Category: Artificial intelligence
Creative AI may be the most disruptive technology for the music business since the Napster era of piracy, forcing us to rethink traditional industry notions of creativity, ownership, attribution, and skill development in real time.
We are studying how creative AI impacts every step of the industry life cycle — from the initial steps of creation and ideation, to marketing, communication, distribution, and monetization.

We’ve been pondering when music will get its “Midjourney moment” — namely, when high-quality song creation will become as easy for the everyday user as clicking a button.

How deepfake songs actually work, how we got here, and what kinds of battles to expect moving forward.

Generative music AI models may be upending attribution as we know it in the music business.

Several tools exist today that allow artists and brands alike to generate high-quality, convincing AI voices with just minutes of training data.

Hint: Yes, it really is about the music.

Over the last few months, three teams working on the bleeding edge of music AI technology led private workshops for the Water & Music community, as part of our Season 3 research on creative AI for the music industry.

Understand how music-industry stakeholders are currently leveraging and thinking about creative AI, including cross-industry patterns in AI-related needs and sentiments.

Addressing artists’ legal questions about creative AI and ownership, through the lens of AI tools’ terms of use.

A comprehensive, first-of-its-kind framework for understanding the music AI tooling landscape, including greater transparency into tech stacks, use cases, and business models for all stakeholders in the music AI value chain.

A comprehensive, first-of-its-kind framework for understanding the music AI tooling landscape, including greater transparency into tech stacks, use cases, and business models for all stakeholders in the music AI value chain.

10 new AI models for music and audio generation have been unveiled in the last month alone. Some of these are home-grown models from anonymous contributors; others are part of master’s theses; still others have come from AI research groups at big-tech juggernauts like Google and ByteDance.

Last week, our community got an inside look at bleeding-edge music AI tools from Harmonai, the open-source music AI arm of Stability.ai, and Pollinations, a company focused on creating more accessible interfaces for existing AI models.