According to Billboard, an AI singer named Xania Monet is “the first known AI artist to earn enough radio airplay to debut on a Billboard radio chart.”
I've heard this song, and it's rather underwhleming, but it's fine. I'd compare this AI voice to Beyonce. If you asked the software to spit out an R&B jam that's Beyonce-esque, you might get this.
It's as fine as any of the AI music Rob Pruess would create for Toronto Mike'd or Bob Willette would play on indie88 during his breaks, but I (a non-musician) can't imagine this slop usurping actual human-created music from musicians. In fact, if this song wasn't a novel AI-created song, it doesn't crack the Billboard Hot 100. But it did.
I appreciated this comment from a reddit thread. This user goes by the handle "SoulPossum" and I think they nail it.
I'm an actual musician. I've been playing for over 20 years. I have a degree in music and worked as a producer, gig musician, and teacher after college. I've been following these stories closely as I'm now working on a grad degree in business and have been taking a lot of classes about data/AI management. I saw an interview with the lady that is behind this "artist." I checked out Suno since that what she uses for this music. Timbaland is also using it for his most recent project. I listed some very simple things in the prompts to see what I got back. I asked for a jazz piece with specific instrumentation in a certain time signature and key. The thing I got back didn't meet most of what I asked for. It seems like it's more tuned for churning out basic music than it is for actually creating anything interesting. The Xania Monet tracks I've heard and the song Timbaland put out a few weeks ago fit that mold. I can point you in the direction of specific songs that are incredibly similar to the output for both of these. I am interested in playing around with the premium version as a tool the same way I would play with a synth or a digital plugin. I could see it being good as a supplement for the things I'm not great at and don't have access to through my music friends (mainly the engineering end). But I can't really take it seriously as an artist.
My big problem with this is that the lady who makes the songs for Xania, by her own admission, doesn't know how to do anything musically. She can't sing. She can't play anything. She wrote some poems, fed them into the model as lyrics, and then just keeps writing prompts until the AI spits out a fully realized song that she likes. People who are doing that are artists the same way that people who drive uber are self-employed. Their entire model lives and dies with the existence of the platform. If Suno goes away today (which could happen if any of the 5 majors decides to take them to court), then her art and ability to create disappears instantly. It also makes any sort of live performance a nightmare because she can't communicate how the song should be performed. It's like someone heating up hot pockets in an air-fryer being given the head chef job at a restaurant.
If your only tool is Suno, you're not a musician creating music. Xania does not exist.
