u/CulturalInternet2043

Not sure if anyone's done this seriously but I've been thinking about it for a while.

The idea is basically: pick a lane, build a consistent artist identity, style, look, maybe generate a portrait so there's a "face", make songs in that style, build out a catalog over time, put out music videos, push it to Spotify and DistroKid, run the YouTube channel like it actually belongs to a real artist. Not a lo-fi beats faceless channel. An actual persona.

Genre matters a lot for this I think. Sad indie pop, dark pop, chill singer-songwriter stuff, AI tends to handle those pretty well. Tried doing something more like a live band sound once and it just came out feeling wrong, like a cover band that learned the song from a description of the song. Some vibes AI just can't fake yet.

The part I keep going back and forth on is whether to be transparent about it being AI or just let it exist. There are channels that disclose everything and still pull real numbers. And then there are some that don't and eventually people find out and it becomes a whole thing.

Spent about 40 minutes the other night trying to name this fictional person. That probably means I'm either actually serious or just procrastinating on something else.

Revenue-wise I genuinely don't know what realistic looks like. Ad revenue on a music channel is low, everyone says that. Streaming adds up slowly. Sync licensing is probably the play if you can actually build a coherent enough sound identity, but that takes time.

Anyone tried this? Not the lo-fi passive income version, the actual "run this like a label" version.

Generating a song used to be the hard part. Now it's not. You can open basically any site, type a few words, and get something that sounds professionally produced. That gap closed faster than I expected, honestly. Suno's still ahead on pure quality in my experience, but the distance between the top tools has shrunk a lot.

So if everyone can generate a decent song, what are these companies actually competing on now?

I've been using Suno since 2023 and I keep watching their product updates, and it's pretty clear they figured this out a while ago. The Home and Explore pages aren't just for discovery. There's curated playlists, different genre sections, a community feed, bots that like and comment on tracks. It's starting to look less like a generation tool and more like a streaming platform that also lets you make songs. That's not accidental.

The Voice feature is where it gets interesting to me though. Create Music with Your Voice isn't really about the technology. I mean it is, it's impressive. First time I heard my own voice come back through a generated track I actually had to play it twice because I wasn't sure if it was working right. It was. But the product logic underneath it is: your voice is now an asset. It's yours. You trained it, it sounds like you and not the next person. That's a very different relationship with a tool than "I typed a prompt and it gave me a song."

Suddenly there's a reason to keep coming back that has nothing to do with whether the generation quality improved this month.

Other platforms are clearly watching. I've tried a few others and both Musicful and Mureka have Voice features rolling out now. Mureka's feels a bit earlier stage. Musicful's is closer. Neither has Suno's head start on the ecosystem side but they're moving.

My read is the next 12-18 months of competition isn't going to be about who has the best model. It's going to be about who gets users to build something inside the platform they don't want to leave behind. Voice is one version of that. Community is another.

Anyway this is half-formed. I've just been thinking about it while using these tools. Maybe I'm reading too much into a feature drop.

Just read through Spotify's latest moves on AI music. They pulled 75 million tracks for spam. New verification now wants live shows, merch sales, real world proof you exist as an artist. And if you disclose using AI on a track, it gets blocked from editorial playlists and buried in recommendations.

Meanwhile their AI DJ just hit 94 million users.

Fine with AI. Not fine with you using it.

I've been making stuff with Suno, Udio, Musicful for a couple years. Actual time goes into it. Prompting, arrangement, back and forth until it sounds right. Doesn't matter apparently. Already starting to look at other platforms to distribute. Not sure Spotify is even worth the effort at this point.

Is anyone actually expecting this to change or are we just waiting to see how much worse it gets?

Everyone keeps talking about UMG and Sony suing Suno. Honestly hard to feel bad for billion dollar labels.

But last week a two-person ambient band called The American Dollar filed a lawsuit and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

These aren't executives protecting a catalog. They've been making purely instrumental music since 2005. The kind that gets quietly licensed to TV shows, ad campaigns, sports networks. No lyrics, no viral moments, just two guys who built a living inside a very specific niche for 20 years.

Their sync licensing revenue dropped 80% since Suno launched. They can point to exactly when it started.

One of them actually bought a Suno Pro subscription to test it himself. Prompted it with their own track titles. Says the outputs were close enough to use as evidence in court.

That's the part that got me. The niche they spent two decades building, cinematic licensable instrumental music, is literally what AI generates most convincingly. They didn't lose to a competitor. They might have lost to a model trained on their own work.

Big labels will be fine. I'm not so sure about these two.

I use AI music tools myself, Suno, Musicful, Google Flow. This one made me think about it a bit differently. Not quitting or anything. Just harder to not think about where all that training data actually came from.

I've been on Suno since pretty much day one in 2023. Back then AI music was barely a thing and honestly the UI looked like it was built in a weekend. Didn't matter. The first song it generated for me was kind of jaw-dropping and I've been hooked since.

But I've noticed something. Search "AI music generator" now and there's a new tool every other month. The space has exploded.

For casual users it almost doesn't matter which one you pick. Most of them have free tiers and if you're just messing around, rotating between tools to stay within the free limits is totally viable.

For heavy users though I'm less sure. Is Suno still the obvious choice? Are you paying for it, or have you actually found something worth switching to?

Genuinely asking because I'm starting to wonder if I've just been loyal out of habit.

Been thinking about this a lot and I don't really have an answer.

A big part of why we love certain artists isn't even the songs themselves, it's them. MJ's voice is unmistakable. The Weeknd has that sound you recognize in three seconds. Justin Bieber at his peak had a tone that made teenage girls worldwide lose their minds. The voice IS the brand.

So here's my problem with AI music right now, even on V5.5:

No vocal identity. Every generated singer sounds vaguely competent but completely anonymous. Like, the melody slaps, the production is solid, but who is singing this? Nobody. Everybody. A ghost.

The ceiling is weirdly low on expressiveness. Real vocalists do things with their voice, cracks, runs, breath control, that slightly-off-pitch thing that somehow makes it more emotional. AI vocals just... don't have that. They're technically fine and somehow totally flat at the same time.

No consistency across generations. Even if one generation sounds decent, the next song has a completely different "voice." There's no persistent vocal persona you can build on.

I've seen some platforms roll out voice cloning, like train it on your own voice and have it sing your stuff. That seems like it could fix the consistency problem at least. But does it actually work well enough to matter? And what about people who just want a distinctive AI vocalist that isn't their own voice?

Curious how others are working around this. Is there a workflow that actually gets you somewhere closer to a real vocal identity, or are we just kind of stuck here?