AI Music for Business: How to Get Started

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Welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.

Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzer, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators and business owners who want to know how to use AI. Today I'm going to be joined by Dan Sanchez and we're going to explore AI music for businesses, for marketing, for creators, for any particular application. I think you're going to find today's show absolutely fascinating. We got some sample music we're going to be playing that is going to blow your mind. Also, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow this show so you don't miss any of our future content. We've got some great content coming up. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Dan Sanchez.

Helping you simplify your AI journey. Here is this week's expert guide.

Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Dan Sanchez. If you don't know who Dan is, he's an AI strategist who helps marketers prepare for the future. He's host of the AI Driven Marketer podcast. He's also the senior AI marketing strategist for Social Media examiner where he helps our marketing team and our AI business society. Dan, welcome back to the show and welcome to Team Social Media examiner. How you doing today?

I'm doing well. Am I the first person to make it two time appearance on the show?

You might be, but I know you won't be the last, I'm sure. So, so welcome back and welcome officially to Social Media examiner as an employee. Super excited that you're here. Today Dan and I are going to explore AI music for marketing and for businesses. Now, probably a lot of the people that listen to this show music is like not on the top of their mind as something they're wanting to do with AI. So why should marketers, creators, entrepreneurs pay attention to AI music? What's your thoughts?

I mean, AI music has just Hit the same. But if you think about music and marketing, that's been going on for a long time. In fact, music and marketing has been going on at least 100 years by now. You know, marketers have been putting jingles in radio shows and TV advertisements for a long time to connect that music to their marketing. Going all the way back to I think 1926. The first jingle for Wheaties appeared in radio. But why would you want to actually use music and marketing? Why have marketers been doing it for so long? Well, can you think of anything more emotional than music? Right. The soundtrack sets the stage when it comes to setting emotions in movies, in TV shows, and certainly in your radio programs or even in your podcast. So why wouldn't marketers want to leverage this emotional medium in order to better connect with the audience? Right? Because all good marketers know that it's not just people buying with logic. Most people buy what with emotion and justify with logic. And most marketers know that. But for the first time, it's become more accessible to marketers. And I think that's why it's so exciting. Because I'm like, I'm not a musician by trade, I don't play an instrument. I've taken music appreciation, but it doesn't count for much. But for the first time with AI marketing, you can actually start to leverage this really powerful medium in order to build that emotional connection to your audience in a totally different way.

I'll add my thoughts to this. I think that marketers should pay attention to music. Music maybe because they've never paid attention to it before because they told themselves, I'm not musically inclined, I don't know anything about music, it's too expensive. I don't want to go out and have to pay licensing fees. These are all the things, right, that, that, that people have had to deal with in the past. Let's explore some of the applications of what we can do with AI music.

So if you've been in content marketing long, you know there's some like low hanging fruit with AI and music specifically like I've made of different videos and the more you've started making content and videos, you know you're, you've probably spent some time on art list or different kinds of music websites hunting for that background music, right? Even in Cap cut where they have a library of songs, I notice I find a few that I like and then I run out and I find now with AI music I almost have unlimited playlist to make songs and the type of genre with the amount of beats and rhythm and highs and lows or whatever the heck I want. I can make as many as I want and keep them and use them in my videos or in my social content or in my podcasts as background music. So that's kind of like a first checklist item for me is just creating royalty free music that I can use to supplement my other content. Another one is coming up with original songs. I find that creating music, music videos, songs for fun sketches, if you're into TikTok type videos are really powerful. Imagine like how many people are making music for your audience. Imagine if you're marketing to accountants. No one's making music for them. But what if you had some fun one off videos just for a social post, just around a holiday, just around something maybe that's going on with that industry in the moment you make a fun song about it and post it, it's going to hit different because it's aimed at them. For the first time ever, we can actually make custom songs for a specific person, maybe a specific emotion for a specific person at a specific time. Right. I've actually started using this recently. We'll talk about more about that later on in the interview. But I'm excited about it as a social media marketer. Actually use this in my social media content. It gives me a whole nother leg to stand on rather than just creating visual elements, video elements and written content. I now have music to play with, so that's cool. And of course there's the time and tested creating jingles, right? All I have to do is say the word like jingles and the word McDonald's and you probably already have it playing in your head, right? The da da da da da. Like being able to have that signature sound or musical ability for a brand I think is going to be powerful for a lot of advertisements. Marketers have been doing it for for decades now, right? Over a hundred years. Audio branding I think is going to become a thing as music becomes more accessible for marketers. The top Fortune 500 companies already do this. They already have set style guides for music and genres and different things like that. Like especially if you have walk in stores where you do marketing, right? You have soundtracks that you curate for your store. Like big companies have been doing this. But I think AI Music now brings it down to us marketers who didn't have the budget to go and license music, curate songs, maybe make original songs with artists in order to have something to play in our, our podcast, our YouTube videos, our social media, or even incorporate into our branding in interesting way, that's going to be a whole unlock for marketers coming in the future. And then I think the real fun part is all of it's fun, but this one particularly is using it in a UX space in those little tiny nooks and crannies of the website, your app, in your store, in your social media, where you might be able to sneak music where it hadn't been before. When something's loading on your website, a 404 page, a thank you song in an email after they buy something, you can now inject music into a bunch of different places where maybe nobody ever expected it before. And I think for those who are kind of ahead of the game and kind of get into this and you'll see how easy it is in a minute as we talk about it, can actually start to leverage, leverage it in creative ways to surprise and delight the audience.

