A.I and the Music Industry

Quoting from Built In, "Artificial Intelligence is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence."

Most of us would be aware of how we've moved from machines easing human tasks to machine learning and Artificial Intelligence that has replaced humans in performing certain tasks. History recalls the beginning of this era as the Industrial Revolution. Several industries and types of businesses have had to upgrade technologically in order to survive and flourish in their fields, including the music industry. Majority of the 90s kids, like myself, would remember what a cassette, CD, and radio player and CD player looked like.

CDs were, at one point in time, the most widely used form of music distribution. That was until the invention of the internet. Once the internet arrived music had a slightly tough time with distribution as people were uploading and sharing their songs. For example, one person could purchase a music CD and then extract and upload/share the songs which could be downloaded by his/her friend on their computer. This is where the story of Napster comes in. It was founded by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning in 1999 as a pioneering peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing Internet software that emphasized sharing digital audio files, typically audio songs, encoded in MP3 format. Hence, sales declined, and the artists, songwriters and record labels were hit bad. Some artists adapted by starting their own YouTube channel for official releases. However, YouTube's policies were not strong enough to protect the musicians from copyright infringements and illegal downloads. This is where Apple ceased the opportunity to enter the music industry with Apple Music - a legal way to purchase and download music. Hereon we saw innovative devices such as Apple iPod, Sony Walkman, Microsoft Zune, etc. Today we are at a time where almost everything can be done on your mobile phones and music isn't downloaded more than it is streamed online, with Spotify being the most used platform in doing so.

As a musician I never thought I would one day hear A.I take over what we do, and that involves songwriting, pitch changes, rhyme schemes, understanding bars and musical patterns, in order to create music. Yes, A.I is now used to create music! A popular example is AIVA - an A.I, created by Pierre Barreau, that has been trained in the art of music composition by reading more than 30,000 of history's greatest scores. It can replicate them, but most importantly creates its own compositions and is released on its own YouTube channel. The next example is Magneta by Google. Magneta is distributed as an open-source Python library powered by TensorFlow. Magneta uses various combinations of machine learning algorithms and can replicate an artist's tone, pitch, rhyme schemes, vocabulary patterns, etc. Magneta too has its own releases on its YouTube channel. In addition to this, we also have A.I to help with songwriting, where it can generate rhymes only or even entire lines.

This seems to be just the beginning of A.I and its role in the music industry. Thankfully, this does not pose a threat to the security of human artists in the industry. Pretty interesting what man can do with technological integration, and with investments in humanoids on the rise, we might just witness a concert for A.I artists!