What interested me here was the idea of using my voice and new tools in service of expression, not instead of it. This project respects the artist's voice, the artist's choices, and the artist's ownership. I grew up watching my parents create wonderful dreams that were owned by other people. ElevenLabs makes it possible for anyone to be a creator and owner. That matters.
Before the holiday, we were talking a lot about A.I. music. And then when I was listening to the new Bruno Mars song, all I could think about was A.I. It's called I Just Might. It is a rich and lustrous homage to the soul pop of the early 1970s. Obviously, you're thinking about the Jackson 5. It's gloss. It's note-perfect.
The Eleven Album aims to showcase "how artists can use AI to expand their creative range while maintaining full authorship and commercial rights," according to ElevenLabs. ElevenLabs is using the album to market its Eleven Music generator and Iconic Voices Marketplace platforms it launched last year, both of which are cleared for commercial use. ElevenLabs says that every artist on the project "produced a fully original track that blends their signature sound with the capabilities of Eleven Music,"
When songwriter Patrick Irwin moved to Nashville last year, he was entering a lottery. Each day hundreds of sessions take place where writers create a song demo to pitch to a publisher. Publishers then share those songs with labels and managers, who may share those songs with the artists. Even if a major country star records ("cuts") the song, it still takes a stroke of luck for that song to become a No. 1 hit.
At a time when many AI music projects are accused of unethical training protocols and practices towards the artistic community, KLAY has, from the beginning, taken a unique path, working in partnership with the music industry to pioneer a new active listening model designed to enhance both human creativity and the consumer experience. The platform reimagines listening with immersive, interactive tools powered by KLAY's Large Music Model, trained entirely on licensed music.
If you want insight into just how worried VCs (and Silicon Valley, generally) are over legal challenges to AI training on copyrighted material, look no further than AI music site Suno. Suno, which allows anyone to create AI-generated songs through prompts, announced on Wednesday that it has raised a $250 million Series C round at a $2.45 billion post-money valuation. The round was led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Nvidia's venture arm NVentures, as well as Hallwood Media, Lightspeed, and Matrix.
The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence. This isn't a trick - it's a mirror.