Well, I think about Netflix. If every time you load up Netflix, there's that little sound at that or whatever that sound effect is, you know, that comes up on Netflix. And I'm also thinking about for anybody that makes longer form video, like, for example, we used to have this thing called the Journey, which I know, Dan, you watched a lot of it before you decided to come work here. The key to a lot of setting the mood for what's happening inside of that docu series was really finding the right music track to go underneath it. And it's just kind of shocking. And even when you watch a movie, if you mute a movie, it's totally different. Like, Star wars is not Star wars without John Williams music. I mean, it's totally not like quite literally that music makes the set. And, you know, you start to think about like all these different applications, even podcast ads. I listen to a number of podcasts that use music underneath the spoken word track just to kind of differentiate that ad from the rest of the content.

And.

And those applications are so crazy. Dan, what I'd like to do, since we're recording this between Christmas and New Year's, I want to give people a sample of one of the pieces of music that you created. And then we've got another sample we're going to do just a little bit later. And this is just kind of to get people excited. Everything you're about to hear is not done by anything but AI. Is that correct?

That's right.

Here we go. On the 12th hour of Christmas, my job gave to me. 12 trips trending TikToks, 11 comments trolling 10 bots, a spamming 9 DM sliding, 8 tweets to schedule, 7 hashtags trending 6 metrics plummeting 5 client addicts, 4 last minute memes, 3 Canva crashes, 2 reels reduced, and a boss who wants it to go viral.

Okay, that's.

That's going to get a virtual applause for me. That's pretty freaking cool. So everything about that was like the voices and whatever that was, that was all completely generated by Dan utilizing tools and stuff. And we're going to talk about that quite literally next. So if people want to do something like that, and that was exceptionally well done. Let's start with kind of the recommended tools that people need in order to be able to pull off something like what we just heard.

So there's really only two tools that you need. One to make the lyrics and another tool to make the music. And if you really want to, you can just use the tool that makes music. Usually can write lyrics too. But I find that having something like a paid version of ChatGPT even, actually, even the free version of Chat GPT will do quite well with this. I mean, if you have access to four. Oh, that's what I use to make it. Which I think is in the free tier, right?

I believe so.

So free access to ChatGPT and you can make a little jingle like that. I wrote that song with ChatGPT. I wanted it to be fun. I wanted it to kind of incorporate the 12 Days of Christmas with for but for social media marketers and kind of a funny song for a social post. That was the prompt and I went through a couple iterations with it. It landed on that one and just copied and pasted over into the next tool, which is probably what most people are looking for when it comes to AI music. And the tool I use is called Suno. So you go to suno.com and it is a wonderful tool where you can essentially give it just a few pieces of information. Your lyrics and the style of the music you want essentially your prompt on what you want this thing to sound like. Now, there's usually a few other options, but it's generally just those two things you push create. And SUNO gives you two four minute tracks and for some reason it loves the four minute track. So if it doesn't have enough lyrics, it will sometimes make up lyrics to go along with it. But that's a lot of music to make. There are other options other than suno. Like Udio is another one on the scene that I've used before. But right now, really loving What SUNO can do.

Spell out Udio.

Udio is U D I O dot com.

Got it. So Suno is the one that you've used. And. And let's kind of break down. If someone's never gone to Suno before, like what do they need to know about using Suno?

You'll have to make an account. You actually. It's a freemium product. You can actually go make a free account and kind of play around with it. They only give you a certain amount of credits like most free AI tools because again, it costs them money to run these things, but it's enough for you to play and kind of get a taste for what it's capable of, what it can do. I have a paid account. I think it costs. It's ridiculous. I think it's like 10 bucks a month or 15 bucks a month. And these are subject to change once this comes out, so don't quote me on that. But it's like it's one of those low price tools that any small business can afford.

