Good Sunday!
I could write on and on about the stock market crash (which is kind of what it was last week… $6 trillion lost in two days), but I’ll leave that alone. Needless to say, I’m not a fan and neither is my 401K.
Meanwhile, in Music News
A couple of weeks back, I thought I would try an experiment with an A.I. like Suno. The idea was that I would input some ideas for a song and then collaborate with the A.I. for a song arrangement. I’d heard other people’s songs using this tool. I thought, why not?
Except:
I read the fine print on the agreement. If I’m using the free version, I don’t actually own the song. Suno’s management does. I could use it for personal sharing only. I could never release it as one of my own songs even where I might come up with the lyrics, the melody and possibly the chord changes.
Let’s say I inputted the lyrics alone? Suno would still own it, reuse it, post it, do this in perpetuity.
If, on the other hand, I PAID for a subscription? I could then use it for my own releases. But, so could they… in perpetuity.
Upshot
It’s not a great tool for collaboration. Not really. Input a notion and throw it at Suno? Sure. Have fun. Write a song WITH IT? Uh uh.
Why not?
The terms are way too exploitative. I doubt I’d ever write a hit with it. But others could, might. And then what? The person who came with the notion makes next-to-nothing (because they didn’t have a paid subscription), and the Suno team makes their $$ off the A.I.’s output and someone ELSE’s idea. The A.I., strange enough, is also being exploited. (One could argue it needs to work for the programmers and the energy to run it — i.e., earn its keep.)
But there are also these problems…
Even if I did come up with something to use it for and work with it, there’s no way to export parts or an arrangement of it. There’s no isolation of parts. It’s not a true collaboration in any sense. It’s a prompt to an A.I. and some generated output for a moment in time. And what it comes up with is pretty derivative of what other (humans) have written. It’s not exactly “original.”
And in a business sense, true collaborations involve deals with respect to monetary payout. For instance, if I came up with all the lyrics but the A.I. does the rest? We’d negotiate how much of that financial pie is mine vs. the collaborator’s. Any release and money would follow that formula. Maybe I’d get 40% and it’d get 60%. And each time it would be streamed or used, we’d split it together.
But even then, at this point? It’s not ready for collaboration. It’s just a fun tool to throw some ideas at and get an output.
I’m sure there are other true collaboration A.I. tools either out there in the marketplace or being developed. But Suno isn’t one of them yet.
I’ll keep looking.
👀