Fairly Trained - Soundful [PART 3] Ethics of genAI for music

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

May 23, 2024

This article provides a deep dive on Soundful, 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.

Acronyms

DAW - digital audio workstation
TTA - text to audio (more general than music; can include spoken vocals as well as sung vocals & instruments)

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.

Soundful

Descriptions:

Fairly Trained: “Soundful AI helps users generate distinctive studio-quality music. The platform is built for content creators, artists, music producers, brands, and creative agencies looking for the highest creative and sonic quality.”
LinkedIn: “The future of music is now. Empowering Everyone to Make Music and Content.”
Website: “AI Song/MIDI/Loop/Stem/Music Generator. Leverage the power of AI to generate royalty free background music at the click of a button for your videos, streams, podcasts and much more.”
PitchBook: “Developer of artificial intelligence-based music creation software designed to empower everyone to make music and content. The company's platform offers different genres and templates to create music and unlock monetization or worldwide commercial use, enabling artists, music producers and video publishers to produce studio-quality tracks in seconds.”

History & Partnerships

Soundful was founded in 2019. They are privately held and headquartered in San Diego.1 They are estimated to currently have ~22 employees and 1 US patent application, and their last seed round was $3.8m. Their 6 investors include Accenture, Disney, and Microsoft. 2

Soundful began beta in late 2022. A reviewer noted in June 2023: “The sound quality is comparable to high-quality sound libraries—which is to say, it sounds professional but not wildly inventive. … sophisticated, tasteful and fun harmony and arrangements.” 3

Soundful emerged from beta with over half a million users. On Nov. 13, 2023, announced a new Soundful Collabs series featuring AI models trained by working together with famous music producers.4

On May 17, 2024, Soundful became the first AI music generation platform to enable stem downloads directly to Ableton Live (a common DAW). Their user base is now over a million.5

Key Features

Soundful allows users to generate individual music parts (‘stems’) or full pieces of music, based on specifying genre, mood, or artist. Soundful guarantees users that every generated 2-4 minute “preview” track is unique. One distinction flagged by a reviewer is that Soundful “songs are created on an individual note-by-note basis”, vs. stringing loops together and repeating them, which the company believes improves music quality.6

Soundful also offers a sound library of pre-generated “Global Tracks” for use:

as-is, royalty-free, by all Soundful users in their own videos or projects under a non-exclusive license, or
as a basis for a user to generate their own tracks in Soundful.

Uses can download their creations as MP3s, lossless WAV files, or multi-track stems.

Training Data & Technology

Soundful’s FAQ states “Our AI is not trained on previously copyrighted music but instead based on music theory and foundation provided by our in-house production team.” They have “a team of professional producers that source all of its sounds before running them through a human-aided AI. The AI writes the song and produces each one uniquely.” 7

The announcements on Soundful Collabs indicated that “Producers and artists involved in training Soundful's AI models will receive 80% of the revenues earned from the collaboration, with Soundful keeping the remaining 20%.”8

Use of artist names as prompts is potentially concerning from an ethics perspective (called out by Cherie Hu in ref [39]). We must assume, given Soundful’s Fairly Trained certification, that they don’t use artists’ music without permission or as part of the TTA process. Perhaps they map common artist names to configuration parameters they support (e.g. genre, mood) and then use those inputs to prompt their AI?

Ownership, Usage Rights, & Pricing

Soundful retains copyright by default. They offer 3 plans for individual users.9 The names of these licenses and plans appear to have changed over time. Mappings below are deduced from content on various pages of their site.

“Personal” license & “Free forever” (aka “Standard”) plan - $0/month:
- Allows users to access 25+ free styles and download 10 full tracks per month.
- Audio & tracks may be used “in personal and non-commercial projects” with credit.
- Soundful retains ownership for tracks created by free users.
- It is not clear if free users can pay extra for stems or for copyright to a track.
“Music Creator” license & “Premium” (aka “Content Creator”) plan - $5/month:
- Allows users to access 150+ styles and Premium content, including Soundful Collabs models (with payment of an extra fee for downloads of finished tracks).
- Can download 100 tracks per month; option to purchase stem pack bundles.
- Generated audio & tracks can be used for commercial projects and music releases as an individual.
- Tracks can be used perpetually and without credit in commercial projects and releases (including revenue-generating works), with a cap of 100k reached users/month.
- Copyright can be purchased for $50/track, which includes a stem pack.
“Music Creator” license & “Pro” (aka “Music Creator Plus”) plan - $120/year - All benefits of Music Creator plan and license, plus:
- Audio and tracks can be used “across all means of creative works and distribution”, with no cap on reached users.
- Allows 300 downloads/month and adds 20 stem packs/month
- Adds API access and use of tracks in apps & games.

Soundful also offers an Enterprise license across 3 Business tiers ranging from $50-$250/month and a ‘tailored’ Enterprise plan.

It’s worth noting that although tracks on Soundful are “unique”, they are not necessarily exclusive to the user, depending on the user’s plan.

“Soundful Global Tracks, Loops, and any created tracks under the Standard and Content Creator plans are non-exclusive, meaning other users can also use the same sounds as you without infringing on any future songs or projects you create using that track and vice versa. Tracks belonging to active Music Creator Plus users or created tracks whose copyrights have been purchased are under an exclusive license.” 10 [Note: Music Creator Plus appears to be an old name for the Pro plan.]

❓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