Did you just say create a song or did you have to give it. Do you have to make some choices? Do you understand where I'm going with this?

There's a big button called create. You push that button and you have a field for lyrics. You can even check the box that says no lyrics. This is just instrumental, which I've done many times for those backgrounds tracks for the videos that I'm making for. For Social Media Examiner. I'm saying no lyrics and then you just have a one place to essentially put your prompt on what kind of music you want. Do you want it to be trap rap? Do you want it to be a soft country song that has kind of a Christmas feel to it? Do you want it to be a cinematic movie score that has a rising climactic ending? Just describe what you want. You can even talk to ChatGPT to try to figure out what you want. Because again, I'm not a musician. Like I haven't taken music theory. I don't know, I don't even have the language. I have a background in graphic design, so I've actually find the image tools to me much more intuitive because I understand design history and I can actually prompt it with art deco and art nouveau and I know what I'm talking about here. I actually have to talk to ChatGPT in order to even figure out like what's that genre that I want where the rap is fast and like rhymes in this way. It's like, oh, you're talking About Trap, I was like, okay, great, I want that. Yeah, Oftentimes too, Suno, like a lot of these tools will have a whole library where you could see what other people are creating, which is just a smorgasbord of inspiration. So if you go and listen around to all kinds of different songs that people have made, if you like one that you're like, oh, I love the way that sounds, the prompt is right there. You can go and copy and paste it and run some iterations on it. A few really important notes for using things like Suno and Udio for that matter is that they are kind of like video AI tools. They're very squirrely. Like you can, you can put in the same prompt with the same lyrics and get some very, very different songs.

Oh really? Okay. So it's kind of creative, huh?

It's very creative. It takes a creative license sometimes and apply your, your picks there because I've asked for rap and gotten some alternative rock sounding things before. You just, you don't know where it's going to go. It's. It can't be engineered as hard as you could with chat GPT where you're trying to get a very specific output out of it. And part of it, I'm okay with that. Because music is so creative that the hallucinations actually add to it. Sometimes they end up adding little things to the music that you didn't even know to ask for. Little vocal flares or repetition of a word sometimes that it'll put in there. That song we just listened to, the way it kind of did that first part fast and then kind of got into the melody. I didn't ask it for that. It just gave me that and I was like, huh, that's actually kind of nice. I like it.

What about instruments? Do you have an option to choose what kind of instruments are part of the, you know, the background music, if you will.

Absolutely. I actually specify most of the time if I want specific instruments or don't want specific instruments. Like I was just creating an album with my wife and I was specifying like I want soft piano with rising strings as the song builds. And it's been able to hit that pretty, pretty well. Sometimes it'll throw on a random instrument again, it hallucinates and we'll come up with stuff. But sometimes you don't know you didn't that you wanted it until it did it and it becomes a thing. Sometimes you end up trying to do you have something specific in mind but it keeps adding an instrument that you don't want in there. In Suno specifically, you can have a place where you can have like a negative prompt, like do not include the guitar. Again, it's squirrely. So it's more of a suggestion than it is a hard engineering type thing. But there is ways to do that where you can exclude instruments. If it keeps trying to throw a guitar in there and you don't want that.

What about vocals? Can you say you want a female vocalist, a male vocalist, a choir? I mean, do you have those kind of options?

Oh yeah. I am usually specifying whether I want a female or male vocal vocalist. Whether you want to be soft, hard, scratchy. In fact, you can. This, this kind of becomes a little controversial in the AI community. Like can actually take your favorite brand and ask ChatGPT what's the style of this band and the lead singer.

Okay, I like that.

Yeah, take that with a grain of salt. Some people are doing that. I try to not do that as much and try to like just find other AI tracks that I pull the inspiration from that. And it's so different from every iteration that even if you do find the exact description of a specific artist or genre or brand or whatever, what's wrong?

Musicians are inspired by other musicians all the time. Right? So like let's say like Seal or Sting is one of your favorite artists. Right. You could ask Chat GPT or whatever to kind of reverse engineer the style of singing that was in this particular song, right. By this particular artist. And then can you tell the AI to make it sound like that person? Or is that where it gets controversial?

You can't say, make it sound like Sting. That's where these AIs have already been trained to not do that. But if you go and work it out with Chat GPT, be like, hey, can you give me a six word description of the style of Sting's music? Then it will. It'll build that for you.

