The Future of AI: The Band Plays On

(Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the Future of AI series)

Napster rolled the dice against the music industry in 1999.

As I wrote about, it allowed for quantifiable media to matchmake content to specific niche demographics. It turned the media into a data mirror. Not only are we peeking into fictional persons lives and watching them play out, the content provider are peering back into our lives and decide how to write the story to keep you hooked. This is how music services like Spotify and Tidal profit.

However, Spotify recently announced some significant changes to its rules for paying royalties to artists working with the platform. Starting in 2024, Spotify will no longer pay for songs with a small number of streams. It will also increase the minimum length required for noise recordings to be eligible for payments.

These rules are to prevent those who were gaming the system by putting noise on the platform to get payments for plays.

Another change impacts noise recordings. Spotify has found that some split audio with white or static noise, both of which are becoming quite popular, into multiple short tracks. That way, they put these audios in long playlists without listeners noticing so that they earn “outsized payments.”

That means, Spotify will be increasing the minimum length of audio labeled as functional noise recordings to two minutes in order to be eligible for royalty payments.

Spotify is considered one of the platforms that pay artists the least, giving them around $0.0033 per stream. Apple Music pays $0.01 per stream, while Tidal pays $0.013. Hopefully, with this change, artists will be better off per stream on Spotify.

But for those new bands and artists who are legitimately putting out new music and want to get heard, how can a band or an artist drive streams, make better quality music, and make a living when Spotify requires songs to have at least 1,000 streams per year for the artist to be paid?

Enter Artificial Intelligence.

My friend Joe Vangieri, CEO and founder of DigiTrax.AI here in Knoxville TN has also disrupted the music industry before.??

In?August, DigiTrax.AI?was honored with the “Technology Advancement Award” at Hip-Hop’s 50th-anniversary event in New York City.? ?

Joe Vangieri created the first “PCDJ”, the first digital DJ software in the late 90s that was later sold to Numark and Pioneer and has evolved to Virtual DJ - that all DJs use today.?

Joe also brought karaoke?to the United States in the early 80s - and then went on to own the majority of karaoke publishing rights.??

And now launching this week, Knoxville's?DigiTrax.AI?KR38R PRO allows musicians to create the music they want to create without limitations. The most important aspect is that all of the output is ethically sourced and generated from human creative thought.

The karaoke music that Joe brought to the United States nearly 40 years ago is now training the AI models on how to create the next monster hit.

Artificial Intelligence can augment human creativity. A.I. doesn't have to steal, scrape and regurgitate what's already been created.

KR38R was born from the idea of jamming with the members of your band or collaboration with others in a music studio.

As a musician you often come up with a cool hook or melody so you sing it (which is why they created the KR38R voice app) or play your progression and in front of other musicians and then work together to create the whole song - the chorus, stanzas, the bridge, or in the case of dance music, the drop.

KR38R ("Creator) allows you to always have that band to jam with. It is a musical collaborator you can always generate ideas with.

If video killed the radio star, Artificial Intelligence can allow the band to play on - infinitely.

DigiTrax AI's first artificial intelligence (AI) music production software plugin tool KR38R PRO. (”Creator”) uses DigiTrax’s seven patents in artificial intelligence to do music composition. The tool gives music producers endless hyper-realistic compositional capabilities instantly, while maintaining complete control over their productions.

If you click on the website for KR38R Pro you will notice the dice icon that is floating over the brain.

This is a reference to Musikalisches Würfelspiel (German for "musical dice game"). This was a system for using dice to randomly generate music from precomposed options. These games were quite popular throughout Western Europe in the 18th century.

So randomly generating music from other works is not new. In fact it has been happening for centuries.

The difference with the KR38R Pro is its algorithm checks the music progression of all music it was trained on (karaoke) to make sure you are not copying or stealing the works of other artists.

The culmination of seven years of refining human-AI collaboration, KR38R PRO utilizes music theory—the language of songwriters and musicians. Parameters like key, chord sequence, beats per bar, and more prompt the composition engine, providing instantaneous creative possibilities. Compatible with leading digital audio workstations such as Pro Tools, Ableton, Cubase, and FL Studio, KR38R PRO integrates into existing workflows.

KR38R also helps the singer hit the notes that they want to sing. However, KR38R is not T-Pain auto-tune.

As Matt Ramsey, singer, songwriter, and music coach teaches eight ways to sing on pitch - focus on steps number three, four and eight:

1. Select the note that you’re trying to sing.
2. Play the note on a piano, guitar, digital tuner or play the recording that contains the note you want to sing.
3. Listen to the note carefully and try to “picture” the note in your mind.
4. Sing the note, trying to match your voice to the pitch you played.
5. Listen to your voice and correct the pitch as you sing.
6. If your note is flat, you will need to bring your voice slightly higher.
7. If your note is sharp, you will need to bring your voice slightly lower.
8. Once you have found the correct pitch, try to remember the “sensation” of singing in tune.

KR38R Voice App allows your voice to hit all the notes so you can "picture", "match" and remember the "sensation" of singing the correct note. Consider KR38R your new music coach.

Now musicians who want to become better musicians, better singers, and gain speed on music streaming services such as Spotify and Tidal can create top-tier music, make a living doing what they love, and take a risk on themselves.

What's going to happen when you click the dice?