The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

AI T-Shirts

“I would buy a band t-shirt but never buy a shirt for an AI.”

That’s the sentiment from a Redditor in response to the launch of Udio, “an app for music creation and sharing that allows you to generate amazing music in your favorite styles with intuitive and powerful text-prompting.”

The platform was built by Uncharted Labs, an AI company that purports to build “AI tools to enable the next generation of music creators,” the site reads. “We believe AI has the potential to expand musical horizons and enable anyone to create extraordinary music.” 

Udio is free to use, and anyone can create up to 1,200 songs a month. What’s startling, though, is the quality of the output. Listen, for instance, to one of the most memed examples, “Dune the Musical,” and you’ll hear what could’ve been a Vaudeville-era banger.

The project is backed by prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, as well as Steve Soute – founder of the popular music distributor, United Masters – and major artists like Common and Will.I.Am. The artist support gives Udio some street cred, but does that mean their backing is driven by a belief in Udio’s potential to make the music industry more artist-friendly?

Will.I.Am wrote:

“Really aiming to be an ally” is pretty noncommittal and low-bar. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. Is this a “if you can’t beat them, join them” effort? Or atom bomb logic, where the tech is inevitable and might as well exist in the hands of the “good guys?”

Udio’s model exhibits an advanced level of emotional sophistication that have led some to call its arrival “the ChatGPT moment for music generation.” But is it emotional enough to buy the shirt? And if not, is that moment close at hand?

Udio

Udio was started by three former Google DeepMind researchers, who left the company due to “frustrations over the company’s sluggish translation of AI research into practical products and internal bureaucratic hurdles.” 

David Ding, Charlie Nash and Yaroslav Ganin dived into Uncharted Labs in December and have already secured $8.5 million in funding. A few months later, Udio emerged – and just weeks after the launch of Suno, a company that’s imagining “a future where anyone can make great music” and does basically the same thing.

Ryan Morrison, an AI journalist for Tom’s Guide, wrote that Udio’s superpower – and primary differentiator from Suno – is its vocals and ability to more naturally emulate human emotion. And that’s apparent in the generated songs.

Both Suno and Udio tout the accessibility of their tools – now anyone can make “extraordinary music.” This trajectory toward ‘now anyone can do it’ access isn’t new. Digital audio workstations, MIDI controllers and virtual instruments are just some of the technologies that have made music-making more accessible.

And we should all be able to make music (for those of us with voices and hands, we already could). But we have to acknowledge that writing a sentence and hitting a button is not making music.

There may be more craftsmanship opportunities coming down the pike, though. Morrison spoke with Ding and learned that future Udio features will include musician-focused tools like adding reference vocals and splitting individual tracks into stems, giving us some insight into how Udio might become an “ally.”

Still, it’s hard to believe the rhetoric of these companies, claiming that their tools are built to supplement creativity. It’s possible, sure. In John Seabrook’s New Yorker profile of UMG captain Lucian Grainge, producer Don Was shared insights into his session with Lyria – a generative music model built by Google – when he experienced “a combination of awe and terror simultaneously.” His first thought was “This is better than anything I could have done.” His second was “I could collaborate with myself on my very best day.”

More salient, though, was Grainge’s hesitant but real capitulation. Seabrook asked the label boss if he could really trust Google, “since the company’s long-term interests may lie in giving its users the tools to close the gap between wannabes and real artists by making it possible for anyone to create a fully orchestrated song by typing in a prompt or even whistling a melody.”

“What are we going to do?” Grainge responded. When a Google-sized company is “making an investment in developing products and tools, my view is, as an industry, we need to be the hostess with the mostest.”

To his point, I can gripe here all day long (and I will), but that’s not going to change anything. On Udio, folks can publish their tracks for the community, download audio and video files, and of course, share on other social platforms. For the casual music fan, why not just do that? Music in the streaming era has already become a mood-enhancing utility that de-emphasizes artist appreciation in favor of “the personal brand of the listener,” as longtime music thinker and AI pundit Mat Dryhurst wrote. Isn’t this just a natural extension of that mindset?

