Can AI make a hit song?

In episode two of The Vergecast's AI mini series, David Pierce sits down with Switched on Pop's Charlie Harding and music producer Ian Kimmel to share how they made an entire song from scratch using a bunch of AI tools. Later, Nilay Patel joins the discussion to talk about the future of AI in the music industry. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:03David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of procedurally generated four on the floor. I'm your friend David Pierce and this is the second episode in our three-part series about AI. What we're trying to do in these episodes is not just talk about AI as a theory or fast forward a dozen or 100 years to when AI takes over the world and kills us all, but actually look at what AI is really doing in our lives right now. This week, we're going to talk about how AI is changing music. And we actually got started down this particular rabbit hole while we were making last week's episode about cloning your voice. Because in the making of that episode, we discovered this tool called voiceify.ai that claims to be able to train a model to sound not like your speaking voice, but your singing

• 1:47David Pierce?

  voice. As far as I can tell, voiceify isn't really a production tool so much as it is sort of a silly tool to let you make songs using voices like, I don't know, SpongeBob SquarePants.

• 2:04David Pierce?

  Or Michael Jackson's voice.

• 2:13David Pierce?

  But you can also train it with your own. So obviously, I had to test that. So I got out my mic, put on some headphones, and I spent about an hour singing a few of my favorite songs into a recorder. I'm not going to play those recordings for reasons of my own embarrassment, but also because, trust me, literally no one needs to hear that. But the thing is, you're kind of about to hear my voice anyway, or at least what voiceify.ai thinks I sound like.

• 2:42David Pierce?

  The process is kind of weird. You upload a bunch of stuff. It processes your voice. And then you just plug in a YouTube URL. It tries to extract the vocals, then sort of paste yours back in, and then rewrite the song using your voice. It's wonky, but it's super fun and pretty quick. So without further ado, please welcome to the stage AI David Pierce singing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" by The Beatles.

• 3:16David Pierce?

  It's actually not bad. Like, I cannot stand the sound of my own singing voice, but that does kind of sound like me, I think. At least until you get a little further into the song, and then it all just completely falls apart.

• 3:36David Pierce?

  OK, I could do this forever. We made a lot of songs, but I'll only do one more here. This is Suspicious Minds by Elvis Presley by AI David Pierce.

• 4:03David Pierce?

  Oh, Lord. Okay, let's just move on before this goes any further off the rails or everyone stops listening because of my voice. Let's bring in a couple of actual musicians to talk about how AI is changing the way we make music. My guests today are Charlie Harding, a songwriter and the co-host of the wonderful podcast Switched on Pop, who has been on this show before. He is responsible for Laser Bong.

• 4:28David Pierce?

  And Ian Kimmel, a producer and songwriter who has worked with everyone from BTS to Mary J. Blige to Netflix and the NBA. Ian also runs a company called Biscuit Head Collective, which works with artists of all sizes to make songs. So you could say AI is very important to both of these people and their livelihood going forward. And I want to know how they're thinking about it right now and how it fits in. Charlie Harding, welcome back to the Vergecast. Thank you for having me. This is, it's just delightful having you back. It always gets weird when you're here, which is my favorite thing about having you here. It's gonna get weird. Ian Kimmel, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me as well. Okay, so I want to do this episode in two parts. Sure. Talking about AI is very complicated because you end up having to talk about like

• 5:10David Pierce?

  the cool things it can be and then the terrifying things about it and then we're all gonna die and it's illegal, all at the same time. So we're just gonna split those things apart. Yeah. So for the first half of the show, I want to talk like super practical, how this stuff actually works, what you can do with it. You're both professional musicians, I want to talk about like how this actually works like in the world. And then we're gonna take a break, we're gonna collect ourselves, and then we're gonna talk about our feelings. Yeah. Does that sound good? That was pretty good. You guys good with that? Yeah. Okay, so I gave you guys some homework and we're gonna get to it in a minute and it's very exciting. But I think the first place I want to start is like, if you're a working musician today in September of 2023, are you thinking about AI in your day to day, like, at all, right now?

• 5:50Speaker 03

  I am as a music reporter.

• 5:52David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  But in terms of making music, I think we probably share this. The only tool I've really used to assist in any part of the creative process has been ChatGPT, but even that is quite limited.

• 6:03David Pierce?

  Interesting. That's not at all what I would have guessed.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:05David Pierce?

  So how are you using it right now? Like, where would ChatGPT fit in?

• 6:08Speaker 03

  You can use it as a rhyming dictionary.

• 6:10David Pierce?

  Ooh, okay.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  But it hasn't come into my life very much. I mean, I wanted to bring Ian into this conversation because I feel like he kind of has, I think he has the most skin in the game.

• 6:17David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Because on top of being a record producer, he's got, you know, platinum records, Grammy nominations. He also runs a business where he will help you take your indie track and make it a like top forty professional style song. So if there's anyone who probably cares about the world of AI replacing musical things, like, I mean, he's directly invested in it. So I'm curious, how has AI been in your life?

• 6:40Speaker 04

  I mean, the number one thing to think about, at least when I'm jumping into it, is generally, you know, we go back a couple decades and we're looking at people like going to tape and that kind of thing. And then we have things like VSTs, the plugins, replacing all that. So now we're getting into this new era of AI and like all these new technologies coming out. That the number one thing I'm paying attention to is just trying to be current. I'm young, I'm in my twenties, but at the same time, with all this technology, we have to do it like it has to. We always have to keep up with the times, otherwise we're going to get left behind. But there is so many amazing functions going on inside of it. And me being a music professional who is a musician that can play multiple instruments and program drums and all that kind of stuff,

• 7:22Speaker 04

  it doesn't come into my world as often as like a new music producer would.

• 7:26David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  Just because there's so many.

• 7:28David Pierce?

  So you think if you were starting fresh right now, trying to get in the game, you think you would be maybe more invested in figuring out some of the AI stuff?

• 7:34Speaker 04

  Definitely. Yeah. If I didn't know how to program drums, there's, you can just pull up this one VST that allows you to program drums with a hit of a button. It automatically reads your tempo. You can set the vibe that you want, and then you've got drums. And then you click the button again, and then you have a variation of that. And it just, there's so many tools that it's creating to really save time. And also, in the learning process, it's a bigger jump. It's a lot quicker. So it's allowing new music producers to be able to jump on weight quicker. But that being said, the thing I only really use in my professional life would be ChatGPT.

• 8:08David Pierce?

  For the same reason, rhyming dictionaries, all that stuff?

• 8:10Speaker 04

  Not as much for me, sometimes lyric editing.

• 8:13David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 8:14Speaker 04

  To see if I can like pull something better out of it. Not as often, but the most I'm actually using it for is writing well converting business emails. That's the top thing I'm using chat.

