Generative AI tools have already made waves in text and visual content creation, but what about the realm of audio and music? Recent examples, such as a viral track featuring Drake and The Weeknd entirely generated by AI, hint at potential disruption in the music industry. While the industry has expressed strong opposition, there are other avenues where generative AI tools can revolutionize music creation. Meta’s latest offering, ‘MusicGen,’ focuses precisely on this.
MusicGen leverages text or melody prompts to generate entirely new music based on a variety of samples and instrument styles ingrained in its generative framework. Users can specify the desired track or even hum a tune, and MusicGen produces diverse audio outputs based on these inputs. Trained on a massive corpus of 20,000 hours of music, comprising complete tracks and individual instrument samples, MusicGen holds tremendous potential to transform how musicians, marketers, and others approach the creation of original music.
While MusicGen is not yet widely accessible, its implications are significant. It opens doors to novel music production methods, heralding a shift in the industry. However, like any AI creation, it may face legal challenges, particularly as the music industry intensifies its efforts to combat unlicensed content usage. The industry already monitors the web diligently for copyright violations, encompassing simulations of popular artists and sampling of owned content. This could potentially lead to the introduction of regulations to restrict systems like MusicGen. Nonetheless, given the nature of the samples it employs, enforcing such limitations may prove challenging from a legal standpoint.
Consequently, AI-generated songs might soon infiltrate the top 40 charts, unbeknownst to listeners. However, the potential of tools like MusicGen extends beyond replication and offers diverse avenues for music creation across various forms. The future, whether desired or not, is rapidly approaching, opening up unprecedented opportunities for individuals to create their own music for a multitude of purposes.
