"What happens to my track licenses if I downgrade? ... the Premium Plan monetization license will expire upon next pay period and the tracks will no longer be covered by this license. Should you wish to continue monetizing without having an active Premium Plan you will need to purchase the copyright for that track."
Oof. So if you use this stuff on your YouTube/Twitch stream, you're locking yourself into a membership with them forever, or else you have to delete your old recordings.
>Copyright available for purchase* Starting at $50
>* Copyright is available for premium users who want to sell music made on Soundful. Contact support@soundful.com to purchase copyright of a track you create.
So it looks like it's essentially $50+/track to buy out your contract.
Would you say you do a lot of that then? In enterprise sales (which is doesn't seem like this is), no one pays full list price, the only question is how much of a discount you can negotiate. Presumably if you've got 1000 tracks to get copyright for, you're not paying anywhere near $50/track.
I did that a few times and now just go to competitors instead. I don’t have time or desire to talk to a sales person and decline all their upsell options just to get the price.
Agree with you re enterprise pricing, but usually it’s differentiated quite clearly as an offering meant for high usage/scale.
Very cool from a tech perspective, I'd love to hear how you are putting these together, I assume there's some breakdown by track that's mixed on the fly but that's a wild guess.
From a creator perspective... meh. Might be good if you're a singer but not a musician, I suppose, and it'll bring the floor for demos up for sure. I'd never use it, because I enjoy the process of making things. The process is really more fun than the results.
__
This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week and you would feel no need of anything to drink.
“Why are you selling those?” asked the little prince.
“Because they save a tremendous amount of time,” said the merchant.
“Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes every week.”
“And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?”
“Anything you like…”
“As for me,” said the little prince to himself, “If I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.”
So I generated a few songs using the same template, and while the songs sound OKish - each next one generated from the same template sounded VERY similiar - some sonics and sequences were the same, but they sound like nearly the same songs. So, while it looks like it is making unique music per each generation - the uniqueness of the music is likely made to escape being fingerprinted as the same song. A person, listening to all of the songs that I made, would likely say - "Didn't I just hear that song?" After hearing the first one. It's not like it's the same genre, it's a pitch shift here a filter cut off there, a sequence randomize there - and poof - new song.
A machine that can spew out shit music that we are already drenched in. Great.
In a less cynical tone, I hope tools like this have the social effect of turning people away from the same old formulaic derivative genre productions and towards music created from the soul with meaning and emotions. Instead of this music created to sell advertising like 99% of what mainstream radio plays..
The vast majority of very popular music is still created with emotions (even when those are forced). Human element is still critical, and I think will remain so for a very long time.
Algorithms have been able to spit out a cohesive sequence of notes for decades, that did not change anything in the music industry. Adding better production to it is far from enough to turn this into something that people would connect with.
Not many knobs to turn. You pick genre, subgenre, key, major/minor, and bpm. No inputs for timbres or moods or really anything else. You make something, and if you don't like it you remake it.
Super excited for these kinds of tools, but so far this doesn't look like a good creative tool, just a replacement for generic background music.
The awful miss-representation of what this tool is in the intro video.
“You know that tune that has been stuck in your head? Set it free!” - by… not actually being able to compose or select or affect the melody or the harmony?
You can pick the genre and the key. Is that the “tune” that has been stuck in your head: “hip-hop in A minor”?
Oof. So if you use this stuff on your YouTube/Twitch stream, you're locking yourself into a membership with them forever, or else you have to delete your old recordings.