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

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

May 23, 2024

This article provides a deep dive on Tuney, 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.

Descriptions:

Fairly Trained: “Tuney builds AI tools that make music more accessible and fun for all creatives.”
LinkedIn: “Tuney builds tools to edit existing music, produce remixes and generate new tracks for media pros working with music and audio.”
Website: “Make & edit music with artist-powered AI. Generate, produce, edit and remix music for any creative project.”
PitchBook: “Developer of a creative tool and music platform intended to offer copyright-safe, production-quality music ready for commercial use.”

History & Partnerships

Tuney was founded in 2020 and is privately held (in seed phase).1 They are headquartered in Los Angeles, CA and are reported to have 6 investors and ~9 employees. 2

Their site does not mention partnerships per se, but it does show logos for Bacardi, Coca-Cola, Create Music Group, Songfinch, Universal Music Group, and WPP.

Key Features

Major use cases for Tuney appears to be sonic branding and background music for videos and digital works, in addition to creating songs. Tuney offers 3 major features:

BeatSwap - music replacement, i.e. a way to replace a vocal track or beat which is not usable (e.g. possibly illegal, or for which the rights have expired)
Music Library
APIs - FlexTrack and Music

Training Data & Technologies

Tuney has 3 patents in progress. From PitchBook:

“The company's proprietary, patented algorithm powers tools to generate music, remix existing music, and rework songs to match different content formats, and its application programming interface (API) powers content automation for large companies, enabling content creators to avoid music searches and low-quality stock music and develop tools to edit existing music, produce remixes and generate new tracks for media professionals working with music across related verticals.” 3

The Tuney site FAQ says the API is not yet released publicly but is available, and that their tools combine “artist made stems with generative musical contents”. Their FAQ states that they:

combine artist-created sounds, including samples and loops, to create music
only use human-created sounds and only material “we own or license”, and
“commission sample packs and loop libraries from producers, and also hire musicians to record original material for our Sounds database”.

All of this is consistent with their Fairly Trained certification.

To protect against misuse, Tuney cautions users that they use technology to recognize popular music by Content ID, and limit what can be done with it.

Ownership, Usage Rights, & Pricing

According to the FAQ, music generated on Tuney is “owned by Tuney and licensed to paying users for various uses”. They indicate that they plan to allow partial ownership in the future and support release to streaming services (e.g. Spotify).

Tuney’s FAQ states that they offer a “freemium tier” which allows free access to generate new music, with a monthly download limit. However, pricing information was not posted on their site, and page https://tuney.io/pricing (which other sites reference as their source) is no longer a valid link. Clicking the “Try for free” link brought up a registration page asking for personal information but not providing any information on available plans.

The plans they appeared to offer as of Aug. 2023 were documented on two external sites. 4 5 A small discount appeared to be available for yearly plans. All plans offered access to “1000s of tracks”.

“Free” - $0 - 3 monthly downloads for personal use
“Creator” - $9.99/month - unlimited downloads for social media and digital content (e.g. YouTube and podcasts)
“Pro” - $19.99/month - Creator plus commercial use (paid ads and client work)
“Pro+” - price negotiable - unlimited downloads for all media except TV and radio; preferred pricing for broadcast usage

Given the missing pricing page and lack of clarity around plans, contacting the company to inquire would be wise before registering “for free”.

❓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