Okay, cool. Very fascinating. So let's dig in a little bit about the kinds of things you've been doing since you've been working at Social Media examiner specifically with music. And we have another song we're going to play. We can play it after. I think you set up some of this stuff and then we can talk about kind of how you did it.

Yeah, absolutely. The first one I did was like that first suggestion, just coming up with background tracks. I actually went looking. I use Cap Cut to edit the videos that I'm making for Social Media at Social Media examiner and they have a nice little track library of some songs to pick from. And I kind of dabbled and browsed through there until I found a few tracks that I'm like, yeah, this is the sound that I want for a series we're doing called the Dollar Marketer. I wanted something on a track for a genre called electric Swing. It was just kind of like this fun kind of bouncy swing music, but with a modern kind of tone to it. But there was only two tracks in there that was good for a background music in cap cut. So naturally I went over to Suno and just generated me, like, six more to pick from. And then later I can go back and they're all in that genre and all have a mello mellowness to it that I could put it in the background without it overpowering the Any spoken word in it. But now I have a whole library of songs that I can use for that particular series, and I'm excited about that. I've also started making some original songs. That first song we played was something I've already posted to Social on Christmas Eve because it was just fun. And I'm like, you know, it's, let's do something fun and Christmassy, But I don't want to just post the Santa meme. And that would be okay, but, like, let's do something original. So I came up with a little track and then later recorded myself kind of of reacting to the countdown or the 12, a little something different in the video. So I still had to make more of the video for it.

I like that. I think there's a big application for a lot of marketers that are listening to entrepreneurs right now, right? So they could create some sort of a song that's seasonal or thematic based on, who knows, an event that's going on in their industry, a conference, a big whatever, you know, maybe they've got, like, who knows what? Like, it could be almost anything, right? But then you can play it and you can simply react to it, right? So when you're reacting to it, just help people understand. What does that actually look like? Is that just you making weird faces and stuff as you're listening to it or.

Essentially, that is kind of what I did. I mean, it's. It's. It was the 12 tasks of Christmas, and it was like all these different things that marketers don't usually don't want, like, on when they're working over Christmas, right? Tweets to schedule on the classic, like, the boss wants me to make it go viral, and I throw, like, a stack of papers and make, like, I'm just emotionally destroyed face. Yeah, you'll have to go. We can link to it and you can watch the video, but. But yeah, there's a bunch of different ways you can do it. I have friends that are making AI tracks for their companies. I have one friend who's done this so far, but they go and use AI video tools to then create animations that kind of illustrate it. And because it's just for social media, like, the quality doesn't have to be there. And that's good because AI video, it hallucinates a lot and gets a little funny. But if you do it like a cartoon status, then. Then it, it kind of works and people are more forgiving of it. But if it's just a short little and the song sounds good and the quick animations are snappy, like, I'll probably be experimenting with that myself in the next month or two.

Let's talk about filling the gap between AI potential and AI results. I'm sure you've tried ChatGPT. Are you seeing real ROI? Most marketers are barely scratching the surface of what's possible with AI. And it's because they're missing the training and the frameworks that will allow them to be very successful in their careers and in their future. AI Business World allows you to get that training. When you attend, you get two full days and 20 expert practitioners, many of the people that you've heard on this very show, that will teach you exactly what you need to know to build the workflows and to succeed as an AI enhanced marketer. It takes place April 29th and 30th in Anaheim, right alongside Social Media Marketing World. And here's the good news. You can save $300 when you register by January 16th. Head to AIbusinessWorld live right now. This discount ends soon. Okay, I don't know if now's the time to talk about this, but first, are there any other marketing applications that you're working on before we talk about what the little story that led up to the clip we're about to share next?

The one thing that I am working on right now is I was trying to think, like, how can I use this to promote something specific? And right now we have, like, the AI Society. And I'm like, how can I make a track that promotes the AI Society? So what I decided, I'm like, I got to make it the topic about AI. So right now I'm working on a rap battle between Chat, GPT and Claude, and each one will write its own lyrics and responding to the other. So I'm really looking forward to this one. The, the. The prompt will be hard because I have to get two voices going back and forth and for that, but to be consistent. That's why it's taking me a little longer to make this one. But of course there'll be a big plug for the AI Society at the end.

Very cool.

And I'll probably hopefully talk about how I made it at the AI Society too. So.

