YouTube Shorts Challenges TikTok With Music-Making AI for Creators
TikTok’s tools for adding music to short-form videos have helped make short-form video a phenomenon. Google now offers select YouTube Shorts creators an AI feature called Dream Track that can generate songs, including lyrics, melody and accompaniment, in the styles of seven different artists, including Charlie Puth, Demi Lovato, Sia and T-Pain, with a tool. called Dream Track.
To create a 30-second music video with Dream Track, a creator simply enters a prompt, such as “ballad about how opposites attract, upbeat acoustics,” then select the artist the song should be about stylized.
YouTube’s new Dream Track AI music generation tool for creators can create new songs in the style of existing artists, in this case Charlie Puth.
The new AI capabilities could help Google attract users from TikTok, where AI tools for adding visual or audio effects are extremely popular. YouTube says it is studying how artists whose work helped train its music generation algorithms will receive a share of future ad revenue generated from videos featuring AI-generated audio. This would represent a test of a new way for artists to benefit from AI built in part on their work.
Dream Track uses an AI algorithm called Lyria developed by Google Deepmind, the unit responsible for keeping the company at the forefront of AI. YouTube’s global head of music, veteran music mogul Lyor Cohen, who helped launch the careers of artists including Public Enemy, Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys, told WIRED on Wednesday that he was blown away after hearing a demo of his production on Google. DeepMind headquarters in London in May. “I knew we not only had something unique and special, but also something that I thought the music industry was going to dig and want to work with,” Cohen says.
Cohen says the seven artists who chose to let Dream Track replicate their styles did so out of a desire to embrace generative AI on their terms. “Our partners, many of whom were around the Napster era, didn’t want to play defense, they wanted to play offense, and they were excited about the possibilities,” he says. In August, YouTube announced the creation of an incubator to collaborate with artists on ways to use generative AI.