• 8:25David Pierce?

  That's your, your hit album, well converting business emails.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  Sounds like a great vaporwave album. Let's make that.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  But yeah, that's the top thing I'm using it for as this time. It's, you know, it's the sidebar of the music industry is the business of the music industry, but it's something that's very important for somebody like me who's trying to afford to live in New York, you know?

• 8:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, for sure. So is there, is there anything that feels like you would love to offload part of the process to AI where I feel like, you know, everybody in who does sort of normal desk jobs is like loves AI because it can write their emails, right? And that feels like the kind of thing that it's like, this isn't really my job, but it's a thing I have to do as part of my job. So like terrific if I can offload that, amazing.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  I mean, we were, we were talking about this just yesterday. I'm very jealous of Ian because he has a team of people that work with him to help him do all the prep work, which is really boring. So prepping a mix session takes forever. You have to cut out all the silences. You have to get everything in the right order. You have to color the tracks, tuning vocals, aligning things. A lot of things do have creative choices that happen in them, but there can be just dozens of hours a week of prep work that usually is handled by an assistant or an engineer. And I don't finish songs often because I'm like, I don't want to spend my entire day doing all this prep work, which not only slows me down, but it also, it drags me down as well.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  Like it puts me in a creative hole where what I need to do is just like get right into my creative state, but I have to do that five hours into staring at my computer. So there's a lot of things that I would love for it to automate.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  And at this point, it's not replacing anything I'm doing or my assistants are doing, but there is technology now coming out that is helping with it, but I think we're just on the verge of that. Um, I saw one last week that, so we talk about the stems of a song, all the different instruments and vocals and everything. And if someone, you know, a lot of times we'll get it from the producer or the artist and nothing will be labeled. So we have to go through and listen to every single one and now there's. New technology where you can enter in your stems and it can name exactly what they are. And you can choose how they're named and everything like that. So at this point, there is new technology coming out that can really save us a lot of time. Save my assistants in particular a lot of time. But we're just on the verge of that, which is personally really exciting for me.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's important because like if you were to mix the artist Jacob Collier, Grammy winning artist, what is a small session of his, like 400, 500 tracks?

• 10:46David Pierce?

  Good lord.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Right? So if those haven't been labeled, you have 400 to 500 tracks. Apple literally expanded the number of tracks that their DAW logic can have because he was feeling like he was hamstrung by the number of tracks he could have. So you can have these huge sessions if things are unlabeled. I mean, it could take an entire day just to get things set up properly.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  So much time.

• 11:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's a really good example. I mean, it's, it is kind of the, the like, the work about the work. And that's so much of AI. Like we talk about this even with like what Google and Microsoft are doing where it's like, you can't do your actual sort of meaningful work better, but you can turn an Excel spreadsheet into a PowerPoint deck more quickly. And that's where we are with AI in a lot of places, I think. And that's, that's fine and good. But yeah, I just feel like there's a, there's a leap away before it starts being more than that. Like, do you feel like you're in a moment of existential business questions about like, how do I do this job? We're going to get to much more of that later.

• 11:41Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 11:41David Pierce?

  Preview it for us now.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  The toes in the water.

• 11:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  No, it's definitely, I am not worried at all, nor should anybody in my company be worried about like, you know, it's just miniscule tasks at this point. There is, you know, there's things rolling through my head like, okay, we have the STEM technology to read the stems. So that means, you know, AI can't hear critically, but it can like read waves and all that kind of stuff to really understand what's going on. So it can tell what different elements are. You can reference things that sound good and then it could like mix your song in a way that sounds good. And you know, it's, that is not at a point we are at right now. That technology hasn't been made, but I see it in the future for possibly being able to automate some of the bigger jobs that we have. But just the data set that you would need in order to create that would be.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Incredible, you know?

• 12:30David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, music is, music creation, though, a big business, is often a lot of, a lot of the companies that serve the music professionals, they're small businesses. I mean, some of them are multimillion dollar businesses, but you know, if you look at like the synthesizer companies, they're like a dozen people. They're using really old technology from the seventies often. There are a handful of, you know, certainly music technology companies that are working in AI, but they don't have the resources of Google, right? In fact, some of the tools we've used for fun have been created by Google as sort of like side throwaway projects. And so one of the big problems, I think, in servicing music professionals is large, good data sets that might exist for, you know, helping us make PowerPoints, because how many PowerPoints exist?

• 13:13David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  But getting access to good data, I mean, I remember The Verge had an amazing article written by a former journalist here, Danny Deal, who talked about the metadata problem within music. And just like, people don't submit the metadata to the streaming services for you to then know how to get paid. So there's just, like, the data problem is already such a significant problem throughout the music industry more broadly. Making tools that are built off of that training data for our subset, the fairly niche industry, I'm skeptical and expect the best tools probably being things that are appropriated from the larger tech companies.

• 13:50David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay. All right. So the, the super primitive nature of all this makes me very excited for what's about to happen, which is that I basically told you I wanted to talk about some of the specific tools that are out there and how they're using them. And the two of you went like several orders of magnitude beyond that. And you just made AI music, is essentially my understanding of what happened here.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  We made music using only AI tools.

• 14:12David Pierce?

  Okay. I want to walk through this whole process. I want to hear the thing that you made. I have not heard any of this. Very excited. But before you get into it, how was this process? You did this with like, very little notice or time. Has this, was this like, was this fun? Was this awful? Was this, did you make the worst thing you've ever made in your lives and you hate it forever? Like, how did it feel?

• 14:30Speaker 03

  I feel like Ian, you make stuff just every single day. How is this different for you? I'm curious.

• 14:35Speaker 04

  I'm so happy I was doing it with him, first of all. A lot of other people, this would have been so frustrating. But I felt like I had a broken leg the whole time. It slowed down the process. And it's not just like figuring out these tools and how to use them. It's how to like, we had to restart and manipulate audio in a way after using the AI to actually get it to fit in correctly, which was, you know, so time consuming. When it's like, one of the tools we used was just to create a simple bass, which was just a sine wave. And I could have pulled up a plugin and done it in thirty seconds. But in order to try and create a sine wave using some of these things, it took us ten minutes, you know? So it was just a slow process, just going through the entire thing.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  And, you know, it's really fun getting starter ideas and little things that I personally wouldn't think of and pulling those in. But using it for the entire process was very inhibiting.

• 15:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, I believe that.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, learning any new tool is always going to slow you down, like with any studio tool as well. Like if you get new equipment in the studio, you gotta kind of spend an hour learning it. So there definitely, we were held back by using new things while trying to be creative at the same time. That said, most of the material that we put together would have been a lot easier if we could have just used the existing toolsets that we already have. So it was a fun exercise, a set of constraints, and a fun excuse to hang out and make a song together.