And for those that don't know what Dan's talking about, it's the AI Business Society. Socialmediaexaminer.com aisociety okay, so when we were prepping for this, I gave Dan a little bit of a idea. I said I thought it would be really cool and correct me if I have this wrong, but I said it'd be really cool to create some music that talks about kind of the challenge of a marketer, particularly a female marketer who's kind of on all the time and has other obligations in her life. And I gave him a couple of ideas and I wondered what he could come up with. I mean, demonstrating this properly. Am I missing anything?

That was exactly right. All right, so.

So share what you did, all the steps that you did, and then we'll play the music.

Something I did because you had an idea in your head of like, I want to tell the story of a social media manager, someone who's a listener of this show, of the social media show and is someone who comes to our social media marketing world. I was like, okay. And you kind of say, give me an example of her day. Of course I had to sit back. I could ask ChatGPT for an example song. But what I do find in creating lyrics is that the more context you can give it, the better it does. Right? And we. You find this over and over with AI. Like, the more context you can give it about what you want and all the background information you can get, the better it's going to be able to help you as it is with any human you delegate to. Right. The context is. Is king here. So I spent a few minutes actually talking through with chat GPT going back and forth and I, I kind of gave it the general a social media marketing manager and some story elements. I'm like, I want the song to cover a full day and to craft kind of a character, but to have a story, to have a punchy chorus. But I want to go through a whole day where it's telling the story where they. She goes through some hardships. But like still ends at a happy upswing in the, at the very end and probably as a mother has a kid, what can we do? The most important thing I asked it is what elements of the story do you need me to elaborate on for you to be able to, to write good lyrics to tell the story. And it asks some fantastic questions. Like best trick you can do with AI is just to have it prompt you back. So I took 10, 15 minutes answering its questions to the best of my ability. It said thank you and then crafted some great lyrics. We went back and forth on the lyrics a few times. It does like Chat GPT specifically writes lyrics that are a bit trite. They're a little like, like kids songs. Like the rhymes are a little bit simple like how now cow brow. You know, you're like, okay, can you make the lyrics a little bit more complex, a little bit less obvious? It makes that change really quick once you ask for it and to make it maybe a little bit more ambiguous so it's not like super, super obvious what we're singing about like a country song. In this case, I, I did have this song a little bit more clear than I'll usually make it for some song lyrics lyrics. But once we got settled on the lyrics, I went in and prompted it and wanted something that was like a folk. I actually had to talk to Chat GPT about what style the song was.

Going to be before you even go there. I think you showed me the lyrics, did you not? I can't even remember. Did I look at the lyrics or did I not look at the lyrics? I feel like I did look at the lyrics, didn't I, before you composed it? I can't even remember.

No, actually I don't think, I think I just sent you the song fully composed.

Okay. Yeah, no, that's good. But you might want to, I have someone look at the lyrics in the future to make sure they're cool with the lyrics. You know, like. But in this case I trusted Dan that he was going to get it right. So just so we're clear, when you were working with ChatGPT, did you give it a prompt? Like you are a world class lyricist or songwriter or any of that kind of setting or did you just not even do that? I'm just curious.

I did give it that prompt. I did tell it it was a world class or a professional songwriter working with businesses to help tell stories for their audience. Yeah, got it.

Did you have to make any edits with the output after you did some modifications and stuff or did you End up just taking the final copy that, you know, after a few iterations that.

It came up with after a few iterations. I didn't have any edits to make. I thought it was. It was good what it had. It's also harder to edit lyrics on like. Like a blog post. Because a blog post you can just start chopping sentences and it still flows with lyrics. It's a little bit more tricky, right, because there's a rhyming scheme in their stanzas and there's a certain length there, so it's a little harder to change.

So then you went into SUNO and did what?

I went to Suno, put in the lyrics. I did have a little bit of a conversation before I went into suno with ChatGPT. I actually asked ChatGPT, hey, based on this song and what we're trying to go for here, what genres would this work well with? Actually gave me a suggestion of three. I picked one of the three and went with it. And that became a my prompt. And I asked for a female vocalist. I asked it for that genre, which was pop folk. That was the kind of like Jewel.

Or something like that.

Y. Yep. And I asked it to just be like soft female vocalist. And I didn't give it too much more than that. Sometimes I put in more into that prompt to try to really specify and sometimes I put in less to kind of give me more variety. Because if you're less specific with your prompt, then it'll get. You'll get a greater variation in the songs you generate. And you will have to generate. Sometimes you can one shot it and get it on the first try, but often it takes like 5, 10, maybe 15 different iterations for one song. With Suno, you get plenty of credits. You get enough credits to make like 500 songs though. So there's. There's plenty in there month and that generates them fast. So you start going through them and curating like, what did you like? What did you. What. What I didn't like once I found one that was close. You can actually in Suno, pick that to inform your prompt. They call it a Persona. So you can pick one song to be your Persona. If you specifically like the. The way that the vocal is sounded, you can pick that as your Persona to inform all future iterations. Sometimes it matches it, sometimes it doesn't. But it gives it extra little clarity on what you're looking for. It's especially important if you want to make a whole album and have the. The singer songwriter kind of sound somewhat you would Use a Persona to do that.

