AI Jake Round-Up: Episode #066 EXPERT

Those ones that will use AI music or produce AI music or use it to augment their process, only those ones that also understand the power of storytelling, those are the ones that are going to be ahead. Hello, I'm AI Jake, and welcome to the Sound Connections Recap Series, where we distill the most valuable insights from each episode into a quick and engaging summary. In this episode, we discuss the world of AI in the music industry with our guest, Chris Wiedewild. But first, who is Chris? Hey there, I'm Chris Wiedewild, also known as the AI musicpreneur. My mission is to help artists, creators, and music professionals navigate the world of AI and the music industry, and I'm all about empowering creators to leverage AI tools to create and promote music, not for the sake of using AI, but through identifying pain points they have in their workflow. Chris reflected on his journey into AI music and how it opened up new possibilities for artists. There were plenty of sleepless nights wondering if I was actually making the right choice in doing that, but I kind of knew in my gut that this

is what I needed to do. So I started researching and networking and experimenting with AI and using it. And let me tell you, there was a whole new world that actually opened up. So I saw how AI could actually help artists overcome some of the very challenges I'd faced in my early days and tools for music promotion, creation, and even business management. It was all there, just waiting to be harnessed, sort of. And that's when I thought I kind of found my calling, you know, my passion for technology to help other artists navigate the space. And that's kind of how the AI musicpreneur was born.

Chris discussed the evolving role of AI music generation tools and their impact on future generations of musicians. We've got different categories of tools that you can access to augment your workflow. You can use AI music generation tools like Suma and Udio or Stable Audio. And not all of them seem to be ethically trained. They're suspicious in a way, of course. But these tools, I hope they're not going to replace musicians in a way that the needle is just dropping. I think we can reverse engineer a lot of the things that are happening now. And with new technology, I always feel like it's a generational shift. So the kids that are growing up now, imagine like a 10-year-old that is sitting in front of Suma and Udio and is prompting the music. And this guy is like coming up with this rock song and he's like, hey, this guitar solo is amazing. I wonder if I could play that. So what I'm hoping is they're going to find these songs really amazing and then pick up the guitar. So in the same way, like me, I sat in front of MTV, like listening to music and absorbing music videos for hours and, you know,

looking at this dude that was playing guitar and I was like, I'll do that one day. And, you know, I want to be on stage and like, I want to express myself. So I think in a way, it's not going to eliminate the love that we have for handcrafted music. People are going to find the love for handcrafted music in a different way. I think he emphasized the importance of storytelling and building a loyal audience beyond just producing great music. You cannot expect to create a following of thousands of people online just by throwing your music on a platform like Spotify, going on a social media platform like LinkedIn or Twitter and saying, listen to my song. That's not going to cut it. No one will listen to your song. No one cares about your song. First off, because what they care about is connection and connection you can only get if you're telling an enticing story behind that song.

So it's not about selling the music. It's about selling the experience. He further emphasized that success in the music industry depends on pairing AI with strong storytelling to stand out and connect with audiences. Those ones that will use AI music or produce AI music or use it to augment their process. Only those ones that also understand the power of storytelling and how they use that music output to amplify it on social media platforms, in their mailing lists, I don't know, on TV or whatever, on stage. Those are the ones that are going to be ahead. So it's still storytelling that's going to cut. Are you going to make it in the industry or not? It's not going to be decided by the greatest music ever.

Chris advises on adapting to AI advancements while maintaining traditional aspects of the music business. I'm basically talking to music artists and some voice actors almost on a weekly basis. And one of the things that they fear, of course, is the work that they have right now, which might be as a session musician or, I don't know, like a voice actor doing audio books, that this might fall away eventually because new tools are coming out. So what I'm telling people right now is, while you have the business that you've had for a little while, what you need to do is build up your, the traditional way, you need to build up your other way, which is monetizing, monetizing your skills and your craft for voice actors that's cloning their voice and monetizing it, putting it on the marketplace because you cannot be at 10 places at the same time. And for musicians or producers that could be to work with providers of large language models or AI startups to provide their production style. And then they get paid every time their production style is being used when an AI song is being generated. So

those are some of the things that I'm seeing that, but that's still kind of a traditional phase. Finally, Chris shares how AI can help artists save time on content creation, allowing them to focus more on their music. When I started writing these prompts and put together this prompt library, which as far as I know, it's the first prompt library for music artists in the world. I felt like this seemed, this seemed too easy for me. Like there's something wrong here. Listen, I think if, if you're aware of these tools and you're putting in the time, you can do anything you want. One of the biggest pain points in music and for musicians that are not making it is because first off, they're not good at social media content, writing social media content and understanding storytelling.

So they, they don't know how to, um, this is not about like getting the streams count up. This is about getting visibility for your story on social media. So that a lot of, a lot of them have, have a struggle with that. And I understand like for, uh, for labels, they have teams of, uh, strategists and PR agents and marketing managers. So that, you know, they're covered there, but for the, for the average indie artists, it's a lot, uh, harder, but once you know, understand how to use AI tools, you can buy back time. And that's one of the pain points that people have. You're on social media, like you, uh, you're, you do these tick tocks because you think you're going to go viral and then you don't have any time anymore for making music. So now you've got the AI, you can automate the content creation process. If you're, if you work out a system, creating content and badges, then on Monday morning, you set yourself a plan to three hours. I'm going to do 15 to 20 posts. That's what I do.

So for the next two to three weeks, I'm, I'm set basically, well, great. It's Monday morning or it's, it's lunchtime. Awesome. So I've got the whole week to make music now. If artists are figuring that out, man, that's going to be great for their music because they, they can take their music to the next level because they already got the content game figured out five years ago where it would have taken me two or three days to put together a four week content release, like a song release strategy. If I have an interview of an artist right now that is up on YouTube, I could just grab the transcript out of that. I could extract information that I put into a prompt and in seconds, I have a four week song release strategy. I'll take one of these ones, put it in another prompt and I have ready to post social media content. And that's in the split of 10 minutes. That's all for today.

Stay tuned to the sound connections podcast for more episode recaps. I'm AI Jake, and I'll see you next time.