The Anti-AI Album is Coming; plus: We Get Meta on the NYT Songwriters List

Last month music YouTuber Brandon Shaw spent an episode going deep into the Rolling Stone story I wrote on AI and music production, demonstrating his good taste in journalism (sorry) and making a prediction I like: we are going to see the rise of the “Mission Impossible album.” His idea is that in the same way that people go see the Mission Impossible movies because Tom Cruise does all of his own stunts, people will be drawn to ‘un-AI-able’ music. What might Mission: Impossible albums sound like? More punk? More bugged out? Deeply human in some other way? Whatever it is, I am up for it.

In other Stems-adjacent news, I wrote in UK publication MusicTech about how Splice — one of the biggest sample marketplaces in the world, the secret weapon behind many songs you know (including Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso”) — is taking on the existential threat from AI full-song generation tools like Suno. (Disclosure: I have done consulting work for Splice as well.) The first challenge for them was figuring out how to make their static library of samples “liquid,” in the words of their head of AI, Alejandro Koretzky, an Argentinian engineer and musician who helped invent stem separation. Then they had to figure out how to get the original producers paid. It’s a nifty story, and an object lesson how to build ethical (and very cool) AI tools. It also could get more interesting because they just announced that later this year they are creating new AI tools with Elevenlabs, who already have a Suno-like song generator which they say is fully licensed.

Cherie Hu of Water & Music has a scoop on Udio’s upcoming revamp, called Starstruck, which will allow fans to use AI to redo participating artists’ songs in four ways (“Cover,” “Reimagine,” “Remix,” “Create” — the last of which allows users to “write their own lyrics and pair them with a selected artist's voice, subject to guardrails.”) She also raises questions on whether Starstruck has a shot at success, given the major-label-imposed “walled garden” which will keep all these high jinks limited to the Udio platform.