• 15:55David Pierce?

  Love it. So let's do it. Walk me through, like, you sit down to do this. Where do you even, where do you start?

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Well, I had done a little bit of research the night before to make sure, and you know, I cover music. And so I had a list of things I was curious about exploring. And we thought that we should probably begin with an idea, right? Like typically, a good song is going to have some kind of hook, some kind of core idea that's going to guide it so that we know which direction to go in. And we figured we could use ChatGPT, which is the, you know, that would be the top of the funnel. Everyone knows it. Let's see if we can use that for some sort of creative purpose. And so I came into the room and I had been talking about, I've just started a teaching position, which is really fun for me. I'm teaching at a music school and I actually didn't finish my music major. So there's kind of this like imposter syndrome that I have of going into class every day and teaching something where I kind of dropped that major.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  And so I thought, well, let's go with that idea. And then I think you went a little further and like, how about, let's take it to like, just the feeling of like not belonging. And so You made an ama- you have a way of prompting ChatGPT Ian that is sophisticated and results in some lyrics.

• 16:59Speaker 04

  I don't find it sophisticated, but thank you. Yeah, so essentially, he had the imposter syndrome idea, and I was thinking like, okay, what can we make this more standard song core lyrical content wise? And so what we, what I thought it was like, okay, I have imposter syndrome, but imposter syndrome with somebody else, it'd be really easy to jump into a relationship. So I prompted a little bit of relationship, and then I also prompted it with, I have imposter syndrome being in this musical or in any world with AI also there. I feel like it's better than me. I feel like it can do better than me. So a lot of, you know, the nouns and things like that, that we're verbs and everything, we're like electrical techie stuff like that, which is really interesting.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Ian basically writes like a multi paragraph long prompt that is just like, you have this way of just kind of like

• 17:45Speaker 04

  It's stream of consciousness.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Stream of consciousness, like maybe that will prompt interesting and creative things. And, and we, I think we came to the idea that like, we would like the song to be maybe from the perspective of an AI that has imposter syndrome trying to exist in the world. Ian has this amazing studio in midtown that, that has, they're on the eighth floor with this giant window that overlooks the Empire State Building. So we had to make it also set in New York.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  So we sent that prompt in and we got back garbage.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  He used ChatGPT 3.5.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  He used four.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  I used four. I think four is supposed to be the more creative.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  And so this is what we got from our, just first verse after this big prompt. Woke up today in a world so bright, but shadows form beneath the city lights. You're soaring high while I remain tied to the ground by invisible chains. Starting a song with woke up today has got to be the most cliche way of beginning a song.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  It's like an off, off, off Broadway show.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  And so the real challenge here is it does write, yeah, the most cliche kind of lyrics, very obvious end rhymes, bright lights, remain, chains. That's kind of nice. It's actually made a slant rhyme, but it's really bad at like multi-syllabic rhymes, which is what makes, you know, a great verse. Strange rhyme schemes and things like that. We were also upset that it was kind of Good songs are gonna have some specifics, like you want the red scarf in a Taylor Swift song. It's gonna guide you through the entire narrative. And so we tried a different approach. I borrowed this songwriting tool from Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. And he's got this idea where you wanna hack your brain and put together unlikely pairings of words are often where you find interesting new meaning.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  So I said, give me, this is one of his exercises. Give me 10 verbs that are about imposter syndrome. And then give me 10 nouns that are objects in New York City. And it started giving me more interesting poetic things, including intruding skyscrapers, shattering street lamps, looting newsstands, tampering taxis. I said, okay, well, take some of those and try to write some lyrics. So it gave me this verse. Intruding skyscrapers piercing the night. In their looming shadows, we tried to find the light. Sneaking subways, silent cries they echo. We're in different lanes, waiting for the metro. Now-

• 20:02David Pierce?

  Better.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  Not bad.

• 20:03David Pierce?

  Better.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Better. We liked metro, although clearly, nobody in New York City calls the subway the metro.

• 20:09David Pierce?

  Sneaking subways kinda works for me.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  I like sneaking subways. And then, so then I was like, wait, we need more specific things. So I then prompted it further, was like, but can you give me some specific places in New York City?

• 20:18Speaker 04

  Now we go down the rabbit hole.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  And it updated it to, intruding skyscrapers, the Empire's might. By the flat iron building, we first saw the light. Sneaking subways beneath the Central Park. By the Bethesda Terrace, we lost our spark. And you immediately start singing. Do you remember?

• 20:33Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  The Alicia Keys song?

• 20:36Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. In New York. It was just so incredibly specific. Or like, you know, I love an actual place, something tangible. You know, like, I put the word Bowery in so many of my songs, it's ridiculous. But not every line.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  It's, yeah.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  So we kept prompting and kept prompting and trying to get better material out of it, and it just wasn't working. And so we decided to go with sort of the, I think what was the second prompt? The one that used that sort of noun verb exercise?

• 21:03David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  And Ian is really good at reducing bad lyrics that's been submitted to him and make them, you know, more singable. So- We knew we had something he could work with. I think my favorite AI tool, actually, that we used the entire time. I'm assuming it's AI, I don't know. Was he took a picture of my computer screen with the lyrics on it. And Apple automatically can identify the text and he could copy and paste the text from the picture into an Apple note and edit it. I think most of it.

• 21:33David Pierce?

  That's the best AI music tool.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  That was the best thing.

• 21:35David Pierce?

  That is so telling.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  And I think the tools that I had the most fun with are the things that often market their AI-ness the least.

• 21:43David Pierce?

  Interesting.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  So I don't know if there is some sort of, you know, machine learning in that tool.

• 21:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, that counts. That's AI. Yeah, we're good.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Okay, great, great, great. All right, we got an idea. We've got some rough lyrics. We need a vibe. And so we went hunting for sounds. And the first place we went was a website called Suno. Suno is kind of like the Mid Journey for music. They have a Discord server where you can enter a prompt and it's going to spit out, rather than a picture like Mid Journey, it's going to spit out music. And it's, I believe, fully synthesized music, including lyrics and vocals. So can I play you what we got?

• 22:17David Pierce?

  Please.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Okay. We're just going to do a smattering of sounds for now. We entered the first verse, that intruding skyscrapers verse, and this is what gave us.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  I was like, okay, I like the Nokia ringtone. We're going to use that. And we've got some vocals.

• 22:45David Pierce?

  So all of that was synthesized?

• 22:47Speaker 03

  That was synthesized.

• 22:47David Pierce?

  You fed it text and it came back with that?

