Not only does touring suck for artists right now, but the same AI-generated art nightmare that's plaguing visual artists (occasionally hilariously) is coming for musicians too! Music Business Worldwide reports that a streaming service named Anghami – Arabic for "my tunes" – claims it'll be the first one to feature over 200,000 songs generated by AI.
According to the report, Anghami has parted with Mubert, a generative music platform that draws from actual human musicians and sound designers to create finished AI tracks, for the music they're planning to host. The partnership between the two was originally based around the concept of letting FIFA World Cup fans create "musical football cheers" to root for their favorite team.
"[Anghami has] generated over 170,000 songs, based on three sets of lyrics, three talents, and 2,000 tracks generated by AI," said Mohammed Ogaily, VP Product at Anghami. "We complement the AI that generates the songs with our machine learning algorithms to match users with the closest genre, based on what music we know our fans listen to."
"Generating tracks with vocals is something we have been thinking about for a long time. Voice adds liveliness to any composition, and increases listeners' interest," added Paul Zgordan, Head of Music and Mubert Co-founder on adding vocals to AI-generated songs.
"However, with a generative approach, there are several difficulties. The vocals should fit into the groove and harmony, regardless of the genre chosen by the listener.
"So, when Anghami asked us to make a song-generation engine, we immediately agreed. This is a great opportunity to test our hypotheses and entertain fans from all over the world. Different genres are like different countries and cultures, but they are united by voice — a representation of the universal love for sports."
And while a lot of the above was AI-generated music surrounding the World Cup, it still means that artist-less music is an extremely real threat… and it's a lot closer than you think. Another report by MBW details Tencent Music Entertainment, creators of TikTok, having already created over 1,000 tracks with AI vocals, one of which has already been streamed over 100 million times.
So where does this all leave artists? I know it seems a little alarmist to freak out over AI music flooding streaming services, but it's definitely a problem. There's over 100,000 songs being uploaded to Spotify every single day (most of which is already ignored), and that number certainly isn't going down if AI music starts getting created at a blinding pace and uploaded. Then it's simply a fight to get your music to the top of an already massively-overcrowded algorithm to get heard, and paid… not very much. It's just a difficult future right now, and who knows how we're going to deal with it.
