Fairly Trained - Lemonaide [PART 3] Ethics of genAI for music
Looking for an ethical tool that uses generative AI for creating music? Check out this profile of Lemonaide, a genAI music company that's certified as Fairly Trained.
This article provides a deep dive on Lemonaide, one of the companies working on generative AI for music who have been certified as Fairly Trained. It supports the upcoming PART 3 in our 8-part series “Unfair Use? Ethics of generative AI for music”, announced in this INTRODUCTION post on .
This article series is not a substitute for legal advice and is meant for general information only.
Acronyms
DAW - digital audio workstation
Business and feature information is summarized from the company’s websites; LinkedIn; Crunchbase; PitchBook, where available; and publicly available reviews of one or more of these tools. Links are in the References section.
Lemonaide
Descriptions:
Fairly Trained: “Lemonaide Music is an artist-focused music technology company that helps musicians find new ways to write, produce, and create, while keeping the artist front and center.”
LinkedIn: “generative AI to help musicians create more of what they love”
Website: “Values: Artist focused music technology company that helps musicians find new ways to write, produce, and create, while keeping the artist front and center. Today, we are focused on doing this through Generative AI, ethically.”
History & Partnerships
Lemonaide was founded in 2023 and appear to be globally distributed, with ~5 employees.1 They are not listed in PitchBook or Crunchbase, and appear to be a private startup. They were originally known as Lemonaid.2 A headquarters location is not listed - best guess is USA (3 of 5 staff are based in the US).
Lemonaide has a “strategic partnership” with BeatStars.3 Beatstars4 is a “digital production marketplace that allows music producers to license, sell, and giveaway free beats.” One source indicates that BeatStars users have free access to Lemonaide under this partnership.5 Another indicates that initially Lemonaide was available only to BeatStars customers under specific paid tiers (Marketplace and Professional Plans), and was not available outside of BeatStars6 (it is now, though).
Their tool runs as a Mac or Windows application, or in a web browser. Their site states that Lemonaide has “helped start over 40,000 songs” as of 2024-02-01.
Key Features
Lemonaide’s stated aim is “to only help producers, never replace. We intentionally draw the line as idea starters - and will never plan to output full songs.” They present their Seeds tool as “the ultimate melodic idea generator. We believe it will push you out of your comfort zone, and plant seeds to your next big hit.”
What this means in practice: they generate MIDI “seeds” that can be either pulled into a DAW or manipulated inside the tool. Their melody algorithm is called Lemonaide Seeds. According to their FAQ, Lemonaide Seeds is a “melody MIDI generator that outputs 4-bar loops that are intended to be dragged into your DAW of choice. You can generate Melody+Chords together, Chords, or just Melodies. You can interact with our state-of-the-art A.I. algorithms through selecting Key/Scales, and Moods.”
Training Data & Technology
Their site says “We worked with producers we know and love, with consent, to train every single line of data in our algorithm. None of our data is randomly scraped from the web.” This is consistent with their Fairly Trained certification.
Ownership, Usage Rights, & Pricing
When known as Lemonaid, they offered a free plan with paid plans starting at $29.7 Lemonaide currently offers a free 3-day trial and two paid plans: 8
“Lemonaide Lite” - $4.99/mo - 50 credits which do not roll over,
“Lemonaide Pro” - $9.99/mo - 150 credits which do roll over, plus 8-bar generations and use of the “bridge” which allows you to “bring your own sounds”
Both paid plans have access to their Seeds Melody Algorithm (Melody and Chords, Chords, Melodies) for unlimited generations. Credits are used for saving and exporting. They state that their pricing works out to < $0.05 per melodic idea (vs. $1+ for each melodic idea in a standard MIDI tool). 9
Their site does not address whether users or Lemonaide hold ownership or copyright on the generated MIDIs. No restrictions on commercial use are mentioned; however, Lemonaide doesn’t generate whole songs, so this may be moot. All generated MIDIs are royalty-free for users who create them, though.
❓If you’re curious about the ethical posture of the big, well-known firms or smaller players who are not yet certified as Fairly Trained, subscribe (for FREE) to be notified of our upcoming posts (the parent PART 3 article, a post on major un-certified companies, a post on other un-certified companies) and the remainder of the series:
REFERENCES
Links to upcoming articles
(coming soon)
Analysis page on 9 genAI music companies who are already certified as Fairly Trained (including this one)
PART 3 - top-level article on Who, What, & When in ethics of genAI for music
![[PART 2] Unfair use? GenAI music ETHICAL RISKS & CHALLENGES](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff43d4635-1899-4964-b093-ced7dda4c29e_1600x1066.jpeg)
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