r/Music • u/ebradio • Jul 21 '25

music Spotify Publishes AI-Generated Songs From Dead Artists Without Permission

https://www.404media.co/spotify-publishes-ai-generated-songs-from-dead-artists-without-permission/
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u/Abombasnow Jul 22 '25

It's been a bad concern for awhile.

Look at Jimi Hendrix's family. They've been claiming since the 1990s he has "so many albums just waiting to be released, so much unheard material" but nothing ever comes out.

Or for people who know of the Japanese heavy metal band X Japan, their deceased guitarist hide had a solo career as well, with his family claiming the same thing about "many new albums" and nothing ever coming out. Given how much the family has whored his image already, 100% they're going to AI generate "music" under his name when it's more culturally "palatable" to do so.

Guarantee you very soon there will be an absolute spitfire of new "music" from the family.

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u/ZombiePartyBoyLives Jul 22 '25

I have proof that Udio's model has been trained on Jimi. Cream too. I use it as a hobbyist and amateur lyricist to help me improve (and I also feel that there needs to be people who love music who know what the apps are capable of). Sometimes the robot spazzes out and ignores all the prompts. One night, I got a batch of first verses that was all '60s Psychedelic Rock--all with approximations of famous voices. When it does stuff like that, I give up and try again another day, but I still have that one saved in a folder.

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u/Abombasnow Jul 22 '25

Moody Blues and Herman's Hermits too.

9 times out of 10 "make a 60s pop song" is one of them.

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u/ZombiePartyBoyLives Jul 22 '25

In my case, the prompts weren't even close to the output. But yeah, there are definitely "trigger" words. If you prompt "1970s Southern Rock", you will get some approximation of Gregg Allman, "1980s Jangle Rock" gives you REM. The robot really loves Bjork too, but I think that is some kind of prompt combo instead of just a style/genre. Say the magic words and conjure an Icelandic Pixie Diva!

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u/Abombasnow Jul 22 '25

The worst part of how they do the whole deal is that it's SO compressed and layered there's no way to break anything down to stems. Which means no isolated vocals. But even if you had them, the vocals are so overly compressed and layered in a permanent harmony even if you tell it not to that it's not like you can have another AI voice go over it (i.e.: how Frank Sinatra performed Bad Romance by Lady Gaga) because you need clean stems for that or it'll sound like garbled crap.

We have a lot of data on Beatles songs, it's not like we don't have a billion ways to get their stems, why the hell does a prompt about a Beatles-styled song CHURN OUT Moody Blues OR Herman's Hermits?!

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u/ZombiePartyBoyLives Jul 22 '25

Udio gives you four stems, but it generates sounds in aggregate rather than individual tracks--which is why it's difficult to break them apart. I've had varying degrees of success using Fadr to break the vocals stem down further in order to replace the lead vocals/harmonies with my own, but there's almost always some bleed-over. Even if there's no harmony, it's usually a double lead--which has been pretty standard for Pop/Rock since the '60s--unless the singer is a total powerhouse or it's a quiet and intimate number.

I'm guessing Udio generates stems in the aggregate bc it would be too intensive to process individual tracks (although I haven't messed around much with the Clarity parameter to see if that would make a difference). I think generally you can't prompt for a specific band due to legal liability, but my hobby partner experimented with using a chatbot to generate Udio prompts by asking it to describe a specific song, and then editing it for brevity and feeding it to the robot. I guess it worked somewhat, but neither of us has intentions of ripping off other artists like that. It was more out of curiosity to see if it would work or not.