The Best AI Music in the World, Vol. 3
This Retro series catalogues the AI-powered production of “new” music “sung” by great artists we can never again hear from—as well as experiments in sending still-living artists “out-of-genre.”
{Note: This Retro series features five AI-created songs in each volume, offered in no particular order. The song titles appearing above each track were supplied by the digital artists who used AI to produce these songs. None of the songs below are endorsed by their listed performers.}
Introduction
All of the songs below are AI-generated and are intended purely for entertainment.
In the first edition of this series, I offered some preliminary thoughts about AI music. If you’re interested in following along as the “Best AI Music in the World” series expands and evolves within the Music section of Retro, I do hope you will read that—admittedly lengthy, far-ranging, and alternately personal and theoretical—essay.
One of the points made by the essay is just how rapidly AI music is developing. And nothing could be a better indicator of this than just looking at the last few months of major-media news. It seems that everyone is now talking and writing about AI music and doing so with enormous urgency. On April 11, The Financial Times reported that
Universal Music Group (UMG) has told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block artificial intelligence services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times.
UMG—which controls about a third of the global music market—has become increasingly concerned about AI bots using their songs to train themselves to churn out music that sounds like popular artists. AI-generated songs have been popping up on streaming services and UMG has been sending takedown requests “left and right”, said a person familiar with the matter.
The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogue for developers using it to train AI technology.
More recently, the New York Times reported that “[state and federal] lawmakers are beginning to contemplate questions about authorship and ownership around creative machines [because] the stakes for creative businesses are high.”
According to the Times, the three key questions being asked right now are these:
“What is owed to the creators of the original material?”
“Does ‘[the] fair use [doctrine]’ apply?”
“Who owns the output of generative A.I.?”
To Retro, the answers to these questions seem straight-forward—though it will no doubt take a good deal of time for state and federal courts to work through them.
Ultimately, AI cover versions of non-public-domain songs will have to give royalties to the original artists, just as cover versions and their artists have done for decades now. The fair-use doctrine will be applied or not based on the usual considerations for its application, including whether an existing song has been sampled but materially altered and whether there’s a parodic, critical, and/or educational purpose in play. And while courts currently don’t recognize “algo jockeys”—the digital artists who, like early graphic designers, use text and their technological know-how to make artifacts they couldn’t create using their own motor skills—as copyright holders, it is likely AI music will at some point in the future become, at least in some fashion, copyrightable.
In the meantime, the three questions asked above will have the short-term effect of making it that much harder to locate AI music online—unless you habitually go deep into the bowels of YouTube and TikTok or locate obscure user-made Spotify playlists.
Indeed, after the scores of “takedowns” relating to the Drake & The Weeknd AI song “Heart on My Sleeve”, it has already become notably harder to find full AI-generated tracks online (particularly those that are produced in the style of a famous artist). Far more common, now—a phenomenon we will see in this particular edition of the “Best AI Music in the World”—are (a) songs performed by humans that use AI-generated lyrics, and (b) AI “covers” of existing (in some cases obscure) tracks by popular artists.
{Note: On rare occasion, songs that appear in this series may be unsettling to certain viewers due to their ability to mimic human singers both living and deceased. Please know that any such upset is unintentional. These artworks are intended to surprise, delight, illuminate and amaze, not provoke negative emotions or physical responses. However, because AI-generated work product is definitionally already lodged deep in the “uncanny valley”, occasional strong reactions to the songs in this series from some listeners are to be expected. Certain tracks are prefaced by a “curator’s note” that briefly explains why I find the work to be of artistic merit.}
1 | Freddie Mercury, “Thriller” (Michael Jackson cover)
2 | Michael Jackson, “Eye of the Tiger” (Survivor cover)
3 | Freddie Mercury, “Don’t Look Back in Anger” (Oasis cover)
4 | Mark Thurau, “Superman’s Too Late”
Curator’s note: The lyrics for this Mark Thurau song were created by AI—specifically by running a very large number of 1990s indie-pop and pop-punk songs through an AI program to produce the “median lyrics” for such a song at that point in music history.
5 | Kanye West, “Viva La Vida” (Coldplay cover)
Curator’s note: I’ve been wondering about—and disappointed by—the fact that so many of the best AI covers feature Kanye West’s “voice” or someone else “covering” a West track. I suspect that one of the reasons (and this would also explain why there are so many AI songs connected to musicians who have passed away—particularly if, like Michael Jackson, they passed away under a cloud of controversy) is that at this point AI engineers feel more comfortable testing the waters of AI music with an artist they deem unlikely or unable to make much of a fuss over their experimentation. But then there is an alternative, and I think considerably more romantic, interpretation: an artist like Kanye West has so thoroughly ruined his professional and personal life with his antisemitism and his apparent reluctance to treat his ongoing mental health struggles that many songs simply sound more meaningful, now, in his voice. A great example is Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida”, a song about a once-admired man fallen into desperate straits. The lyrics of the song could easily be describing West’s own descent into self-delusion and hatred, which makes the track below an intriguing listen even if, as ever, I could wish that far fewer of the best AI tracks now available—keeping in mind there really aren’t that many, yet—involve a man with views as hateful as West’s.