For Anand Roy, making music used to imply jamming together with his progressive rock band primarily based out of Bangalore. Right this moment, the one-time metalhead now makes music with a easy faucet of a button by his start-up Wubble AI, which permits customers to generate, edit, and customise royalty-free music in over 60 completely different genres.
Roy began Wubble together with his co-founder, Shaad Sufi, in 2024, from a small workplace in Singapore’s central enterprise district. Since then, his platform has generated tunes for international giants like Microsoft, HP, L’Oreal and NBCUniversal. They’re even used on the Taipei Metro, the place AI-generated tunes soothe harried commuters.
Roy, nonetheless, thinks Wubble is a method to repair a music sector that’s already damaged. Artists are awarded micro-payments on streaming websites like Spotify, which solely works for probably the most well-known artists.
Roy spent nearly twenty years at Disney, the place he oversaw operations at its networks and studios in main cities like Tokyo, Mumbai and Los Angeles. He stated his time main Disney’s music group opened his eyes to the tedious means of music licensing.
“So many licensing deals were not going through because of the quantum of paperwork, the amount of red tape, and how expensive, complex and convoluted the entire process was,” he says. But, the incumbent music corporations “don’t have a lot of motivation to streamline processes.”
Wubble is attempting one thing completely different, collaborating instantly with musicians and paying them for the uncooked materials used to coach Wubble’s AI. “If we’re looking at Latino hip hop, we’ll go to a recording studio in Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro, and tell them we need ten hours of Latino music,” Roy says. Wubble then negotiates a deal and gives a one-time fee for his or her work, at charges Roy argues are extra aggressive than different corporations providing music streaming companies.
He admits {that a} one-time fee isn’t an ideal answer, nonetheless, and provides that he’s presently exploring how applied sciences like blockchain can uncover new methods to compensate musicians for his or her assist coaching Wubble’s AI fashions.
“If you’re curating your data sets, and compensating and giving credit to the artists that are being utilized to train your model, you won’t find yourself in a lawsuit,” he explains. “It’s a better business practice, just in terms of your long-term viability as a commercial actor.”
Textual content-to-speech technology
Wubble presently gives simply instrumental music and audio results, however Roy thinks voice is the subsequent step. By end-January, Roy says his platform will supply AI-generated voiceovers created from written scripts, to cater to purchasers who require narrative-led audio tracks. “So, the entire audio content workflow for a business can be housed on Wubble,” he concludes proudly.
AI music startups are popping up world wide, hoping to make use of the highly effective new know-how to make the method of making tunes and songs simpler. Some, like Suno, cater in producing full songs, whereas others like Moises supply instruments for artists.
In Asia, too, Korean AI startup Supertone gives voice synthesis and cloning, utilizing samples to generate new vocal tracks. The startup, based by Kyogu Lee, was acquired by HYBE, the leisure firm behind Okay-pop sensation BTS, and now operates as its subsidiary. Supertone even debuted a totally digital Okay-pop woman group, SYNDI8, in 2024.
At Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore final yr, Lee stated he noticed musical artists as “co-creators,” not simply by way of licensing their voices, but in addition asking for his or her assist in refining the know-how.
AI “will democratize the creative process, so every creator or artist can experiment with this new technology to explore and experiment with new ideas,” he advised the viewers.
Roy, from Wubble, additionally sees AI as a method to make it simpler for extra folks to get entangled in music creation.
“Music creation has always been a privilege. It’s been the domain of those who have the time and resources to learn an instrument,” he says. “We believe that every human being should be able to create—and AI enables that now.”