• 22:49Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 22:49Speaker 04

  Also, this is the full audio quality, like, to be told.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  It's like a... This isn't being degraded at all through the listening process here. This is the full audio quality.

• 22:59David Pierce?

  It's basically Nokia ringtone quality.

• 23:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Okay. And then, actually, just like Mid Journey, it will give you alternatives. So it gave us this other track as well.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  And this one we thought was kind of trash, but it has this-

• 23:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm getting like bad country songs vibes from this, yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  But we like this little sort of piano-y synth thing. Now we have the problem that we want these individual pieces of material to play with. So we go to a website called audioshake.ai and they will stem your pre-existing music for you when you're all separated. Audioshake will take that track and it gives us the vocals, the little piano riff we liked from the first one and some like other stuff and then you can listen to them individually.

• 23:44David Pierce?

  So this seems like the kind of thing that I could see being useful for lots of things in the world, but not really in the music-making process. Like, are you often pulling stems out of existing things when you're making music?

• 23:54Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, generally that's against copyright, so we can't.

• 23:57David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  People use it for remixing. So especially when like it's a really old song and so you do have the rights for it. Big-name artists are actually using this tool to be able to get the stems to be able to remix.

• 24:09David Pierce?

  Right, yeah, you also see it all over TikTok and stuff. They're using it to like isolate the vocals and stuff like that.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, okay, so isolating vocals.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  We now have isolated vocals, okay, right? And we have a little fun riff, this little cinty thing.

• 24:23David Pierce?

  I do like that.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  My no key, my no key-

• 24:25David Pierce?

  The ringtone is nice.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Okay, so that's the first sound we assemble. We've got suno. We also pulled-

• 24:32David Pierce?

  Piano riff.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  That thing from the bad country song. We got that as well. All right, so we got those sounds. I then just went to like a ton of other "we will make music for you" AI sites, thinking maybe I can just keep stemming stuff and a lot of them are really bad. The quality of music that we were getting back would not fit like top 40 pop kind of vibe. They're much more like background advertisement sort of mood music, but we figured maybe we could, you know, get inspired by one. And so we went to a place called Soundful and heard this music, which I think sounds like a pharma ad.

• 25:10David Pierce?

  Side effects include drying out.

• 25:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Exactly. And we're like, okay, so we took this to AudioShake and we got the piano.

• 25:22David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  The quality is not great, but this guy's a wizard and we knew he could do something with it when we play with it. We got a few more sounds. We went to Splice is one of the biggest libraries of samples. And they have a new tool that will automatically pair different samples together for you as sort of like a starter.

• 25:44David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  And we went to their beta AI tool and they made this sound for us.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  These are four different samples that Splice just kind of randomly put together. And we thought sounded kind of like a really bad phone call again.

• 26:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Like you're on waiting. But we liked the kick drum, so we got the kick drum.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  Full drums, yeah.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  You had a sample of your own. Ian has, as a professional producer, has a bunch of starter sounds that he can bring to any session and just like get things going creatively. But we had to figure out how to process something he'd already made through AI.

• 26:25David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  And so there was a tool by a company called Output called Arcade that will automatically take your sample and play it back to you with some kind of AI tool that will make some creative choices.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  It's essentially the listening and chopping. Arcade also does a creative function where you can set the key and it looks at the tempo.

• 26:42David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  And then it will give you sounds that could work. It's not using any kind of learning technology in this case, but they have a new portion where you can input a sample. It learns that sample, figures out where to chop it and then plays it back to you in creative chops.

• 26:55David Pierce?

  I see. Okay.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  So here's the chops that it gave us.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  All right, now we have a selection of sounds. Like, basically, we have lyrics, we have collected our paints, we gotta now put something together.

• 27:09David Pierce?

  Right.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  And... All in different keys, all in different tempos. I think that whole process took us like two and a half hours of getting all that material and just like getting something to work with and...

• 27:19David Pierce?

  We have a lot of piano tracks.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  A lot of piano tracks.

• 27:21David Pierce?

  If I've been keeping track, yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:22David Pierce?

  I'm feeling this is gonna be a very moody song.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  We were thinking moody.

• 27:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Because we actually made a... I didn't say, we did make a little reference playlist of artists that maybe could inspire the vibe. We definitely wanted moody piano was on there. We wanted a sort of mid-tempo, happy, sad, walking through New York in the rain kind of thing at night, but it's like neon all around. All right?

• 27:43David Pierce?

  Love it.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  So that's the vibe.

• 27:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  And with all of that prompt, we probably could have written a song or two in the amount of time that it took us to collect these sounds, which are very lo-fi and need a lot of processing to make them sound good. So Ian takes first the piano and gives us this riff, the piano from Suno.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  The piano from Soundful, actually.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Which, you know, sounds a whole lot better than...

• 28:23David Pierce?

  Oof, yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  It's already started, yeah. So that's where we start. And then I think we had these like interesting, we had those like sparkly sound effects.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  There's no, yeah, yeah. We piled them together.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  And then we had that kick drum.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  It took us probably a half hour to process the sounds to actually sound better than they initially did. We thought, okay, that's sort of like a pre-chorus chorus, now let's use some of our other sounds, let's make a verse. And one of the issues is we didn't have a bass and we were trying to limit ourselves to only the sounds that we had at our disposal. So we took this tiny little sample from Suno again, Suno, the sort of mid-journey-like app. That.

• 29:18David Pierce?

  Just that?

• 29:19Speaker 03

  That. And I turned that into a bass sound.

• 29:25David Pierce?

  It's like a space bass.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Space bass. By like staring and feeling a bit. Basically, I put that into a sampler, I process it, I do a bunch of different things to it to give us some kind of bass something. And I think I used the same sample to make this as well.

• 29:40Speaker 04

  It just took so long to get from that one to another one. We just had to run it through like three plugins and yeah.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  Okay, so, and we have one more sound, which was this.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  I can't even remember which one this came from.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  That was from my loop.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  That's your, this is your loop.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Arcade, yeah.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  This is the arcade loop. Okay, and so kind of all those things together give us a verse vibe.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  And then I think there's just another little chirpy sound.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  That was the piano.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  And the sounds are like, they're, they're, they've got a lot of texture, we'll say. I think they sound kind of like, the Nokia ringtone is probably the best metaphor, but for me, it's like those really bad MP3s that you definitely didn't download off of Kazaa or Napster, you know, 20 years ago, that's kind of the quality that they came in.

• 30:32David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's that one that it kind of makes you want to like peel your headphone off just to make sure it's like not, you didn't blow your speakers.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the next thing is, okay, we have, now we have a vibe, we have some lyrics, we've got to put together some kind of, we'll call it top line, we need a melody that's going to go on top. This is where I think we gave up on trying to use an AI to write a melody, I was just like, Ian, get in the booth.

