songs all feel just really authentic. You know, if I were to sit down in a bar somewhere and someone picked up a guitar and sat, I would expect some gritty local musician to get up and sit on the stool and sing one of those songs and think, yeah, this is really authentic. This person really suffered through these things and felt these things. That's how they come across. And I think that AI tends to work best when it just leans into that authenticity because it kind of helps overcome the cognitive dissonance that we're thinking this isn't really a deeply felt song. And it moves away from mainstream human-generated music, human-made music, which is often very heavily designed to be a summer hit or to go viral in some way.

23:31And it often doesn't have that level of authenticity, that feel of authenticity. And I think when AI replicates that, we're more aware of it being superficial or artificial because there's already an element of artificiality there. Do you think when your experiment is done, you're going to keep making AI music? I think I probably will. Oh, my God. You love the power. I think, you know, what has surprised me with it is now I'll be walking somewhere and I'll think, what if I were to ask it to combine these styles or put a banjo with, you know, a hip-hop track and add this kind of vocals? What would I get?

24:13I would say now I'm at the point where I don't worry about the connection to the human. like I did in the beginning. In the beginning, I was really like, who's this person? You know, when you're reading a book and you're halfway through the book and you think, what human mind did this book come out of? And you turn the book over and you look to see who the author was and you Google them and you're like, how in the world did they think of this, right? And I just had that impulse so often in the beginning to want to know, you know, who felt this? Who thought this? I just would have cognitive dissonance, right?

24:41Be going, this is a machine. This machine did not fall in love. This machine did not suffer these experiences. This machine did not wake up at 2 in the morning and write this song, you know, just needing to express itself. It was actually really bothering me. It kind of blocked me from being able to enjoy the song. And I thought, well, if somebody created an AI avatar and gave it a personality, and it were a fictional character that existed in, you know, the metaverse, and that AI avatar was a songmaker and it was singing this song, would that make it easier? And weirdly, it would. It would make it a little easier.