Originally Posted by JoanneCooper
Before AI, if a person like even thought of creating a personalised song like this he would have to go to a lot of trouble and expense.
But that person isn't creating a personalized song.

They are having a personalized song created for them.

In the past, it would have had to be created by a person, who would have some set of expenses. With AI, the expenses are entirely different, and far less.

Originally Posted by JoanneCooper
AI (and BIAB for that matter) is democratising the process of music creation. Just like Canva has democratised design , Shopify e-commerce, Amazon publishing , Robinhood investing, etc.
AI has made personalized songs accessible to everyone by removing the traditional costs. Music can now be created by AI cheaply, and on a mass scale.

AI music differs significantly from Canva, Shopify, Amazon publishing, Robinhood investing, etc. These are all web-based applications that have leveraged the UI, making it possible for ordinary users to interact with the applications in a way that doesn't require them to be experts. Cost reduction has come about by generalizing a process, and then spreading those costs over many users.

With Shopify and Canva, the tools like templates and widgets have been created by the company. Users choose templates and then customize them. You can't just tell Shopify that you want a website that looks like some other website you've seen on the internet. They are basically iterations of similar layout applications that have been available for decades. This is also true for Amazon publishing, Robinhood investing, and so on.

In contrast, cost-reducing democratization in AI has come about because AI has mined millions of songs on the internet without regard to ownership. It has played, analyzed, deconstructed, and stored that analysis in a format that allows reconstruction of the material in a new configuration. The sounds that AI generates aren't an imitation of the instruments and voices, they are a literal amalgamation of those instruments and voices, down to fret noises and vocal tics.

The people whose music is used as raw material for AI have paid the cost of purchasing, learning, and recording instruments. AI bears none of these costs, because it doesn't compensate the people who paid those costs. While there are licensing agreements, they reflect the clout of the licensed artists, not the percentage to which those artists contributed to the AI's training.

So while these are all tools that have reduced barriers to entry, the means by which they've done this are entirely different.

-- David Cuny

My virtual singer development blog
Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?

BiaB 2025 | Windows 11 | Reaper | Way too many VSTis.