• 30:55Speaker 04

  Sure, I just started riffing and see what worked.

• 30:58Speaker 03

  He puts on some autotune, here's what he gives us.

• 31:00Speaker 05

  Intruding skyscrapers, pierced through the night, looming shadows under the city lights.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Not bad, he kind of has massaged the lyrics. I will say that I think "intruding skyscrapers" is a terrible opener to a song, it's very wordy.

• 31:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Intruding skyscrapers.

• 31:21David Pierce?

  It's a lot of syllables to say at the very beginning.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  It doesn't roll off easily. So we build a whole bunch of melodic ideas, pair them with these lyrics. Ian puts down a whole set of vocals to the entire song. The more interesting thing, though, is we can't use his voice. We have to use someone else's voice, so we send this through voice swap.ai. If you want to release a track with them, they will actually allow you to license their professional singers. This is one of the few tools that has actually made pretty high quality tools specifically for musicians.

• 31:49David Pierce?

  So they're actually generating models like with specific musicians?

• 31:53Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 31:53David Pierce?

  And then you can plug your own stuff in and get their generated stuff out?

• 31:57Speaker 03

  If you license it for a couple hundred dollars, basically. So this is for journalistic demo purposes only.

• 32:03David Pierce?

  Of course.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  We're not releasing the song.

• 32:05David Pierce?

  Do we have a name for the song, by the way? Have we titled it yet at this point in the process?

• 32:08Speaker 03

  I don't belong, probably.

• 32:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  You haven't heard the chorus yet.

• 32:11David Pierce?

  Oh, you're right. I apologize.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  All right.

• 32:13David Pierce?

  I don't belong parentheses intruding skyscrapers.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  That's it. Perfect. All right. So we send his voice through the voice model.

• 32:22Speaker 06

  Intruding skyscrapers pierce through the night. Blooming shadows under the city lights.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Now, it sounds very processed and affected because we intentionally took his autotuned vocal and sent it through the model. We want this to sound like it might be an AI singing to us.

• 32:40David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, it sounds more robotic in a good way.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, we didn't want it to sound natural. That was the goal. Probably VoiceUp is supposedly the best at doing this, but we tried to hack their thing to give us bad quality material back. There were a few other small tools we used at this point. I mentioned that Google has a handful of projects, one called Magenta, where they will edit MIDI data. That's basically, you know, the programming language that musicians use to input music into their software. And we had made this little rhythm on our own.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Just that. And what Magenta would do is it will give you variations on your rhythm. So it gave us this.

• 33:23David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  I mean, one of us could have done this, but we just figured, all right, there's one nice little variation.

• 33:27David Pierce?

  It's interesting how many of these tools are doing kind of roughly the same thing where you, it's like, I mean, they're basically all chat GPT, right? Like you say, like, here's a thing, give me other versions of this thing. And it's able to do that with sort of some level of competence. But there's so many moments in this process, it seems like where you've said, like, okay, we need to put all these pieces together, or we need to start from scratch and get somewhere. And these tools are just, they have nothing.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, cause like, I just needed one little percussion idea. And I honestly don't, there's probably some tool somewhere. But if you ask me, can you like, go interpolate and make me an interesting little top percussion moment? Like, it would have been faster to program. But anyways, I used Magenta to make this little.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  It's intentionally buried in the back of the track. And there's a artificial tape plugin to sound like, like a tape machine.

• 34:16David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  That's trained off of a neural net that we put in here to, to process, made by Baby Audio. Finally, I'm gonna play the whole thing in just a second.

• 34:22David Pierce?

  Love it.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  We put the whole song together. And there's a company called Isotope that has a mix and master assistant tool. Their mixing tool is called Neutron. And that will go on every single track. And you can basically say, hey, mix this track for me. And at the end, on, on the, the full master track, you put ozone. And same thing, rather than mixing and mastering the song ourselves, we just hit the master assist with a license that ozone gave, that Isotope gave us for, to make this song.

• 34:51David Pierce?

  And Isotope specifically is pretty widely used, right? I don't know how much the AI stuff is, but the Isotope thing is pretty well known.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  And this is a great example of like, the AI marketing around Isotope and Ozone. It's just like a tiny little slice of what that's being used for.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  I think, I think they're mostly chasing after the people who are doing the top of the top work and know the sounds so well and just want to make a really big help tool in order to jump on. They don't want to necessarily, necessarily take someone from like 0% to 10%.

• 35:17David Pierce?

  For sure. That makes sense.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  So anyway, do you want to hear the track?

• 35:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  Here's what we got.

• 35:21David Pierce?

  This is "I Don't Belong" parentheses, "Intruding Skyscrapers."

• 35:25Speaker 06

  Intruding skyscrapers pierce through the night.

• 35:29Speaker 06

  Blooming shadows, under the city lights. Sneaking through the subway, silent cries they echo. We're in different lanes, waiting for the metro. City of dreams, where hearts intertwine. Tossing and fire escapes, trying to make you mine. But with every glance, every sound. I'm walking streets, where I don't belong.

• 36:21David Pierce?

  Alright, we're gonna take a quick break and then we're gonna come back and talk more about this, but we're gonna let this play us out.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch. InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 37:12Speaker 01

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• 37:47David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. We brought in Eli Patel. Hi, Eli.

• 37:50Nilay Patel?

  Hey, what's up?

• 37:51David Pierce?

  It's time to talk about our feelings. But first, I want to know, you were sitting in the control room, listening to the song. What do you think?

• 37:55Speaker 04

  Is it a song?

• 37:56David Pierce?

  Do we have a banger on our hands?

• 37:58Nilay Patel?

  I think someone needs to go in and move those drums into the pocket. They're early. The snare was early. That's like, I can't hear anything beyond that. And that's just, that's just me.

• 38:08Speaker 04

  You should have so many more critiques.

• 38:11Nilay Patel?

  I'm confident there are more critiques to be had.

• 38:13Speaker 04

  It's really hard for like, my musical representation on this show to be a song.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  It's very difficult for me.

• 38:21David Pierce?

  So do you, do you listen to that and think, like, is there anything in that that's interesting to you as a musician?

• 38:27Speaker 04

  The more I've done this, the more I produce music for like, so many different people, the more I've realized that I do make bad music, and that's okay, and that's gonna go right into the trash can, and that is just fine. I'll make a better one tomorrow. And, you know, it's really fun using all of these tools, but it would take me more time to go into this and try and save stuff from it than it would just be to make a new song.

• 38:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 38:48Nilay Patel?

  My whole feeling about AI in general is it is a canon of C++ content. And if you point a canon of C++ content at any business model, something happens. And that song, like, it's a, that song is like, a cannon blast of C++ content, right?

