ElevenLabs Music v2.5(elevenmusic.io) |
ElevenLabs Music v2.5(elevenmusic.io) |
I'm not against some AI uses, I use LLMs myself where it makes sense, but music is one of the things that we were told AI would free up all our time to do!!
Why not? The experience of working with a freelancer for a piece of creative art is more or less like prompting except they take longer to reply, understand better most of the time, write/spell worse, but produce way better results, especially after two/three iterations ("prompts").
Hiring someone is work and takes effort, and can take a few tries. People, especially solo creators, generally don't want to bother, and are excited at what they can now do without requiring people to fill in skills they haven't acquired. This ironically goes for creatives as well!
I think it's been telling past week, when Astra demonstrated a step change in 3D modeling/art abilities. I have a few friends who are indie game devs, and who had been excited about AI because it allows them to create without requiring programmers all of a sudden. And they reacted with dismay to Astra - like what many programmers were feeling two years ago. But previously they had not quite been able to empathize and were in no way hiding their enthusiasm about making games without being handicapped by programmer inavailability.
This won't replace pop stars; those remain analog because they sell better. This is why South Korea for example went all-in on the idol system of kpop: South Korea had pervasive broadband before most other markets, so when MP3 came along physical album sales crashed over night. Music companies shifted to the most analog product they could think of: People. (I'm almost literally quoting J.Y. Park.)
It might well replace the session musician you hire to sing the demo tape that's delivered to those pop stars to model their performance on, though.
The moral debate also isn't entirely new to music production, with software emulations having replaced many physical instruments and having put plenty of instrument or gear makers out of work.
Counter-example: This is pre-AI, but I also have a friend who runs a very successful small company in a niche he's all but cornered. When he started he needed a programmer, and he found this almost-no-cost kid working from his parents' home in a small village in Argentina on a platform like Fiverr or something. It worked out so well he offered to make him a 50% partner, and now they're both incredibly well off and the kid, now in his 30s, is the richest man in his village. This could be you, but chances are you'll give the money to Sama or ElevenLabs because it's the path of least resistance.
While the advisability of this particular project is up for debate, I do think it's something that could only exist with an API like eleven's.
I'd still do this again however, because I really enjoyed the feeling of the community of people contributing our wedding and all the little stories attached. "I prompted ElevenLabs for this!" wouldn't be a memory; a fellow human spending some hours of their life on making this for us and what lead to it is.
There's often value in the provenance of things.
So yes, there'll be demand, no people won't often know it.
https://melodysechochamber.bandcamp.com/track/some-time-alon... (not in French language)
https://endlessfloods.bandcamp.com/track/rites-futurs (French language)
I think it's a bit unfair to draw the line here. Some of the most memorable music in my life has been from video games and I'd hate to lose the human touch here just as much as I'd hate to lose the human touch at live shows.
DOOM 2016, FTL, the Donkey Kong Country games, Mega Man and the Mega Man X series - and of course anything Koji Kondo's done - just to mention a few off the top of my head. I've never really been the type to listen to game music outside the context of a game (unless I've got a particularly bad earworm), but man, I do appreciate good game music.
> we were told AI would free up all our time to do!!
You were told you'd do it for your soul, not money, so the AI can't block it. And your specific religion might not even codify that AI assistance kills the soul ("it's just a tool"), so there is no this downside either.
But, I'm generally open minded to new things, and I won't claim I hold some absolute truths here, so if anyone heard anything generated that feels like it really pushes some horizon and actually innovates, creates something new or similar, please link it so I could hear it too and I promise I'll hear it with an open mind! :)
In my experience they are inexplicably excited by how easy it is to make something shitty.
Not everyone is a born musician, just like not everyone is a born writer, sprinter or mountain climber. But it takes a certain kind of person to hit the "easy" button and still feel like they accomplished something.
Every time a barrier drops (samplers, synths, autotune, GarageBand, sample packs) this argument gets made and it is partly right. Plenty of what gets made on our platform is complete slop but if your only contribution to a song was a "make a pop song" prompt that's what you deserve. You are right that nobody was ever short of music - but many people are short of a way to make it so we build for them.
