Introduction
Finding the perfect track to sample or even listen to is sometimes impossible. If you’re in the mood for some soulful jazz but with a piano backing, that’s going to be pretty hard to find and will take quite a bit of research, and sometimes, you don’t have the time for that. That’s where MusicLM comes in.
MusicLM: What Is It?
MusicLM is Google’s latest invention, an AI-powered music generator. Trained on a database of 280,000 hours of music to learn to generate music for specific text prompts, MusicLM is the next step in music.
It uses a large dataset of unlabelled music from MusicCaps, which uses rich text descriptions by humans and audio clips from Google’s Audioset.
It essentially takes pieces of sound and takes the words in the caption to represent meaning, thus responding in a cohesive manner to user input. While the AI is still a bit shaky, we expect it to improve over time. Currently, the vocal ability is practically nonexistent, and as the piece progresses, the instrumental quickly falls into disarray.
Overall, while it is still a baby step, it does have the makings to revolutionize the music industry as we know it.
How Do You Use MusicLM?
MusicLM is currently not available to the public. Anyone who would like to use it can sign up for the waitlist. However, nowadays, the waitlist is prioritizing reviewers and media personnel to get the word out about AI.
Who Can Use MusicLM?
This is a tricky question. It’s hard to say, given the state of the AI right now, but it is anticipated that both consumers and music producers will be using MusicLM.
Casual listeners can enjoy a custom music piece specifically tailored to what they want to listen to at that moment. At the same time, producers can easily generate beats and instrumentals to go with vocals.
It might also be incredibly handy for upcoming artists in the industry who work with low budgets since production costs will be massively reduced thanks to the AI.
What Impact Can It Have On The Industry?
Again, hard to say how early it is, but it can go either way. Either it reduces demand for artist-produced music, and we see a rise in AI-generated music, or we see the Music Industry booming like never before due to how simple production becomes.
However, this is more of a long-term change in trends as currently, AI is still in its beginning stages and won’t be ready to challenge an industry anytime soon.
Alternatives
Considering that this is a completely new AI model, there aren’t any alternatives available at the moment that can rival the extent of MusicLM’s vast capabilities. However, for a more toned-down version, Riffusion is an excellent alternative that functions similarly to MusicLM.
