The future might sound more familiar than we think.
The influx of AI song covers is one of the latest trends to hit the music industry.
These covers use LLMs, trained on audio recordings, to mimic celebrity voices and create custom renditions of songs. Despite never actually being recorded by the imitated artist, AI-generated songs use the voices of many high-profile artists. From Drake to Kurt Cobain, these songs are gaining traction all over the internet and sound eerily similar to mastered recordings.
FineVoice is an AI voice studio offering voice cloning and text-to-speech conversion. Vocal characteristics are learned from audio samples to transform and replicate any individual’s voice to sing songs and say nearly whatever the user pleases.
Creating an AI song cover is easy, simply select one of the many pre-trained models of trending celebrity voices to start and either upload an audio file for the model to recreate or supply a link to your selected song on YouTube.
Before the model can begin working on your newest musical masterpiece, you’ll be asked about the conversion settings that will be used to create your results. Pitch shifting can help your AI cover sound more natural by modifying the voice you selected to have more feminine or masculine undertones that fit the song you’ll be using.
To create my Drake cover of Smooth Operator by Sade, I applied a -12 pitch conversion to smoothly transition, see what I did there, from Sade’s soft feminine voice to Drake’s melodic masculine voice. The results below will surprise you.
Weird, but sort of cool right? Now you can hear all your favorite songs recreated by an artist of your choosing, or even yourself! But with all AI-created media, the question now lies in the ethics and copyright of the produced media.
FineShare, the company behind FineVoice, claims that all content produced by their models should be used specifically for parody purposes, stating that the company holds no legal liability over the data uploaded by its users. They allow individuals to submit copyright infringement claims and remove any of their intellectual property from the website, but what about when the produced media is already going viral?
That’s exactly what happened with the AI-generated song, Heart on My Sleeve, which used mimicked voices of both Drake and the Weeknd. The song grew so popular that it was nominated for a Grammy this past year. Though it didn’t end up winning, this scenario raises concerns over who owns the royalties and accolades of these AI productions. It also questions how this new paradigm of music production will change the industry in the future.
What do you think of AI-generated song covers? Who should hold the intellectual property rights to these productions, and will you create the next Grammy-nominated AI song? Try out FineVoice and see what you can create.
Jonathan Goshu
