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YouTube added a capability for select creators in the U.S. to create AI-generated songs via prompts using the vocals of artists like Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, Demi Lovato, John Legend, Sia, T-Pain, and Troye Sivan last year. Now, the company is adding a feature for select creators to remix a track by describing how they want to change the style of a song.
The video streaming platform is making select songs through its label partners available to creators for the new remix experiment.
If a creator is a part of the test group, they can select an eligible song, select the “Retstyle a track” option, and describe how they want to restyle the track. This will generate a 30-second snippet that creators can use in their Shorts.
On a support page, Google noted that the remixed sound snippet will be attributed to the original song through the Short and the Shorts audio pivot page. Plus, it will also have an appropriate label to indicate that the track was modified through AI.
YouTube released the Dream Track feature in November 2023, powered by the Lyrica music generation model developed by Deepmind. At that time, the platform also released a tool that created a track by a user just humming a tune.
“These experiments explore the potential of AI features to help artists and creators stretch their imaginations and augment their creative processes. In turn, fans will be able to connect to the creatives they love in new ways, bringing them closer together through interactive tools and experiences. All of this will help us iterate and enhance the technology, informing applications for the future,” YouTube said at that time.
To save itself from the music industry’s ire, YouTube declared last August — before releasing any of these tools — that it plans to compensate artists and rightsholders for usage of their work in AI features. To that end, the company announced a partnership with Universal Music Group (UMG) to develop a structure to pay rightsholders.
YouTube is not the only company working on providing ways for users to remix tracks. Former JioSaavn exec Gaurav Sharma is building an app called Hook, which allows users to legally remix songs that could be used to create short videos.
Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web. You can reach out to him at im[at]ivanmehta[dot]com
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