So how many iterations did you have to go through before we got the one that we're about to play here?

This one took a little bit more. I probably did 20 to 22, maybe 23 variations because we also tried to make it shorter, and we ended up liking the one that was longer. So I went through a couple more iterations to try to get that.

Okay, just out of curiosity, was it this different voice every single iteration?

The female voice, There was a lot of different voices. Some were closer to the one we use because I started using this one as a Persona to inform future ones.

All right, let's go ahead and let's play. Not going to play the whole thing, but we're going to play a big chunk of it. So here we go.

The alarm rings softly it's 5:04 she's up before the world starts knocking on her door Coffee in her hand and a smile on her face her little boy's laughter fills the quiet space she's ready to conquer Got the plan all set Today's gonna be the day she won't forget I'm running on coffee A dream in my hand Chasing the clock making a stand Though the pressure feels endless I won't let it break Because I know the difference my stories can make for my family, my work, for the life that I choose I'll keep spinning I'll keep winning I've got nothing to lose. The first post is live and the comments flow but the boss says, where's the next one? We're moving too slow. The plan she perfected is now out of date A glitch in the system and the clock won't wait. Her phone's vibrating braiding her head's in a spin she's fighting the tide just to keep swimming I'm running on coffee.

All right, that's pretty dang good. You know, one of the things that I was curious about, did you notice how her voice went and then it went into a musical instrument almost at that one point?

Yep.

That's the kind of stuff that we're talking about. That's like hallucinations, right? Like her voice turned into an instrument on that high note right there. But most people might not even notice that, you know? Yeah, but that was pretty dang good, Dan. I mean, what. What were your thoughts after you generated that version of it?

I mean, I'd listen to so many iterations, and generally, once you're working through iterations. I'm looking for something that sounds the most human.

Yeah.

Because obviously, like, this has been cherry picked out of 20 iterations, this one song. And you could still tell there was this, like, this digitalness to it. And the longer you go in the song, I found this. That happened with Suno. Like once you get into three, four minutes, it starts having this, like, hiss to it where, like, all the digital, like, noise is collecting and it sounds a little funky. But you gotta remember, like, AI music is something we weren't even talking about a year ago. Like, this was hardly on the scene a year ago. And now we're to the point where, like, I'm actually listening to some AI songs on a regular basis in my mix now because it's so good. And in some genres, like if you're listening to like a hard, grungy song, like, you don't even notice because it's just part of the thing. But when I was listening to these ones, I was looking for clarity of voice often is what I'm looking for. And consistency. One funny thing about AI music is that it will change. Like a song can change from beginning to end, and the song you started with is not what you finished with. And you don't know exactly where it changed. It just slowly changes over the whole song. So that's kind of a funky thing where, like, real songs will have more consistency and rhythm to them, where AI will like, morph along the way. And honestly, I. I think that's okay and it'll just get better over time. But even what we have right now is not only listenable, it's fun, and it's. It's pretty good.

My guess is we've got some professional vocalists and musicians listening to this thing, and they're probably cringing because they picked up all the things that are wrong with it. But everyone else is like, that was dang good. I mean, like, that sounded really good. Like, that gal was talented is probably what went through a lot of people's minds. Now how. How long do you think it took you from beginning to end all in on that particular song?

Two hours.

Two hours. Okay. That's not bad. You know what I mean? Like, you think about how long it would take to actually do something like that in real life. That take days, right? You'd have to write the lyrics, you'd have to find the instrumentalist, you'd have to get the studio booked, you'd have to go out and get the vocal artist, sign the contracts, all that stuff. So that's really, really cool. Now what would you do with something like this potentially as a marketer for.

This one in particular. Obviously it'll be promoting this episode, but you could use this. This one in particular is probably just a social post, unless you wanted to do something bigger with it and try to build, like, maybe a music video would be, like a pretty high level of you, but shooting a music video for this. For a lot of the videos we're doing right now, I film myself, but I'd actually have to, like, find an actress to film the scenes of this and progress the music forward. You could use this as an advertisement with the music video, so that would kind of fit and have so, like, come to social media marketing world at the end. So it, like, ties into our brand and what we're doing, I think would work really well. The easiest thing to do is just like, make a lyric video where it's just like some kind of. Not a still background, but it has, like a little bit of motion to it, and then you just have the lyrics popping up in a really smooth fashion. That would be the easy thing you could do for a social video or even for YouTube.