• 39:04Speaker 04

  I think the biggest problem was that we used that piano, which came from what sounded like a Pharma ad. And so we started from a terrible source material. I remember when we, when you were working with it, we're like, we're not going in the right direction. What are we gonna do? And I was like, we gotta make the, the verse has gotta be minor because it's too happy. And it just like, we ended up making like, slightly better remixed Pharma music. So, I don't know, I mean.

• 39:28Nilay Patel?

  Look, have you listened to the radio lately? It's, it's not, not what the kids are listening to.

• 39:35David Pierce?

  Okay, so, the piece of this that I think is left to talk about is the like, what this means. Like, the capital F feelings about all of this, right? And I think, Eli, we've spent a lot of time in the show talking about like, what AI does to these industries and how we use them. But I'm especially curious, like, and we talked a little bit about this at the beginning, but like, as people who make music professionally. We're in this moment where I think most of these tools are not very good. Many of these tools are useless, as we were talking about at the beginning. But like, there are a lot of people who would tell you we are on the road to this stuff becoming a part of life, right? And I guess the first thing I wonder is like, the story of technology helping us make music goes back forever, right? And there's like, there have been these sort of moral panics about autotune and the idea that you can make drums on your computer instead of having to play drums and everybody

• 40:20David Pierce?

  gets up in arms about that. Like, is AI different from those things? Or is it just kind of another technology on the spectrum of how we make music, which is a forever-changing thing?

• 40:30Speaker 04

  I don't think this is any bigger of a step than we've had in the past. Just because a lot of the AI technology that we have is just doing little steps if you really look into it. So we have like Splice that has every loop under the sun that I can just drop into my song and it can or cannot work, but I instantly have a great quality, let's say drum recording. And then you have programs like Drum Monkey, which uses AI. I'm not actually sure how, because I'm pretty sure it just reads the BPM of the song, which is incredibly easy to do. And then you choose the genre you want, and then you hit generate. And it gives you a drum sample pattern. And you can hit generate again, it'll give you a different drum sample pattern. And to me, that's kind of no different than going on Splice and going through those sounds and picking one from there.

• 41:15Speaker 04

  It's automatically syncing up right away, so you can hear it quicker. But there isn't a giant step anywhere in music that I have seen, at least.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  I think a great analogy would be like the release of drum machines in the 1980s. Like, originally, these things were made to be like demo devices, maybe replace a drummer, and a lot of them were completely not, they were failures. The most important sound in contemporary popular music is probably Roland's TR-808, the drum machine that was a failure, ended up in pawn shops. And early hip-hop producers start thinking, well, that's a cool sound. If I, if I misappropriate it and use it in these different ways and I mix it in interesting ways, this thing which sounds kind of like a toy actually sounds amazing. And it took decades for these, you know, rejected devices then to become the mainstream sound. I think what will be most interesting are the weird sounds that you can get out of these tools, kids in their basements figuring out how to misuse them, at least at the state

• 42:07Speaker 03

  we are today, to create new, interesting creative material. But this is mostly a really challenging exercise, with the exception of Isotope's tools are very usable, very useful. I mean, we use those every day professionally anyways. Apple's iPhone is very useful. And ChatGPT was mildly useful.

• 42:24Nilay Patel?

  You know, you brought up autotune and the panic over autotune. It's important to just remember when autotune first hit as an effect. They lied about it because the stigma was so incredible. So Believe by Cher, they overdid the autotune. And there are articles upon articles where the producers of that song just invented other lies to claim that they had done something that was not use autotune on Cher. Because they were so worried about the stigma of having used the software. And now it's like, everyone just uses it all the time. And I think we're in that moment with AI just like across the board creatively where no one wants to cop to it. But it's just gonna be in the background of all these tools that we're using all the time.

• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  And the question is, can you make something that sounds different or great? And I think the worry is that you're gonna type in pop song and get that. And that will be all of music and.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Okay, I feel slightly insulted, just to be clear. We didn't, we didn't prompt that. We actually, we actually worked to make something over about two hours. That was song-ish.

• 43:28Nilay Patel?

  Song-ish?

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you know.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Using only AI tools. And yeah, it was, it was very challenging to make anything. It just led us in strange directions.

• 43:37Nilay Patel?

  Look, I think that's as big of a hit as Believe.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 43:41Nilay Patel?

  Let's get out there.

• 43:43Speaker 04

  All right, y'all have a good day. I'm out.

• 43:46David Pierce?

  So Ian, if somebody walks into your studio and is like, I have the beginnings of something. I made it entirely with AI. Are you gonna like roll your eyes and kick them out of the studio?

• 43:55Speaker 04

  Oh, not at all. I take demos from artists all the time. So a lot of times we'll do stuff from scratch, but generally I'm working with stuff who like they've already had the guitar part and the vocal and that kind of thing. And yeah, there's no stigma behind any of it. You know, there's a bigger stigma, I think, right now with using full samples than there is using any kind of AI tool. Where if all of my drums are from one like drum sample loop. People are like, oh, you could have been more creative than just go on splice and drag that in. That's more of a stigma than like using an AI tool at this point.

• 44:25David Pierce?

  That's really interesting. So, and what about the, like, I was just thinking, listening to that vocal, that it's gotta feel weird for you, having uploaded your voice to a piece of software that spit back your singing in somebody else's voice. And I feel like, I wonder about that creatively with all of this stuff, right? Obviously, there's big copyright questions about who owns a voice and can you make a song with fake Drake that counts. But I wonder, like, it's gotta feel weird to hear that out in the world, whether you're Drake or you, like, listening to someone else sing your song that was just your voice 30 seconds ago. What does that feel like?

• 44:59Speaker 04

  I mean, for me, I like my voice, so I'd rather just stick with my voice. But coming from, I work with so many vocal producers or producers in general, top line writers, that do not like their own voice at all. And they have to manipulate it and tune it a lot to get it to the point they would like to get it to. So if you're not a fan of your vocal tone, but you can get your point across in a recording, then you can change out your voice with something like this. And a lot of the work I do is I'll create a full beat, I'll put on the top line myself, the lyrics and melody and everything, and then I'll send it to an artist. It's a pitch. And if they like the song, they'll remove my top line and put theirs on and keep everything else. So essentially, you know, you don't have to keep the AI-generated voice, but it gives a reference for a pitch situation.

• 45:41David Pierce?

  Interesting.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  This is also just like an age-old issue. People feel uncomfortable with their voice. And there have been hacks that we've used for decades, whether that's reverb and compression, or oftentimes, in fact, when you went in the booth, the very common thing to do when you're trying to improvise melodies and top line over a beat is you just put on autotune almost to max, and it lets you be looser and freer. And so I think there's actually something very, yeah, there's something liberating about being like, ah, I don't feel good about my voice, but I know I can make a song and I can make it sound better if I just, you know, massage it with these tools.

