Fairly Trained - SOMMS.AI [PART 3] Ethics of genAI for music

Looking for an ethical tool that uses generative AI for creating music? Check out this profile of SOMMS.ai (now MusicalAI), a genAI music company that's certified as Fairly Trained.

May 23, 2024

This article provides a deep dive on SOMMS.AI (now MusicalAI), 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 6 'P's in AI Pods.

This article series is not a substitute for legal advice and is meant for general information only.

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.

SOMMS.AI

Description:

Fairly Trained and website: “Custom AI model training, generation & attribution for record labels, publishers, artists, producers, songwriters, distributors, digital instrument makers, sonic branding agencies and enterprise music companies.”
LinkedIn: “Artificial Music Intelligence for Artists and Enterprises”
PitchBook: “Developer of an artificial intelligence (AI) based platform designed to explore new creative possibilities in music production. The company's platform allows one to train custom artificial intelligence (AI) models using their music, musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) files, and loops to generate sounds, songs, and musical compositions, enabling the music industry to enhance their brand identity and stay competitive in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.”

History & Partnerships

According to PitchBook, SOMMS.AI was founded in 2016; however, Crunchbase and their LinkedIn profile say the company was founded in 2023.1 They are headquartered in Los Angeles CA, and the site states that their product is “jointly made in Canada & the U.S.A”. They are listed as privately held and in the Accelerator phase, with 1 investor (Techstars) and ~5 employees. 2 3

Key Features

SOMMS.AI is a platform supporting traceability and “consent, control, credit, and compensation” for artists. It enables musicians to train custom AI models exclusively on their own music, and then get an “attribution report for all generative outputs, enabling artist recognition and royalty splits”.

The site says that users can (perhaps ‘will be able to’ is more accurate?) train models using their own music or samples and generate sounds from text, audio, or MIDI.

Training Data & Technology

Their site states “Our custom models are built only on our clients’ music and every generation includes accurate attribution.” This is consistent with their Fairly Trained certification.

For technically-minded folks, the SOMMS.AI site offers a link to a paper describing how their traceability system works.4 However, the link does not appear to work 🙁. (If you manage to track the paper down, please share a link 🙂)

Ownership, Usage Rights, & Pricing

As of May 21, 2024, there is no pricing page, and no information is available on the SOMMS.AI site about product offerings or pricing plans. The only option offered is to contact the company to schedule a demo.

❓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 and ENDNOTES

Links to upcoming 6 'P's in AI Pods 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