It was only a matter of time before AI-created music officially made its way to streaming platforms. A few months ago, Deezer launched a new technology to detect and delete AI-made music mimicking real artists, and Spotify ejected thousands of AI-generated songs from the platform. However, now Spotify is open to artificial intelligence, allowing some AI novelities to seep into streaming.
A couple of days ago, we heard about this new AI music-related deal: SoundCloud has teamed up with three music tech companies—Fadr, Soundful, and Voice-Swap—to facilitate the direct uploading of AI-generated music onto its platform.
Soundful AI, one of the collaborators, caters to content creators, artists, producers, brands, and creative agencies, enabling the swift creation of original music using artificial intelligence algorithms. The platform recently secured early investments from notable figures in the music and media industry, including artists like 3LAU, Axwell, and Steve Angello, as Music Business Worldwide reports.
Fadr, another partner, offers various AI music tools, including a vocal remover, song splitter, key/tempo/chords detector, and remix maker. We have recently covered their new text-to-synth feature.
Voice-Swap, the third collaborator, allows musicians to transform vocal stems using generative AI to match the style of licensed artist voices. With over 115,000 users, Voice-Swap ensures that every artist on its roster is officially licensed and receives a 50/50 split for the use of their AI-generated voice. The service introduces a subscription-based service starting at £5.99 per month (with one-off payments on the horizon), so users can seamlessly upload their acapellas and transmute them into the voices of popular singers. The roster includes models from collaborators of Chase and Status and Shy FX, such as Liam Bailey, as well as the voices of Dominique Young Brown, Angie Brown, and more.
To address potential copyright concerns and prevent AI abuse, SoundCloud has implemented "new methods to block AI bots from crawling its site and training models on its catalog."
The upcoming integrations will enable artists to share newly created songs directly to SoundCloud through a built-in "Upload to SoundCloud" option within each AI tool. Songs uploaded using these tools will be automatically tagged to indicate the specific tool used, providing transparency and acknowledgment for the AI-generated content.
Notably, another household name in the industry announced its AI-friendly project a few months back. YouTube partnered with Universal Music and introduced YouTube AI Incubator to let content creators legally generate voices with AI using human artists’ voices as long as they pay the rightful copyright owners. This partnership then led to YouTube Dream Track for Shorts—collaboration with the Music AI Incubator's artists (Alec Benjamin, Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, Demi Lovato, John Legend, Papoose, Sia, T-Pain, and Troye Sivan) to develop a suite of music AI tools aimed at enhancing the music creation process.
Funnily enough, Billboard recently reported that "Google trained its model on a large set of music—including copyrighted major-label recordings—and then went to show it to rights holders, rather than asking permission first. That could mean artists 'opting out' of such AI training—a key condition for many rights holders—is not an option."
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