• 46:13David Pierce?

  Neil, how do you feel about your singing voice?

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, two, three, four.

• 46:18Nilay Patel?

  You know, when I was in the punk band in college, I sang with a British accent.

• 46:23David Pierce?

  That's AI, right there.

• 46:24Nilay Patel?

  That's just some straight, Al Dergensen did it in Ministry, and I'm gonna do it too. And that's, that was the road I was in. You know, you said there's copyright issues. There aren't, though. That's, that's actually the thing. Right, that your voice is not protected in that way. There's like a handful of laws at the state level that might protect it, but none has ever been tested. And the real question is not, can I sing into a computer and have it sound like whoever, so I can send it to someone else and they can, it's can I distribute that and tell everyone it was Drake?

• 46:53David Pierce?

  Right.

• 46:54Nilay Patel?

  Or tell everyone that it sounded like to Drake?

• 46:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure we can't release any part of what we made, more because of licensing issues rather than copyright issues, because some of these tools we've used probably have some kind of license that needs purchase to be able to then, you know, use some of their sounds. And we did not do all of that perfectly.

• 47:10Nilay Patel?

  I promised David that I would bring up the thong song on today's episode of the Vergecast. What's fascinating about the music industry right now, and Charlie and I have talked about this lots of times, is that the norms inside the music industry about sample usage, about interpolation, about all this stuff, have almost nothing to do anymore with copyright law. So I know this fact about the thong song now, and I will come back to it over and over again. Cisco does not own the publishing to the thong song, because he said "live in la vida loca" in that song one time.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. No way.

• 47:41Nilay Patel?

  In the chorus. And Ricky Martin's songwriter came and took it and makes all the money every time that song is played.

• 47:46David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 47:47Nilay Patel?

  That's ridiculous to me. T-Pain, I think, just this week, revealed that he owns almost none of the publishing to buy you a drink, because there's all these little quotes in it, and all those people came for him and they took his publishing away.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:59David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 47:59Nilay Patel?

  And that's like, they didn't go to court.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  They're just lawyering up and pressuring people.

• 48:04Nilay Patel?

  The norms in the music industry are just like, we're gonna, we've built this other system. And if you just described that to you, it's like, if you just whisper the phrase "live in la vida loca", like Ricky Martin appears and like takes your money away, that's not right. It doesn't, it doesn't sit right with me, anyway. And I think this AI stuff is gonna lead to like a supercharged version of that, where like the computer is automatically giving Ricky Martin money, because it's been trained on his song. Like, that seems like it will fall apart.

• 48:35David Pierce?

  Well, it seems, it seems to me like it goes one of two ways, where either those norms become really, really, really aggressive and careful, and everybody becomes very litigious about everything, like you're talking about. Or it goes the other way, and we end up in this place where it sort of, nobody owns anything. It's just like pure anarchy and chaos.

• 48:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's not, that's not.

• 48:52David Pierce?

  Because you don't know, but we're gonna get to this point now where like-

• 48:55Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if you've met the music industry?

• 48:56David Pierce?

  I mean, everybody's gonna get real litigious at the beginning, but like-

• 48:59Nilay Patel?

  It's once described as a cruel and shallow money trench.

• 49:03David Pierce?

  But like, we're going through this with ChatGPT right now, right? Where it's like, they're like, oh, well, this sounds like the book that I read or that I wrote. And OpenAI is just like, who's to say? And it's just, we're just like, we're putting so many black boxes between I made something and something else exists that is kind of similar to the thing that I made, that I wonder if it's just gonna get harder and harder to understand provenance and where all this stuff came from and what counts as a sample and who's responsible and where. And it's just like, I suspect.

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  But this, when you say, how do you feel about this? This is the thing that I, that gives me the most uncomfortable feeling. Because they're not gonna not try, right? And they're gonna, they're already trying really hard. Like YouTube has a seal with Universal, which seems very terrifying to me. And they've already built this bizarre system where Charlie came on and we talked about Olivia Rodrigo's handing out publishing credits on an episode of Decoder, where Olivia Rodrigo is like, fine, Paramore can have a credit, even though probably shouldn't, right? Or like.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  The Taylor Swift ones are even more.

• 50:03Nilay Patel?

  Really shakier, right? And it's like, the industry has decided they don't, inside the family, they're not gonna fight.

• 50:09David Pierce?

  Right.

• 50:09Nilay Patel?

  And the famous people will just like, collect some money from new artists. And you just keep spinning that up with AI and you're like, oh, eventually the rich are just gonna get richer here. In like, ways that I think disincentivizes anyone from trying to make anything new. Like, you might as well, in that case, then just try to flip samples as creatively as possible and hand the money back out, right? And that, that's the feeling here that, it's like, the music industry's response to AI is to become even more corporate in, in a way that just makes me like, like I'm an old punk rocker. Like, that seems like not what you should do. You know, like, you should, like, the kids should revolt against all of that. And like Olivia Rodrigo should be like, I'm, I'm definitely not paying you.

• 50:53Speaker 04

  But in the same way, the industry, as I've noticed, is getting a lot politer in some ways. And I realize when we think about that, it might not look that way. But you know, when I have writing sessions with people now, that there'll be four people in a room. And let's say three of us do 90%, not 99% of the work. And the other person lays one bass note down. That's four equal splits on publishing. And I kind of see it the same way with, you know, you're anticipating the lawsuit and there's going to have to be a payout regardless and like all this stuff just to make it go away. Like, there's definitely that side of it. That's why you add the credits initially. But it's more so just like a, I don't know, a peace offering of kindness to be like, here, take this. And it is cool seeing people like, you know, higher up artists that are handing out to like

• 51:37Speaker 04

  lower level artists, these publishing credits and that kind of thing, too. So I don't know. The way I think about it is it is getting politer. But yeah, when we're thinking about AI in the industry, it's, it's corporations.

• 51:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then it's automated. That's the thing that gets me. It's like, okay, some artists are handing out some credits as they go through a writing session. Okay. Like, I don't know how you feel about Ricky Martin, but like, yes or no, that happened, right? On the flip side, it's like, okay, I made a song using AI, uploaded it to YouTube. YouTube is like, Drake gets a piece of this.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I don't make Switched On Pop video versions for YouTube because the content ID system is such a pain that I don't want to deal with it because it will demonetize everything. You have to fight everything, even for journalistic purposes. If you use any copyrighted material, which is absolutely fair use, YouTube just has its own government, right? With its own set of ID. It's not actually a copyright issue. It is a set of private contracts between copyright holders with YouTube that has a system that you have to go through that is its own court. And it's just such a pain that I don't deal with it and I'd rather just make a podcast.

