Stability AI, gunning for a hit, launches an AI-powered music generator

Stable Audio is far from the first model to leverage latent diffusion in music generation, it’s worth pointing out. But it’s one of the more polished in terms of musicality — and fidelity.

To train Stable Audio, Stability AI partnered with the commercial music library AudioSparx, which supplied a collection of songs — around 800,0000 in total — from its catalog of largely independent artists. Steps were taken to filter out vocal tracks, according to Newton-Rex — presumably over the potential ethical and copyright quandries around “deepfaked” vocals.

Somewhat surprisingly, Stability isn’t filtering out prompts that could land it in legal crosshairs. While tools like Google’s MusicLM throw an error message if you type something like “along the lines of Barry Manilow,” Stable Audio doesn’t — at least not now.

When asked point blank if someone could use Stable Audio to generate songs in the style of popular artists like Harry Styles or The Eagles, Newton-Rex said that the tool’s limited by the music in its training data, which doesn’t include music from major labels. That may be so. But a cursory search of AudioSparx’s library turns up thousands of songs that themselves are “in the style of” artists like The Beatles, AC/DC and so on, which seems like a loophole to me.

“Stable Audio is designed primarily to generate instrumental music, so misinformation and vocal deepfakes aren’t likely to be an issue,” Newton-Rex said. “In general, however, we’re actively working to combat emerging risks in AI by implementing content authenticity standards and watermarking in our imaging models so that users and platforms can identify AI-assisted content generated through our hosted services … We plan to implement labeling of this nature in our audio models too.”

Increasingly, homemade tracks that use generative AI to conjure familiar sounds that can be passed off as authentic, or at least close enough, have been going viral. Just last month, a Discord community dedicated to generative audio released an entire album using an AI-generated copy of Travis Scott’s voice — attracting the wrath of the label representing him.

Music labels have been quick to flag AI-generated tracks to streaming partners like Spotify and SoundCloud, citing intellectual property concerns — and they’ve generally been victorious. But there’s still a lack of clarity on whether “deepfake” music violates the copyright of artists, labels and other rights holders.

And unfortunately for artists, it’ll be a while before clarity arrives. A federal judge ruled last month that AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted. But the U.S. Copyright Office hasn’t taken a firm stance yet, only recently beginning to seek public input on copyright issues as they relate to AI.

Stability takes the view that Stable Audio users can monetize — but not necessarily copyright — their works, which is a step short of what other generative AI vendors have proposed. Last week, Microsoft announced that it would extend indemnification to protect commercial customers of its AI tools when they’re sued for copyright infringement based on the tools’ outputs.

Stability AI customers who pay $11.99 per month for the Pro tier of Stable Audio can generate 500 commercializable tracks up to 90 seconds long monthly. Free tier users are limited to 20 non-commercializable tracks at 20 seconds long per month. And users who wish to use AI-generated music from Stable Audio in apps, software or websites with more than 100,000 monthly active users have to sign up for an enterprise plan.

In the Stable Audio terms of service agreement, Stability makes it clear that it reserves the right to use both customers’ prompts and songs, as well as data like their activity on the tool, for a range of purposes, including developing future models and services. Customers agree to indemnify Stability in the event intellectual property claims are made against songs created with Stable Audio.

But, you might be wondering, will the creators of the audio on which Stable Audio was trained see even a small portion of that monthly fee? After all, Stability, as have several of its generative AI rivals, has landed itself in hot water over training models on artists’ work without compensating or informing them.

As with Stability’s more recent image-generating models, Stable Audio does have an opt-out mechanism — although the onus for the most part lies on AudioSparx. Artists had the option to remove their work from the training dataset for the initial release of Stable Audio, and about 10% chose to do so, according to AudioSparx EVP Lee Johnson.

“We support our artists’ decision to participate or not, and we’re happy to provide them with this flexibility,” Johnson said via email.

Stability’s deal with AudioSparx covers revenue sharing between the two companies, with AudioSparx letting musicians on the platform share in the profits generated by Stable Audio if they opted to participate in the initial training or decide to help train future versions of Stable Audio. It’s similar to the model being pursued by Adobe and Shutterstock with their generative AI tools, but Stability wasn’t forthcoming on the particulars of the deal, leaving unsaid how much artists can expect to be paid for their contributions.

Artists have reason to be wary, given Stability CEO Emad Mostaque’s propensity for exaggeration, dubious claims and outright mismanagement.

In April, Semafor reported that Stability AI was burning through cash, spurring an executive hunt to ramp up sales. According to Forbes, the company has repeatedly delayed or outright not paid wages and payroll taxes, leading AWS — which Stability uses for compute to train its models — to threaten to revoke Stability’s access to its GPU instances.

Stability AI recently raised $25 million through a convertible note (i.e. debt that converts to equity), bringing its total raised to over $125 million. But it hasn’t closed new funding at a higher valuation; the startup was last valued at $1 billion. Stability was said to be seeking quadruple that within the next few months, despite stubbornly low revenues and a high burn rate.

Will Stable Audio turn the company’s fortunes around? Maybe. But considering the hurdles Stability has to clear, it’s safe to say it’s a bit of a long shot.