For Anand Roy, making music used to imply jamming along with his progressive rock band based mostly out of Bangalore. Right now, the one-time metalhead now makes music with a easy faucet of a button via his start-up Wubble AI, which permits customers to generate, edit, and customise royalty-free music in over 60 completely different genres.
Roy began Wubble along with his co-founder, Shaad Sufi, in 2024, from a small workplace in Singapore’s central enterprise district. Since then, his platform has generated tunes for world giants like Microsoft, HP, L’Oreal and NBCUniversal. They’re even used on the Taipei Metro, the place AI-generated tunes soothe harried commuters.
Generative AI has been a controversial topic within the artistic business: Artists, musicians and different content material creators fear that firms will practice AI on copyrighted supplies, then in the end automate away the necessity for human creators in any respect.
Roy, nevertheless, thinks Wubble is a method to repair a music sector that’s already damaged. Artists are awarded micro-payments on streaming websites like Spotify, which solely works for essentially the most well-known artists.
Roy spent virtually twenty years at Disney, the place he oversaw operations at its networks and studios in main cities like Tokyo, Mumbai and Los Angeles. He stated his time main Disney’s music group opened his eyes to the tedious technique of music licensing.
“So many licensing offers weren’t going via due to the quantum of paperwork, the quantity of purple tape, and the way costly, advanced and convoluted the complete course of was,” he says. But, the incumbent music corporations “don’t have plenty of motivation to streamline processes.”
Wubble is making an attempt one thing completely different, collaborating instantly with musicians and paying them for the uncooked materials used to coach Wubble’s AI. “If we’re Latino hip hop, we’ll go to a recording studio in Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro, and inform them we want ten hours of Latino music,” Roy says. Wubble then negotiates a deal and gives a one-time fee for his or her work, at charges Roy argues are extra aggressive than different firms providing music streaming companies.
He admits {that a} one-time fee isn’t an ideal resolution, nevertheless, and provides that he’s at present exploring how applied sciences like blockchain can uncover new methods to compensate musicians for his or her assist coaching Wubble’s AI fashions.
David Gunkel, who teaches communication research at Northern Illinois College in Chicago, thinks coaching AI from artist-commissioned materials is a wiser enterprise transfer than simply trawling the net for copyrighted content material.
Manufacturing firms like Disney, Common and Warner Bros., for instance, are suing AI firms like Midjourney and Minimax of copyright infringement, arguing that customers can simply generate pictures and movies of protected characters like Star Wars’s Darth Vader.
“When you’re curating your knowledge units, and compensating and giving credit score to the artists which can be being utilized to coach your mannequin, you received’t end up in a lawsuit,” he explains. “It’s a greater enterprise observe, simply by way of your long-term viability as a industrial actor.”
Textual content-to-speech technology
Wubble at present gives simply instrumental music and audio results, however Roy thinks voice is the following step. By end-January, Roy says his platform will supply AI-generated voiceovers created from written scripts, to cater to shoppers who require narrative-led audio tracks. “So, the complete audio content material workflow for a enterprise might be housed on Wubble,” he concludes proudly.
AI music startups are popping up around the globe, hoping to make use of the highly effective new know-how to make the method of making tunes and songs simpler. Some, like Suno, cater in producing full songs, whereas others like Moises supply instruments for artists.
In Asia, too, Korean AI startup Supertone gives voice synthesis and cloning, utilizing samples to generate new vocal tracks. The startup, based by Kyogu Lee, was acquired by HYBE, the leisure firm behind Okay-pop sensation BTS, and now operates as its subsidiary. Supertone even debuted a totally digital Okay-pop lady group, SYNDI8, in 2024.
At Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore final 12 months, Lee stated he noticed musical artists as “co-creators,” not simply by way of licensing their voices, but additionally asking for his or her assist in refining the know-how.
AI “will democratize the artistic course of, so each creator or artist can experiment with this new know-how to discover and experiment with new concepts,” he advised the viewers.
Roy, from Wubble, additionally sees AI as a method to make it simpler for extra folks to get entangled in music creation.
“Music creation has at all times been a privilege. It’s been the area of those that have the time and assets to study an instrument,” he says. “We consider that each human being ought to be capable of create—and AI permits that now.”
