frustrated Udio users<\/a> who were blocked from downloading their own AI-generated tracks. But Udio CEO Andrew Sanchez said he’s optimistic about what the future will bring as his company adapts its business model to let fans of willing artists use AI to play with and potentially alter their works.<\/p>\n\u201cHaving a close relationship with the music industry is elemental to us,\u201d Sanchez said in an interview. \u201cUsers really want to have an anchor to their favorite artists. They want to have an anchor to their favorite songs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many professional musicians are skeptical. Singer-songwriter Tift Merritt, co-chair of the Artists Rights Alliance, recently helped organize a \u201cStealing Isn’t Innovation\u201d campaign by artists \u2014 including Cyndi Lauper and Bonnie Raitt \u2014 to urge AI companies to pursue licensing deals and partnerships rather than build platforms without regard for copyright law.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe economy of AI music is built totally on the intellectual property, globally, of musicians everywhere without transparency, consent, or payment. So, I know they value their intellectual property, but ours has been consumed in order to replace us,\u201d Merritt said in an interview in Raleigh, North Carolina.<\/p>\n
Shulman contends technology \u201cevolves very often faster than the law,\u201d and his company tries to be thoughtful about \u201cnot breaking the law” but also “deliver products that the world really wants.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the music industry first confronted Suno over alleged copyright infringement, the company\u2019s antagonistic response alienated professionals like Merritt.<\/p>\n
Symbolizing the divide was a clip last year in which Shulman was quoted as saying, \u201cit’s not really enjoyable\u201d to make music most of the time. Shulman started learning piano at age 4 but later dropped it. He took up bass guitar at 12, playing in rock bands in high school and college. He said that experience gave him some of the best moments of his life.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software,\u201d Shulman said on the \u201cThe Twenty Minute VC\u201d podcast. \u201cI think the majority of people don\u2019t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cClearly, I wish I had said different words,\u201d Shulman told the AP. The context, he added, was that \u201cto produce perfect music takes a lot of repetitions and not all of those minutes are the most enjoyable bits of making music. On the whole, obviously, music is amazing. I play music every day for fun.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sanchez, the Udio CEO, also would like people to know he loves making music. He’s an opera-loving tenor who’s sung in choirs and grew up crooning Luciano Pavarotti in his family’s home in Buffalo, New York. <\/p>\n
Founded in 2023 by a group that included several AI researchers from Google, the startup now employs about 25 people. It has fewer users and raised less capital than Suno, reducing its leverage in its negotiations with record labels.<\/p>\n
But like ride-hailing company Lyft, which pitched itself as the friendly alternative to Uber\u2019s aggressive expansion tactics more than a decade ago, Udio embraces its underdog status.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo many tech companies actively cultivate this I-am-a-tech-company-crusader and that\u2019s part of their identity,\u201d Sanchez said. \u201cThat alienates people who are creative and I am uniformly opposed to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sanchez said he knows not every artist is going to embrace AI, but he hopes those who leave the room after talking with him realize he\u2019s not imposing a kind of \u201cAI bravado.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you took what we\u2019re doing and pretended that the word AI wasn\u2019t a part of it, people would be like, \u2018Oh my gosh. This is so cool.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Some see potential in AI-assisted music creation <\/p>\n
In the basement office of his Philadelphia, Mississippi home, Christopher \u201cTopher\u201d Townsend is a one-man band, making and marketing Billboard-chart-topping gospel music \u2014 none of which he sings himself \u2014 and doing it in record time.<\/p>\n
The rapper, whose lyrics reflect his political conservatism, downloaded Suno in October and, within days, created Solomon Ray, a fictional singer that Townsend calls an extension of himself.<\/p>\n
Townsend uses ChatGPT to write lyrics, Suno to generate songs and other AI tools to create cover art and promotional videos under the Solomon Ray name.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can see why artists would be afraid,\u201d Townsend said. \u201d(Solomon Ray) has an immaculate voice. He doesn\u2019t get sick. You know, he doesn\u2019t have to take leave, he doesn\u2019t get injured and he can work faster than I can work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trying to dispel that fear for aspiring artists is Jonathan Wyner, a professor of music production and engineering at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, who sees generative AI as just another tool.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo the creative musician, AI represents both enormous potential benefits in terms of streamlining things and frankly making kinds of music-making possible that weren\u2019t possible before, and making it more accessible to people who want to make music,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Such a vision remains a tough sell for artists who feel their work has already been exploited. Merritt says she’s particularly concerned about labels making deals with AI companies that leave out independent artists.<\/p>\n
Neither Sanchez nor Shulman was invited to the Grammy Awards in February, but both spent time schmoozing at the sidelines of the event.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think AI music is still officially not allowed, and my hope is that some of these rules change over the next year, and then maybe the 2027 Grammys, I\u2019ll get an invite,\u201d Shulman said.<\/p>\n
\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014-<\/p>\n
O’Brien reported from Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York. Ngowi reported from Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts. AP journalists Sophie Bates in Philadelphia, Mississippi and Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) \u2014 Suno CEO Mikey Shulman pulls up a chair to the recording studio desk where…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":356781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,166827,289,290,18,166830,19,17,166824,3323,166828,106056,82,166825,89255,166826,166829],"class_list":["post-356780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-andrew-sanchez","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-eire","tag-gospel-music","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mikey-shulman","tag-music-industry","tag-music-production","tag-suno","tag-technology","tag-tift-merritt","tag-udio","tag-universal-music","tag-warner-records"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116135327316786399","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/356781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}