Can be interesting tools there for #music #Marketing with #AI but "AI-driven predictions" may seem just another take on the "new" A&R approach adopted by #majorlabels which generally aren't keen on the work of discovering and nurturing fresh artists. Instead, they want to use bigdata to identify acts that have already gained traction — simply invest and turn a profit.
Can be a bit contradictory...imho

Suno confirms v6 is trained on user-generated interactions as new copyright lawsuits surface
Suno recently released v6 of its AI music generation models, marking a new beginning for the platform and a step out of the shadows of its legally murky past. Well, that was the plan. The trouble is, the company faced new lawsuits from Sony and UMG barely a week after releasing Suno v6. I’m almost [...]
View post: Suno confirms v6 is trained on user-generated interactions as new copyright lawsuits surface

Sound designers and SFX libraries launch Professional Sound Alliance to fight AI scraping: ‘Now sound will have protection of our own’The Alliance says it was formed in response to two forms of unauthorized use, which it calls Data Piracy and Sync Piracy.
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“The death of Suno”: Reddit users have turned against Suno after v6 model updateBack in August, Suno got a slap on the wrist for its unlawful AI training practices, with German courts ruling that it had used protected songs without permission. Then, at the start of September, Suno came clean in the US District Court of Massachusetts, admitting in court documents that “audio data was obtained from YouTube for use as training” its software.
As the ongoing legal proceedings unfold, Suno’s latest iteration, v6, aims to “strengthen safeguards” across the industry and “create a healthier” musical ecosystem. Developed in partnership with the likes of Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, it seems like Suno’s way of addressing the elephant in the room, perhaps by throwing out unlawful datasets and retraining Suno from the ground up… and users aren’t very impressed.

READ MORE: ElevenLabs strikes first deal with a major label to launch AI-powered music platform and audio products

Taking to Reddit, one unhappy Suno user brands the latest update as “the death of Suno”, calling it “unusable” with poor quality tracks. “Every song comes out flat, the voices are muddy, the sound is abysmal,” the user writes. “[Suno] claims we can still use the 5.5 voices – not true – they sound nothing like in v5.5. The songs come out so bad [that] I won’t be able to use Suno at all.”
Words like “muddy” and “muffled” crops up time and time again across r/SunoAI. One satirical parody post even ‘leaks’ the next update, which will involve “muffle maker” software to capture the same quality as v6. “If you accidentally create something that sounds good, you can use it to bring the sound quality down to the classic v6 level,” the fake ‘update leak’ reads.
save this before it gets deleted! new suno update leaked!! byu/RefrigeratorOpen2655 inSunoAI

The post even namedrops a number of companies suing Suno over its alleged copyright infringement. “[The new update comes with] your own personal representatives,” the post reads. “After Suno’s latest settlement, representatives from Sony, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group will watch your screen live whenever you start writing a prompt. if they see anything they don’t approve of, your account will be suspended.”
Many posters seem to scowl at any mention of the lawsuits at hand. When one user mourns how “awful” v6 is, noting with annoyance that Suno has even removed some of its “best models”, 4.5+ and 5, a commenter notes: “it’s called complying to a lawsuit”. It’s a reminder that has users branding the companies as “dickheads”, while also dog-pile downvoting any attempts to explain that training on content without permission is “still theft”.
No matter how many years of loyalty users seem to have under their belt, there seems to be a unanimous sentiment: v6 isn’t up to scratch. However, as users debate jumping ship and cancelling their subscriptions, as least the companies pursuing lawsuits are happy… right?
Not quite. According to Variety, as of 18 September, Sony and Universal Music Group have filed a new 45-page lawsuit. It comes as yet another lawsuit against Suno, with the labels first pursuing legal action over Suno’s “unimaginable scales” of copyright infringement in 2024.
The new lawsuit alleges that Suno’s latest model, the infamously “unusable” and “muddy” v6, still infringes on copyrighted work across Sony and UMG’s catalogue. The companies argue that v6, if v6 was trained on its previous models or any of Suno’s previous output, then it would still be utilising Sony and UMG’s copyrighted works – as training off of copyright infringing content may dilute the source material, but it was still created unlawfully.
“Training a ‘new’ model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it,” the labels claim [via Variety]. “V6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree.”
So, with users and the industry still unsatisfied, Suno is between a rock and a hard place here. It begs the question: what does the future hold for Suno and generative AI in music?
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UMG sues DistroKid for #AI tracks distributed (counted around 70%), new Suno v6 sounds worse than v5.5...this is the current #MusicBusiness

What is loudness and LUFS in #musicproduction

GTA VI x artists will release the #Game soundtrack #music

Noise wants to help everyday people become paid content creatorsMarketing platform Noise is on a mission to help anyone with a smart phone make money from their content.

