Publishing an AI generated music album
In one week, without any music creation expertise
Listen to the whole album on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music or on our Website (completely free, no sign-in required, with prompts and lyrics).
Last week me and my friend David published the - maybe first, at least as far as I could find - music album produced by AI.
Yes, there are already albums that are composed by AI or songs developed with AI but all examples I found had at least some part where a human is still actively creating music. We just wrote some prompts and selected our favourites.
Song 1: Baile el Ding, prompt: “the ding, latin americon!”
Our background
We’re two students from Germany, David is studying political science and I’m studying computer science. We both play a bit of guitar sometimes. Both of us are at the “campfire level” (David at a decent campfire level and I’m at the “can-someone-please-take-away-his-guitar” level). I’ve also played the drums casually for a year or two (without much success).
So long story short, we’re not musicians by any stretch, but we are AI enthusiasts (at least for now…). So when we found this - dare I say - magical tool suno.ai, we decided to try creating a music album as a fun experiment.
Song 9: Shake and Roll, prompt: “the ding, 60s rock”
What we did
So we bought the pro version for 10 USD and when we ran out of credits spent another 30 USD getting credits for generating a total of 2500 songs (each about 30 seconds long, with an option to create seamless extensions).
We generated more than 1000 songs and selected our 10 favourites, extending all of them to be at least 80 seconds, using suno and ChatGPT to generate more lyrics.
We then used bandcamps free online mastering tool and spent another 20 USD on tunecore (which I can’t really recommend as a distributor) and uploaded our songs (we also created some cover art with Dall-e 3).
Roughly two days later, our album was on most platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music, TikTok, Tidal, etc (and my favourite part: you can shazam our songs, too!)
Song 3: The Sound of the Streets, prompt: “The ding, skrraa”
Costs and effort
So we spent a total of 60 USD and about 5 hours of work over a week and we had a published album. I’m still blown away by this to be honest. Our album is not what I would call great music by any stretch but neither is it terrible. It’s better than some music created by humans (not naming any names so I don’t accidentally insult your favourite artist, dear reader).
Thoughts
This was mostly a fun experiment, but it left a big impression on me and probably will on music creation as a whole not far into the future. I don’t think big artists need to worry much, but will this make it harder for smaller artists to be found when people are being drowned in a sea of AI generated music? On the other hand will this allow people who are not really musically inclined to create and share great music that people will love?
Only time will tell, but I’m pretty sure there will be some massive change that will transform the music industry similar to what happened with Napster and PirateBay.