What’s particularly damning is this mindset’s pairing with the platforms that pay musicians, which might see fiscal opportunity in deprioritizing music made by humans. Spotify’s margins become more favorable, for example, if they launch their own proprietary Udio and just drive everyone’s attention to that music. There are major label relationships to reckon with, of course, but as seen above, even Grainge has seen the writing on the wall. Would enough people with power care enough to stop this from happening?

In 2020, I interviewed music documentarian and data science executive Chasson Gracie. His award-winning documentary The Music Sounds Better with Whom? explores the intersections of music and AI. Even then, he was already envisaging ominous futures about an AI-powered system of platform capitalism in which the music-makers could conceivably be replaced.

“If we ended up in a world where musicians were all machine learning applications, then the experience of music completely changes,” he told me. “Sure, it might technically exist, but the connection to it would disappear. And if that connection disappears, is music something that lasts forever?”

That thought is fucking terrifying. And I’m doing my best to not be old man yells at cloud, and cognizant of what I’ve deemed the kaleidoscope mentality (referencing a quote from the tool’s inventor David Brewster, gawking at the new and improved stereoscope: “It will create in an hour, what a thousand artists could not invent in the course of a year”).

Still, in the systems we operate in, this clearly isn’t good for musicians. And that’s even setting aside the thorny incompatibilities with copyright and trademark laws, which companies like to lean on when it’s advantageous and then decry when it’s not. In response to Udio’s announcing itself on Twitter, mostly there was adulation – and truly, it’s at least worthy of a “wow” – but there were also frustrated onlookers, demanding answers on whose music they used to train their model.

As Beat readers will know, I’m no defender of traditional copyright law, and that I think the memetic nature of the Internet necessitates a reimagining of ownership and IP, but there have to be some protective mechanisms in place for artists, and VC-funded ‘we’ll try and be an ally’ platforms ain’t it.

“A concern is that without an (sic) strong open base model to compete with them, Udio and Suno will start offering fine tuning options unimpeded,” Dryhurst wrote on Twitter. “This will allow them to set rates. A legally questionable company setting rates to solve a problem they helped create sounds a lot like the birth of Spotify.”

Already the tenor of the Udio-reacting folks in the r/Music subreddit is that music will just be a fun side gig for earning a few extra bucks. How likely are we to become superfans when 99.99% of artists have to work 40 hours a week at their day job? Music-making requires time and care, and that’s why we buy the shirts.

Even for those staunch loyalists, the defenders of subculture and holdouts who refuse to buy a tee from AI, know that people are already buying merch from machines. Talk to Brud about Lil Miquela, a CGI influencer who has her own clothing line, or Hume’s ”metastars, whose NFT volume is 382 ETH (about $1.2 million).

So if this is all just a race to the bottom and the major labels fall in line and Spotify starts to play Udio’s game, what then?

“Confident any of the streaming giants could flip a switch and have as good a model running tomorrow,” Dryhurst said. “However that brings with it liability that perhaps isn't worth it for them, for now. If they do, more rate setting.

“We only get so many opportunities to rethink how art and music is supported,” he continued. “Regrettably that opportunity appears to be slipping away.”

Coda

I tested Udio to see if it could react playfully to its name in the context of Dio, prompting it to create: “a song about udio in the style of Tenacious D's song ‘Dio.’”

I got an “artist replaced” notice, which said: “We do not generate artist likeness without permission. We have replaced Tenacious D in this track with: male vocalist, comedy rock, acoustic rock, sketch comedy and rock opera.” (Clearly the model’s still aware of Tenacious D.)

Interestingly, when I modified the prompt to “a song about the udio platform that references the artist Dio in the style of Tenacious D,” I got the same “artist replaced” message for Tenacious D, but no such notice for Dio. Sonically, all the tracks definitely referenced Dio (the duo fronted by Ronnie James Dio, the vocalist that replaced Ozzy at the helm of Black Sabbath), both in style and in literally putting Dio’s name in the lyrics. But hey, at least they’re trying to be an ally.

Now, while I go dig out my Tribute tee from my closet, please go outside and listen to Tenacious D – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.