Suno admits it obtained YouTube audio to train its AI – but challenges UMG and Sony’s standing to bring ‘stream ripping’ claimAI music company has filed its answer to the first amended complaint from UMG and Sony Music Entertainment.
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Really cool web-view tweak with Firefox "Add Split View" feature to combine two function of PublMe at once. The platform is at beta though yet. With no mobile app so far it is a good workaround to simplify. #PublMe #Education #FAQ

Dithering in #musicproduction was quite an interesting topic. Every dithering algorithm has it's own color (or sound character), it pretty much depends on the material - sometimes truncated conversion sounds better if there is a lot of "muddiness" or "wooliness" in the particular mix, better to pick up by ears imho. Also 32 to 24, 24 to 16, 32 to 16 are quite different conversions, TPDF is the most neutral dithering though (triangular "white noise" kind of)

SoundCloud is finally letting artists sell music directly to fans – with zero commissionSoundCloud has spent years being the place where you stumble across your next favourite artist. Now, it wants to be the place where you actually buy their music, too.
The company is currently testing a new feature that lets artists sell and deliver music directly from their SoundCloud profiles, meaning fans can discover a track, decide they want to own it and buy the download without being sent off to another platform.
Artists can set their own prices and offer music in formats including MP3 and WAV. More importantly, SoundCloud takes no commission from those sales. Once standard fees and taxes are deducted, artists keep 100% of the revenue.

READ MORE: How to get playlisted on streaming services: 7 playlist pitching tips

It’s a notable addition to a platform that has traditionally been much better at getting music heard than getting it sold. A stream might introduce an artist to a new fan, but a direct purchase puts actual money into the artist’s pocket.
SoundCloud says there’s already a sizeable appetite for that. Around 250,000 artists currently direct fans to external platforms to buy their music, with 2.4 million tracks linked to purchase pages. The company says more than 500,000 SoundCloud users are sent to those external sites every year, while 28% of surveyed artists either already sell downloadable music or want to start.
The feature will initially be tested with 200 US-based Artist Pro creators. Feedback from the beta will help shape the service before it rolls out to all eligible creators later this autumn.
Participating artists will be able to monitor their sales through Artist Studio and the Fan Support Dashboard. Direct sales will also add to SoundCloud’s existing artist monetisation tools, including Fan-Powered Royalties, Fan Support, on-demand vinyl and ticketing.
“Artists should be able to build their audience in one place, on one platform,” says SoundCloud CEO Eliah Seton. “SoundCloud has always been where artists find their first fans and build real communities. We’re continuing to bring more of what they need to grow their careers into that same experience, while letting fans directly support the music they love.”
SoundCloud’s move follows the lead of Bandcamp, which has long championed direct-to-fan music sales and launched its Bandcamp Fridays initiative in 2020.
Learn more at SoundCloud.
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Suno wants to offer tracks pressing to vinyl, really? Interesting move from the point of rights in #AI #MusicBusiness

Vibe coding of #musicproduction #Plugins with #AI ? - Sounds like the interesting experience, but I wonder how practical is it in details and interoperability in particular

Vibe coding has come for music plugins – are we witnessing a revolution?“AI works so well that now our internal sound designers can build products in two days that would have taken our entire dev team a whole year. It’s unbelievable.”
Casey Kolb, CEO of Lunacy Audio, had no plans to use AI in the company’s forthcoming plugin release. But while most of the music industry has been focused on deepfakes and full song generators, in the last six months something arguably even more impactful is happening in the world of music software. Lunacy is one of many developers just trying to keep up.

READ MORE: Anukari is a unique modelling synth that dares to be different, but how does it fit into my workflow?