Example: This one is easily a replacement for people who listen to linkin park type music passively: https://elevenmusic.io/tracks/6aa1ca95740e34b282c33b0a Well except the vocal only pre-drop part, that was horrendous lyrical flow from the clanker.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/EDM/comments/1mq3s5p/just_noticed_t...
Here is my first attempt: http://rochus-keller.ch/Diverses/Polyphonic_Threshold_1.mp3
And here are some Suno v5 tracks with the same prompt for comparison: https://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1428
All in all, Suno still has much better musicality (or at least had in version 5), but the sound quality of elevenmusic is clearly better.
> (d) License to Your Content and NILV. You hereby grant to ElevenLabs a license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, make available, communicate to the public, publicly perform, display, and use your Uploaded Music and Input (including your name, image, likeness, voice rights and other indicia of your persona that may be embodied in your Uploaded Music or Input (collectively, “NILV”)) and your Output, in each case, to provide the Services (including the trust and safety features therein), to promote and improve the Services, and to develop and improve our other services and products. Such license shall be…
Cool presentation, but who signed off on this?
To be fair, there are technical considerations. Like, technically, nobody in charge of these companies gives a shit about misleading people.
Something must have happened here, miscommunication between departments so the blog post authors/owners and whoever made the actual music generation missed some update in-between when they made this and the release. If it's truly that the model chose not to follow passed lyrics/hallucination, and they still released this, I'd be lost for words.
Text: You have rights to what you make.
Music: You own what you make.
Naming is hard!
[1]https://elevenmusic.io/blog/introducing-muse [2]https://about.fb.com/news/2026/09/introducing-muse-personal-...
Then I got the music, which promises Unlimited lossless downloads for Pro tier, whereas the text says only 400 per month! Isn't this false advertising?
I made some here with our last model: https://elevenmusic.io/artists/elevenmusic-spaces
It’s almost like dj but now you’re not just picking tracks of a similar theme , you choose a theme , and the rest of the music bands . Wow .
I am more interested in knowing what this will bring in the future. This is bigger than their 2.5 or whatever version.
the idea that we can have something that so deeply ingrained into my practice as a human just kind of tossed out there easily as if it's no thing at all,
with no real cultural context, no material situation in history, no connection to a place or a time, denuded of anything that would make mark it as art of a time or place, or even of a specific individual person much less of some localized scene, work created without any specific need being filled to be immediately and unconsciously forgotten.
In my life I have come to understand that almost all the things I -like- about music and my practices of it might seem so marginal to the work-in-itself as to be inconsequential:
this band played this song on this day this way because this person heard that guy play it, and then they played it in these clubs for a while, and it was recorded and someone over there liked it and that's why "Mighty Might Bosstones".
Like, for instance,
remembering the Slim Richey chainsaw statue in the Starlight bar in Terrlingua and recalling how he replaced Karen Abrahams in the Jitterbug Vipers and wishing that I'd gone and played that gig for $30 in Austin with her and Richie Bowden when I could have, and then thinking how I'll never get to play with Augie Myer or Jon Inmon either and then understanding that the JV are why Dr Sick of the some dumb throwback band brings coked up New Orleans musicians to a last-Sunday concert at the Kerrville Folk Festival, and knowing that the fact I have played on that stage and stage managed both those bands sutures me into a history and a community far larger that I can fully understand much less put into something intelligible to other folks who haven't stood with a giant family tree of musicians on stages smaller than drum risers.
The idea that you can make "music" totally a-historically, ex nihlo, and some folks would listen to it and not be able to taste the difference or even understand the weight of what they are saying when they say "this is that, this dumb shit is the same as what all yall do".
That's what I hate the most.
It's like they've invented zombies (in the 1932 film sense) and are proud of that instead of horrified, and I find it repulsive.
I sometimes wish I believed in god so I could say if this is the kind of disgust that believers feel when folks are casually sacrilegious.
It really depends on what you want/need, augment/extrapolate your own creativity with AI tools, or invite someone else's.
The AI debate is for now most often centered on whether AI is capable of replacing individuals, but replacing the results you get when you put multiple humans together is another dimension entirely.