Production Music Composers: The Robots Are Coming for You
Not all composers are writing songs. There are untold thousands who spend their days and nights coming up with scores for movies and TV shows. Others specialize in production music, material that might end up in a commercial, on a website or in a corporate video. It’s hugely labour-intensive stuff but can provide a nice, steady income.
But now the robots want that job.
A British AI company called Jukedeck has come up with something it calls “responsive music software” which, they say, can write production music just like one of us meatbags. Theoretically, this could provide a steady stream of royalty-free music for use online. Music Ally has this report.
Anyone could use Jukedeck’s tool to create music: choosing a genre, mood, tempo, instruments and track length, then giving the resulting song a name and – if it’s suitable for your soundtrack needs – paying as little as $0.99 for a royalty-free licence, or $199 to buy the copyright outright.
Music Ally picked Jukedeck as a startup to watch in 2016, and its CEO Ed Newton-Rex appeared at the AI music event we ran with UK industry body the BPI that November, claiming that “AI will change the music industry and lots of other industries a lot more than the internet did”.
That kind of view is being talked about a lot more in 2017, with startups including Amper Music, Popgun, AI Music, Groov.ai, Rave and AIVA as well as the efforts of Google (with its Magenta project) and Sony (with its Flow Machines).
We wondered how things were progressing with Jukedeck, which has been relatively quiet this year. Newton-Rex says that its team has been hard at work.