Okay, I've got a lot more questions specifically about Suno. We've already talked at length about using ChatGPT to come up with the lyrics. My guess is you could experiment with other AI platforms as well. For example, those of you that love Claude, that are writers, it might actually be able to write music maybe even better than ChatGPT if you experiment with it. I also think Google Gemini might also be something. Or you could start with ChatGPT, right? And then you could ask a system like Claude to critically analyze it and see what it's missing. Or potentially Gemini, because all these models are like, constantly. They're all battling each other for top rankings and all these things. Something we were talking about was injecting prompts into lyrics. I don't remember what that was. What was this tip on that one?

It's an advanced tip, but I find you can actually. There's a place for the prompt on the style. Then there's a place for lyrics. You can inject tiny prompts into the lyrics.

You're talking about Sono now, right? We're back in Sono.

But you can do this with Udio too.

Both.

Both. I've noticed you'll find if you go and look at the lyrics that other people are making their songs with, they're often injecting little prompts into the lyrics themselves. So right before a stanza, it'll. It might be like, this is spoken word and then this is the first verse. This is second verse. Now this is the chorus. Now here's the bridge. Now here's the third verse and the. The outro, right? And even within those, you can specify, okay, verse, first verse, sing it softly. Second verse, ramp it up. You're like. You can give little instructions per verse.

Oh, okay.

It may or may not take it. There's been many times where I'm like, read this, don't sing it, and then sing this next one. And it just never did it. I've gotten it to do it before, but, like, I've noticed a lot of the best creators on these platforms, and a lot. They're sharing a lot of their songs where you can literally see what they're doing.

Just to clarify, let me make sure I understand this. You got your lyrics. Maybe you wrote them yourself. Maybe you got them from Chat GPT. You're inside of Suno somehow. You're giving instruction sets. Do you have to do this in brackets? Or how. How in the world does it delineate brackets? Okay, so it's brackets. Like, when we say brackets, let's describe where that is on the keyboard. Is that the little bracket that's above the.

Just to the right of the P key?

Okay, so you're putting brackets on both sides of it. It knows what to do with brackets generally, or does it ignore them? Or does it sometimes think they're lyrics? Or what's your experience?

I find with AI, like, even suno, it doesn't really care if it's a bracket or if it's a curly bar or. Or if it's a parenthesis, but something that designates like, hey, this is a note, not the part of the verse. Okay, so put something around it and put verse one or verse. You don't even have to label them with a number. And it does a better job if you don't give it that again. You're giving it more license to do whatever the heck it wants. And it might decide that your verse two is a chorus, and it will literally take verse two and put it. Inject it into the song again and make it a chorus again. I've had to do that to. To. To me in a few songs before, but you can get more specific in your lyrics by actually giving it a little bit of instructions per stanza on how you want it to go, just to know. Don't worry about doing that at first. It is so intuitive, you will be amazed. People are literally putting in legal copy terms of condition, putting it in the lyrics, and it still sounds good.

Really?

Okay, literally legal Jargon. And you can go, there's. There's a song on there that's got like over a million views and it's some guy who posted put the word cat over and over again. And somehow that song with just the one word cat repeated actually is kind of bouncy and nice. You're like, I don't know how it made the lyrics sound good on terms and conditions and the word cat, but it's cool.

Talk to me about how long does it take to render songs?

As soon as you hit Create and you submit your instructions, you'll have something to listen to in 15 seconds.

That fast?

It's very fast. Now it won't fully render the full four minutes, but if I'm there all the time and I'll click Create and as soon as something's ready to hit, I'll hit play. And unless their servers are really busy, the amount of time it takes to listen to it will have fully rendered it. So you'll be able to listen to the full song within the time it takes to listen to it. Unless you want to. Like if you want to skip ahead to the three minute mark because you just push play and you wanted to see how the three minute mark rendered, then it's going to take a little bit more time, but it is very fast.

Are there any editing capabilities at all or any way of editing with other tools that you're using?

