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Story Time

On August 19, 2022 as a joke I posted an image of an album cover and a track list of an EP I had no intention of creating. The track list is a curated list of things that come to mind when I think of the Bay Area, since I have been living there for a while now. Going from talking about how high gas prices are on the song "Gas Prices" to talking about the car break ins with "Smash & Grab". It was just a collection of all things that I love and think about in relation to San Francisco.

I can't rap or sing, so it was a joke that I didn't even plan to see the light of day, but it was ironic that it got a little buzz on my social media when I dropped the image.
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​Suno Enters The Chat

Keeping that in mind, since AI has consumed every part of my life as of late, I have been trying to find novel ways to use the technology. On a random day a couple weeks ago, one of my friends dropped the link to Suno AI, in our group chat. It is an app that generates full length songs by typing in a prompt. I messed around with for about 5 minutes and was amazed at the quality and lyrics it was able to generate with little prompting.
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I am fairly familiar with the music distribution process, being that I created a meme song and uploaded it to multiple platforms using TuneCore.

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Thus, getting a album out in the wild wouldn't be hard for me since I have done it before.

The Music Process

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The music creation process on Suno is pretty straight forward. You can either just generate a random song by just typing in a few words, or you can go the more custom route.

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Since I had a track list already, it didn't take me too long to come up with some lyrics to work with. If you provide it with some guard rails the tool is pretty good in filling in the blanks for you.
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FWIW, I am an author, so I was able to rift and come up with the chorus and versus pretty fast. Much of the iteration came with messing with the tempo and style that I wanted for each song. I got feedback pretty quick from my friends because I just kept sending what I was creating via text and they would say "yay" or "nay".

Coming up with 8 tracks didn't take too long, so I was able to finish the album pretty quickly.

From what I understand, I have the exclusive rights to all the songs that I created on the platform. So thankfully I don't need any lawyers involved.
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​Distribution

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I don't care if I am dropping an article or a whole album, I like trying to get as much eyes on my projects as possible, so I decided to throw the album up on Sound Cloud first in order to get it on streaming platforms fast. I shared the links to my friends. Some people vibed with it some people found it corny, but I always enjoy the process of releasing stuff and getting it out in the wild.

The true test of quality is how a song sounds on a car stereo.

I blasted the album multiple times through out the week just to get a sound check. I thought it sounded pretty good to me. So, I decided to pay the money and mass distribute the album.
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TuneCore as I mentioned before is an app that allows you to upload music to platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music and so one. It costs about $34 to distribute an album annually, so it is pretty cheap investment given the barrier to entry into the music industry traditionally.
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Depending on how many streams you get on the platform you can make some real income, with the royalties from my last song I can probably get a bag of chips.

Despite that, I was able to upload the track list, create a new album cover, and upload the song in less than an hour. After all the content is uploaded, it takes about 3 days to index on platforms.

Fin

I love music, so it was awesome that I was able to go from idea to a whole project in such a short time. It is also conflicting because I know it will dilute the music industry and make it really difficult to decipher AI from real talent.

One of the main things from an entrepreneur aspect that I will find use for it is having royalty free music that I can use for videos and other content that I have ownership over.
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This might also be a push for those who have projects to finish them quicker if I was able to accomplish this myself.
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