Welcome to this week’s Stems! We’re publishing later than usual this Friday, but in the rainy Northeast, at least, readers will have lots of indoor time to catch up on their reading and track the “will Milli Vanilli play Trump’s 250th party” story.
MUSIC • MEDIA • TECH| Analysis |
When the Superfans Start Making the Songs
One song from a text conversation (center) spawned 28,000 videos and tens of millions of plays.
Rolling Stone very kindly let me write about the TikTok trend of people turning texts from their kids, partners, work nemeses and others into songs with AI. There have been examples of this floating around a year or more, but in April things got bonkers, with some posts getting north of 10 million plays; on the back of this, Suno became the number one selling music app in the Apple App Store for a while last month. One song clip — built on panicked texts from a woman hiding from the jealous girlfriend of a casual fling — was used by TikTokers in more than 28,000 other videos, lipsynching to the song, acting out the scene and dancing around to it.
If AI music does have staying power, it’s very likely going to look less like AI-generated stars like Breaking Rust taking over the Billboard charts, and more like this: non-musicians making social content for each other. Like those AI 50 Cent covers that Joe Rogan liked so much the AI “ick” factor is lower for shticky, low-stakes social media content like this; this isn’t people using AI to try to literally be Beyonce; it’s people using it more like Snapchat filter. This is notable in a world where people are reacting more and more negatively to music when they know it’s AI-generated.
Beyond the boost in customers, this is a nice story for Suno — who doesn’t like moms turning their kids’ demanding texts into emo songs? The thing is, these lighthearted “consumer creators” could still drink the music industry’s milkshake in a couple ways. For one, these models are still trained on other people’s copyrights. Second, this is still competition. Olivia Jones of MiDia, who I spoke to for the RS piece, said that they are already seeing in surveys that people who use AI full-song tools “are often more likely to engage more with fan created versions of an entertainment that they like rather than the entertainment itself.” Yes, some of that content might be those AI covers, which Spotify, UMG, Udio and any number of other companies are betting on. But some of it is going to be its own thing, like these songs from texts.
Jones calls the non-musicians making these songs “consumer creators”; interestingly, a lot of them are also music superfans, who overindex on buying concert tickets, merch and paying for streaming. “They actually value music more than the average consumer,” she said. “This is just a way of them engaging with it.”
(Full RS piece here.)