Yes, there are editing features within suno. I find them to be a little bit frustrating to work with and I'm sure they'll get better over time. The most important one is its ability to extend a song. If your lyrics like the one we just listened to, it actually runs a little over four minutes and it always cuts off at four, which means I had to click a button that said extend and craft the lyrics. I'm like, hey, extend. Just sing these lyrics. But you're extending it from this song. Okay, now go ahead and extend the song and it'll give you two variations on just the part two of the song. It has the ability to, once you pick the right one, to join them, but I find it never joins them correctly and there's always a repeat of lyrics somewhere.

What do you mean join them? Like just clarify what you mean by join. Join what exactly?

Because the, the second rendering is just part two. It doesn't have the whole first four minutes.

Oh God.

It's just generating the second part. And when you go to click like combine them, it never combines them right from my experience. So I always have to Download them separately and kind of go into. I just do it in Cap cut. If I were an audio engineer, you'd use an audio tool, but I'm just doing it fast. I go into Cap cut and just kind of crop it right at the ends to kind of get it to fit just right. It's not perfect because there's usually a little bit of a. Just a. Just a little bit of a bump. If you're listening carefully, you can hear it, but I promise you won't even notice it where it's at on that song unless you're listening very carefully where that cut is.

Can you render out the music and the voice separately? Like, once you find something you like, or you can.

Yeah, talk to me about that. It'll let you render out the voice and the music separately as two tracks. So it does give you some wiggle room there. I've not spent a lot of time with that yet, but I probably will in the future. If I want to, like, if I can't force it to, like, do a spoken word and then sing, then I could just render it twice all the way spoken and all the way sung and then just kind of combine them. Them to. That way. That's. That's one of the projects I'm working on. I'm doing it that way well.

And anybody who really understands Adobe Audition could do really cool stuff if they wanted to with the vocal tracks, you know, by creating certain kinds of effects at certain kinds of moments and stuff like that. All right, the big question on a lot of people's minds is, is this commercially acceptable? Can I use this in my ads? Can I use this in my products? Like, what's the deal on that?

So, big caveat, I am not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice, but this is where my own understanding is on it. The who AI industry is in a legal battle right now with the people who have made all the original content that this stuff has been trained on. So just like with all AI content, you kind of have to take it with a grain of salt as far as, like, what you're publishing and what you're putting out there. Because all these AI companies, Suno and Udio included, like, wrapped up with chat, GPT, are getting. Are dealing with lawsuits from music companies and publishers and all that kind of stuff. So that's going on, and the courts will work that out over the next couple of years, that aside. And I. I don't know what the implication of those will be for, like, what the music we produce will be. So big companies would probably be more hesitant to get into it just because of that alone. But if they're already made decisions on how they're going to handle outputs from like something like chat, GPT, then they probably they already have decisions on how they're going to deal with AI music. But for those who are, you know, smaller players like myself, and I'm actually even publishing music albums as a non musician on Apple and Spotify. So I had to look into this. If you pay for Suna, then you have commercial licenses to everything. You can distribute it and monetize it on Apple, Spotify, YouTube and all the other players. You can put it on social media and YouTube videos, you can sell it directly, you can even license it like all the stuff you would normally have the full commercial license. And if you're using Suno for free, then Suno owns it. I'd say that's fair. Like you can download it and listen to it as much as you want on your personal devices and you can share it on Suno as much as you want and share the link out from Suno, but you don't have the rights to be able to put it under your video background and all that kind of stuff. Udio, on the other hand, is giving you commercial licenses even with the free stuff. For now they're like in beta right now. Either of these might change, so look it up when this episode drops. But as as of right now, that's the current conditions when using Suno or Udio.

Dan, this has been a fascinating exploration into AI music. If people want to connect with you, where can they connect with you? And we'll also note that we're going to put links to the music in the show notes on wherever you're listening. So hopefully we'll have that all figured out by the time this show publishes. But if they want to discover more about you, where do you want to send them?

The best place To Connect is LinkedIn.com in DigitalMarketingDan. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn.

Wait, did you say I am Digital Marketing Dan in.

So it's LinkedIn.com in digital marketing Dan.

Okay, cool. And then also inside of our AI business society, if you're a member there. Dan's very active inside of that there and you're probably going to find him across all social media Examiner's social platforms as well. So if you see his videos, comment on his stuff. Dan, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.

Thank you so much for having me.

Hey, if you missed anything. We took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com A37. Be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcast app. And if you've been a listener for a little while, I would love a review on whatever listening platform you're on. And feel free to share this with your friends. That would be amazing. If you want, you can tag me. I'm Elsner on Facebook, Telsner on LinkedIn, and Ike Stelzner on X. And do check out our other shows, the Social Media Marketing Podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the AI Experience Explored Podcast. I'm your host Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may AI help you become more successful.

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