11 uncertified companies [Unfair Use? series, PART 3]
Summary of 11 uncertified companies who are working on generative AI for music. Includes some product announcements, key features, and a few insights on ethics of genAI for music.
This article overviews 11 companies working on generative AI for music whose offerings have not yet been certified as Fairly Trained. These are companies we will not be deep-diving on in Part 4 and beyond.
This post supports PART 3 in our 8-part series on ethics of generative AI for music on 6 ‘P's in AI Pods. Subscribe to be notified when new articles are published (it’s FREE!)
This article is not a substitute for legal advice and is meant for general information only.
Summaries for 11 uncertified tool providers
Our PART 3 article provides the big-picture view of 85 companies offering AI-based tools or platforms in this musical melody space. This set of 11 was selected in mid-2024 from the uncertified companies not already profiled.
These profiles are not as in-depth as the others. These pages are meant to provide insights into why these companies are significant enough to review but weren’t chosen for deeper dives.
Of the 11, two (Amper Music and Beatbot/SplashPro) were found to be obsolete and no longer available to end users. They are covered in the end notes of this page for completeness, since they still show up in some recent articles.
A third, WavTool, was profiled briefly, but has now quietly “gone offline” (confirmed as of Dec. 30, 2024):
Note: Meta has a partnership with Shutterstock that allows them to train on Shutterstock Music (i.e., Amper Music) songs. (TechCrunch ref, 2023-06-12)
The other 8 uncertified tool providers are summarized on individual pages, one post per company:
AIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist)
Stability AI (HarmonAI, Stable Audio)
What’s Next?
This profile summary post is the last big piece in PART 3. PART 4 is coming up next. Subscribe for FREE to be notified automatically of new posts and support our work:
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REFERENCES
See this “Ethical AI for Music” page for links to all posts related to this series, as well as bonus articles mentioned above on voice cloning and other music-related topics.
Amper Music summary:
Amper Music (Shutterstock)
Amper Music was subsequently acquired by Shutterstock in Nov. 2020. The company no longer exists, and the music creation tools are no longer available to end users.
The Shutterstock page for Amper Music says “You can now access over 100,000 exclusive tracks pre-generated by Amper Music directly from Shutterstock.” All 107,190 royalty-free music tracks by Amper Music are “premium” in Shutterstock.
Amper Music was founded in 2014 and headquartered in NYC. However, Amper’s beta music creation tool was shut down on Oct. 25, 2018.
Description from PitchBook: “Developer of music composition tools designed to help people create and customize original music. The company's tools help to select a genre and set length, make music through AI, edit and tweak as per requirement, thereby enabling users to instantly have original music for their content without the need for any prior experience in composition.”
Amper Music was popular; it is mentioned in many lists, and continued to appear in comparative reviews well into 2023 . It enabled “users to create and customize original music by leveraging over one million individual audio samples recorded by musicians on thousands of unique instruments” plus “an expansive dataset of musical composition algorithms”. (Quoted texts are from the acquisition announcement page.)
Many reviews gave Amper Music favorable ratings for ease of use in creating tracks and integrating with DAWs, e.g. this one from The Verge in 2018. “Amper, on the other hand, has an interface that is ridiculously simple. All you have to do is go to the website and pick a genre of music and a mood. That’s it. You don’t have to know code or composition or even music theory in order to make a song with it. It builds tracks from prerecorded samples and spits out actual audio, not MIDI. From there, you can change the tempo, the key; mute individual instruments, or switch out entire instrument kits to shift the mood of the song its made. This audio can then be exported as a whole or as individual layers of instruments (known as “stems”). Stems can then be further manipulated in DAWs like Ableton or Logic.”
Amper was the first AI platform that artist Taryn Southern used when she began working on her 2018 AI-based album. (She also worked with IBM Watson Beat and Google Magenta.)
References for Amper Music:
2018-09-20, Amper Music beta music composer shut down in 2018: “Amper Music to shut down its beta AI-music composer”, by Stuart Dredge / Musically
2020-11-11, “Shutterstock Announces Acquisition of Amper Music”
2022-06-22 “Composing with artificial intelligence: how AI can help you write music”, MusicRadar MusicRadar
2023-06-13 “AI Music Making Is Here and This Is How You Do It”, Fadr (uncredited)
2023-07-07 “9 AI Music Generators You Need to Know About” Analytics India, K L Krithika
2023-08 https://www.compsmag.com/vs/amper-music-vs-aiva/, Paula Stark / Compsmag
2023-08-25 “Top 12 AI Music Generators in 2024” Analytics Vidhya
2023-12-14 “16 Best AI Music Tools In 2024” Musicfy, Arib Khan
2024-02-19 “A Complete Guide to AI Music Generators” audiocipher, Ezra Sandzer-Bell
2024-03-01 “9 Best AI Music Generators (March 2024)” Unite AI, Alex McFarland
2024-03-27 “Top Best 10 AI Music Composers in 2024” Wondershare, Benjamin Arango
2024-05-22 Top 3 AI Music Platforms and Tools | Soundful Soundful (uncredited)
2024-05-22 10 AI tools for music production - Hypebot
2024-05-22 Amper Music Review 2024: What It Is, How to Use It & Is It Worth It? (aihungry.com)
Beatbot (Splash Pro) summary:
Splash Music renamed Beatbot to Splash Pro to avoid confusion with the robotic pool cleaner. It launched Splash Pro in June 2023 as their “flagship AI music service”. Their website said “With Splash Pro, you can describe the music you want to make with a text prompt and our AI will compose a track that you can customize with lyrics and AI vocals”.
Splash Pro also offered an option to “train a custom voice model using your own voice”. It was a successor to Splash Music and Beatmaker, which were shut down in January 2024. Splash Pro has now also shut down. (FAQ link).
Splash Pro shutdown: “Shutterstock Announces Acquisition of Amper Music”, 2020-11-11
Splash Pro references:
2022-06-22 “Composing with artificial intelligence: how AI can help you write music”, MusicRadar / Computer Music
2023-12-14 “16 Best AI Music Tools In 2024” Musicfy, Arib Khan
2024-02-19 “A Complete Guide to AI Music Generators” audiocipher, Ezra Sandzer-Bell
2024-03-15 "Splash Music AI Generator Shuts Down, Pivots Back Into Video Games" audiocipher, Ezra Sandzer-Bell
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