• 52:39David Pierce?

  Right. Charlie, you were mentioning before, like, you didn't do this process of making all this stuff in the most sort of like upstanding pay everybody who should weigh. But like, you left a trail that every one of these services knows about, right? And to your point, as they get better at doing things like having deals with record labels and stuff, like, it may be true that that money just like slowly starts to disappear every time you open a new app. And right now, this stuff is happening like in discords. And like, one of the most popular things is like a, it's in a Google Drive and you just upload your file to a Google Drive and then download it from a different Google Drive. And it's like, that is fine and gonna be hard for anyone to figure out how to make money off of.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 53:19David Pierce?

  But eventually, if this stuff gets better as quickly as people think it's going to, it's going to get corporatized too. They're gonna make these same deals. And then all of a sudden, as you make music, you're just gonna leave these like breadcrumbs.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  A number of these services claiming to have watermarks within them so that they could identify automatically with, with systems if you haven't properly licensed.

• 53:37Nilay Patel?

  Do you believe them?

• 53:39Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 53:40Nilay Patel?

  Do you know how like the BBC used to drive around London with a truck that could detect TV antennas if you didn't pay the fee?

• 53:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, man.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  I think the question is, how good do AIs get at tracking those things down for them? Because it's a pain to, to, to enforce. But I think enforcement of copyright will get significantly easier. I mean, there are people making very effective DRM tools that can basically track every misuse of copyright on Instagram. People just, because Instagram is basically a one giant copyright cluster, right?

• 54:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  People are taking people's intellectual property all the time and reposting it without permission. And no one's really enforcing it because it's difficult, but there are companies that can help you do so if you want to.

• 54:17Speaker 04

  But it's also mind numbing because, so I, I put out a song that was a hundred percenter. I wrote it, I did everything on it. I had a hundred percent of the master, a hundred percent of the publishing. I put a TikTok video out using that audio and the audio got removed for copyright.

• 54:30Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  Wait, what?

• 54:31Speaker 04

  I own it.

• 54:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  But this is, so like, all these automated systems have some error rate, right?

• 54:36Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. I totally post my own song.

• 54:38Nilay Patel?

  We'll just take.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Did you have any, did they tell you? Like, what, what did you do wrong?

• 54:42David Pierce?

  You literally violated your own copyright.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 54:44Nilay Patel?

  The estate of Marvin Gaye.

• 54:45Speaker 04

  I forgot to pay myself.

• 54:46Speaker 03

  This is, this is why actually we need AI music. We can't make music anymore because it's so contentious.

• 54:51Nilay Patel?

  But this is what I'm saying, right? You build these systems with this weird understanding of who gets paid and why inside of it. And the answer is because you exist and you might sue us. And then the error rate in the system makes it so new artists can't upload their own music. And it's like, well, that's not the, that's just definitely the, the wrong outcome. You make, I'll give you the, um, the blurred lines example. Like you open an AI drum program and you're like, give me a Marvin Gaye beat.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:19Nilay Patel?

  And the estate of Marvin Gaye is like, that sounds too much like any song. We're shutting you down.

• 55:24Speaker 04

  Where you could prove that AI made it and then you could like, like countersue.

• 55:30Nilay Patel?

  I just think like that's the thing like that's the feeling I get with all this stuff is once you just add this much software to the creative process and the pressure on the software is to do automated enforcement or automated credits or to not do things to protect you it's like oh we've just pushed creativity into one tiny little box.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  I honestly throughout this whole conversation I'm still wondering like what is even the point of using any of these tools because in music at this point there's just no scarcity if you want a sound it exists you can get it for free or cheap if you want professional level tools you can use them with a decent computer there are free tools available to make very high quality music like if you asked us to go do this process again using only a hundred dollar guitar and plugins that were free off the internet we would make a much better song.

• 56:15Speaker 04

  No just BandLab so BandLab.com entirely free and anyone can use it I guarantee you just you just pick loops and you drop them in and manipulate them and make them all fit together I've taught BandLab to eight year old children and they had it like that and it's so so easy to use and it's free and everything is yours it's entirely royalty free.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  So why do we don't need these tools to make music for us unless there's there's definitely like the amateur who's trying to learn or wants to express something I think is certainly interesting but as you know working professional it's kind of like if you want the high quality sound you're not getting it from these things so why even like deal with the future headache that Neil is discussing you put yourself in that world yeah.

• 56:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah this is just at the bottom of the curve though I mean that's kind of right this is the 808 example like it didn't work for that workflow and then the stuff got discarded and then people who were not part of the gate cap system were like we're gonna use it for our own thing and that became a dominant sound like that's the pro case here.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  There's also the like this idea that culture radically shifts and that all we want is completely individualized art which doesn't seem very human but perhaps that happens and then like yeah we all make our own songs that are in our own perfect little world the thing is right now like already there is so much high quality library music you know like like better pharma sounding music that you could go listen to which is like your own special personalized playlist and actually just that's not what people usually want they want to like be in conversation with culture when other people are doing and so. That world doesn't really make sense to me.

• 57:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, and it goes back to something you were saying at the very beginning, which is like, if you, if what you want is an easier way to make like a music bed for your YouTube video. Tools abound and they're getting better very quickly. If you want something that is like good and high quality and will make you feel things and care about things and like be on the radio, we're kind of nowhere still.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  I still think these tools kind of, they're pretty janky most of the time. We just did an episode, Jimmy Buffett recently died, and so we did a little tribute episode to him on Switched on Pop, and I had to make a promo for that episode. And I was like, can I just find Jimmy Buffett-esque music? And I couldn't find anything good on Splice, and I went to some AI tools and was like, make me a Jimmy Buffett song. And I was just like, screw it, this is so annoying. I brought out my acoustic guitar and I just strummed some chords and it sounded way better than anything else I could generate.

• 58:34David Pierce?

  Well, when jimmybuffett.ai launches, we're having you all back.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 58:38David Pierce?

  But until then, thank you all for being here. This was unbelievably fun. I really appreciate it. Charlie, will you play us out?

• 58:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, run it back.

• 58:51David Pierce?

  All right, that's it for the show. Thanks to Charlie, Ian, and Neelai for being here, and thank you as always for listening. AI David, you want to hit the credits again? If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other songs you'd like to hear AI David sing, you can always email us at [email protected], or keep calling the hotline, 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you, and the Meta Vergecast episode is coming soon, so if you have questions about The Verge or The Vergecast, send them in quickly. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back on Wednesday with some more Apple talk and with plenty of new news on Friday. See you then. Rock and roll.

• 59:44Speaker 08

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• 1:00:15Speaker 09

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.