“We’re trying to navigate this. It’s very weird; we weren’t even planning for it. It threw everything up in the air, and it was like ‘oh my god, maybe this is the future.’”
AI-assisted software development, or ‘vibe coding’, has the capacity to shortcut old practices, open the doors to complete novices, and have a foundational impact on the field of programming writ large. But what does this mean for audio development? In the case of Lunacy, that meant taking their human-made code and using AI to experiment and iterate on their designs at an astounding rate.
Kolb spent years building his team of human engineers. Talented audio developers are rare in his experience, and refining the development workflow took time. Before AI came onto the scene, the team at Lunacy manually coded CUBE, a sample-based virtual instrument and BEAM, a multi-effects plugin.
Lunacy’s next project, dubbed NOVA, invites people to build, share and remix plugins “like Google Docs for audio”. It never originally involved AI at all, but with the codebase already built, Kolb and his team took the chance to see what more AI could do with it.
Lunacy NOVA. Image: Press
“We had already built by hand a custom audio engine to make our product work. AI already has access to our algorithms and infrastructure paradigms, so all it is doing is coding – putting together the Lego blocks that we’ve handed it.”
If AI is having an impact for companies, it’s an even bigger shift for solo developers. As a former tech lead at Google and first-time plugin developer, Evan Mezeske wanted to combine his love of music with his background in programming. The result is Anukari, a weird and wonderful physics-based synth that takes inspiration from the 3D modelling environments usually found in video games.
At first, AI was simply a curiosity, and he did the first couple of years’ work the old-fashioned way. When Mezeske finally got round to seeing what AI could do, his initial reaction was mixed. “I was seeing it do things that I’ve spent my whole life getting good at […] and now there’s a robot that does my job. I went through a period where I was shocked and disoriented.”
“But at some point I realised I had to come to terms with the fact that this is how the world is now. I was like, okay, well, what does this mean for me? It means that I, as a solo entrepreneur, can’t afford to get help programming. But I can afford Claude.”
The allure of Large Language Models such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini is that you can talk to them in natural language and ask them to execute entire development cycles from design to testing to executing code. Experienced programmers might use it to bridge between languages they’re not familiar with, but people who have never written a line of code can also get AI to build their idea.
The danger here is that this paradigm might result in low-quality, buggy and uninspiring music software, as a consequence of developers not fully understanding the code being produced. This is something Kolb is aware of: “We don’t want everyone and their grandmother to come in and build awful things and share them. We’re trying to really curate the system such that it’s tasteful.”
Evan Mezeske. Image: Christopher Marchetti
Vibe coding might seem easy, but the reality is music software requires dedication and hard work to orchestrate something that not only operates, but performs well and sounds great too. Vibe coding might be a gateway to a new generation of plugin makers, but for Mezeske, the quality of new software will be determined by how much detail, direction and effort goes into the AI and Human working process.
“If vibe coding means I say ‘build Anukari’, it’s going to go off and do something awful. But in terms of the prompts that I gave Claude for the 3D renderer, it was something like a thousand chat interactions, starting with a huge thousand-line design essay and then a thousand iterations on that where I gave it feedback and provided direction. Is that vibe coding? I’m not sure. Personally, I think of vibe coding as somebody providing a lot less direction, in which case I think the results are going to be pretty poor.”
Furthermore, audio development comes with challenges that are highly unique to the industry. As Mezeske found out, audio software has to run on multiple operating systems, a long list of different DAWs, and there are all sorts of features worth considering from MPE to multichannel to microtunning and MIDI 2.0. “There’s just this vast surface area of contact points with other parts of software that are complex. It has to be in real-time, and on top of that it can’t crash. I mean, that’s insane, right?”
Anukari UI. Image: Press
At Lunacy, the secret recipe that goes into their DSP development is not something Kolb is ready for AI to cook with just yet. “It’s not perfect. Earlier this year, we were trying to figure out how Claude Code would fit into our workflow. If you used it on certain deep-level things like DSP algorithms or something, it would often fail or mess something up. It’s gotten better, but we kind of avoid using it on anything that’s too delicate.”
Nonetheless, AI has suddenly made music plugin and software creation exponentially more accessible, allowing musicians and producers to build bespoke tools that fit their needs exactly.
For Scott Young—a producer by night and a former front-end developer—AI helped him overcome personal learning difficulties to build his first plugin. Based in Hong Kong, he couldn’t find many local studios that were developing audio software, and so “found the courage to do it” himself. The result was Acetate, born from a need to create quick club-ready masters for the venues he was performing at.
Scott Young. Image: Press
Although Young’s project began as a means to solve his own problem, ultimately he’s determined to create a high-quality tool that others find useful too. “I wanted to make a statement that this could be done,” says Young. “That it could be done at studio-quality output. Just because I couldn’t do it on day one doesn’t mean that I can’t do it a year later.”
As the barrier to plugin development lowers, we might see a renaissance of plugins that are niche, esoteric, and unique — just as we did at the turn of the millennium with the introduction of the VST standard. On the other hand, we might be hit with a wave of bad plugins, poorly optimised or full of bugs, with bad actors hoping to make a quick buck.
In the current AI-sceptic landscape, getting the balance right for both users and plugin makers is difficult but necessary. For Kolb, it’s a matter of seizing the tools before they are co-opted by others.
Acetate analysis. Image: Press
“If you’re in the camp of ‘let’s never touch it, it’s only evil’, I think that’s wrong. We’re going to get swallowed alive by the evil tech giants if we do that. We need to find out how to harness this superpower in a way that feels creative so we can beat companies that are trying to bypass the creative process.”
At a time when the plugin and software market is arguably over-saturated, AI might—in the right hands— have a surprisingly positive impact on music software.
As Mezeske puts it: “To me, the cool thing about music is the human creative process and the way that that connects to other people. I like the idea of superhuman cyborg people realising ever more of their creative dream in more detail. If the AI tools are amplifying a human being’s creative process and the agent is helping realise that much more rapidly than they could on their own, I think that’s very cool.”
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