A contestant from COMBO’s recent Songwriting Contest asked about his scores, the Songwriters Showcase, and had a question about us allowing AI (artificial intelligence) written songs into the competition. A very interesting conversation ensued which also coincided with a conversation on Facebook regarding the AI tool Suno. We’ve added both here and, if you’d like to add your thoughts, please send them to info@coloradomusic.org (Edited to take out identifying names, etc.)
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Really enjoyed checking out the top ten songs. Lots of good stuff in there including a deserving friend! I have to be honest though, I was a little surprised that an AI-generated song was in the competition as well as 5 of the top 10 spots. That just sits a little strangely for me.
What were the rules about using AI in the competition? I’m not able to find them anymore.
Good question. We really didn’t have rules regarding AI this time around but we will have for next year.
The songwriter in question submitted several songs. Some were basically just him & his guitar so the style of writing was similar. He entered a bunch of songs 2 years ago and, at that time, we suggested that he get some pro musicians and a singer to record his songs for demos to submit to publishers, etc. So we asked him about a couple of his entries this year, including the two top songs (he actually got 5 in the top 20 but we have a limit of 2 — old rule due to us making compilation CDs at one time) whose production was so much better. He said that he’d used AI (Suno) to produce them but swore that the lyrics & melody were his, not AI. Having examples from the 2024 entries, we believed him. AND since we really don’t judge on “production” — only on the lyrics & melody, and we had no “AI Rules,” we decided to go ahead and give him the win.
What happens now will depend on the publishers, music supervisors, record companies, and writing companies that may pick up on any of the songs we submitted to them. They may “cry foul” and dismiss his songs for consideration. Or they may take the lyrics & melody and re-record them with live musicians for submission to movies, television, and commercial companies for their use. I’m going to say that they will re-record them anyway because the tracks that [our guy] submitted were incomplete, not really good for radio, and certainly not good enough for the sound production used in more professional settings such as movies and tv shows.
They would do the same with yours. Who knows? They may like your song and will want to do something with it. Most of them take a good song and “fix” it somehow anyway. They’ll want co-write credits on it so that they make more money. Kind of rotten but you’ll still get more than you would have before!
I hope this answer helps. I understand the sting. Besides, there were more songs entered that used AI but they did not score 4.0 or above anyway so there was no problem.
Barb
Thanks for the thoughtful response, Barb. What a strange world we’re living in these days. Hope you read this all with a good tone. It’s not meant to be accusatory, just a conversation. There’s no sting, wasn’t expecting to win the first songwriting competition I entered, was just very surprised to hear an AI song had won [we deemed the song not fully done by AI – only the production]. I write a lot of music and aspire to delve deeper into the sync licensing world so your wisdom about how that works is very valuable and appreciated.
Out of curiosity, I gave Suno the lyrics and a recording of the song that I submitted. Here is what it came up with if you’re also curious. I’ve not used Suno for original music before. I wouldn’t classify it as having had no artistic input or affect on the melody or overall interpretation of the song. Hard to imagine that not having an effect on the judges. Again, not being argumentative here or complaining I didn’t do better. I don’t want anything and am grateful to be included in the showcase. Hopefully just providing helpful feedback to take into consideration for next year’s competition rules.
Anyway, I’ll look forward to meeting you at the event. I’ll buy you a beer and we can talk about the good parts of music in a more fun setting!
Since I know so little about AI (right now), can you tell me how you learned that some of the songs had been entered as AI recordings and not “human” recordings? We’re trying to figure out how to solve this problem before we start the next contest.
Remember: We only judge on the lyrics & melody, not on the production.
Thank you for helping us out!
Barb
Initially I just wanted to listen to the top songs. I just googled the ones on your list to find them posted somewhere. I can usually just hear if it’s an AI song. I’m not sure how to describe that really. Too polished and perfect while lacking a human feeling or real story. Generic lyrics and/or composition. Sounds like every song of that genre you’ve heard. I’m not meaning to say these all describe songs in this competition, just general things I hear that flag it as AI.
I thought pretty quickly the winner was an AI song. Polished and familiar. Sent it to a few musician friends to confirm and everyone agreed. The youtube video further confirmed the suspicion as it is flagged as AI generated. The description says that just the images are AI and that it’s performed by Ima Noman and Ira Noman. But those names are a word play meaning, “I’m No Man.” Gemini actually pointed that out when I tried to google those names. It thought I was making a joke. The Youtube channel says that these two are new singers in their lineup of artists and that they are a label but they don’t appear to exist. At that point it seemed pretty obvious.
If you’re still not sure you can run it through your own AI. Hive.ai specializes in identifying music made with AI. GPT can actually do some analysis as well. You can have AI analyze the lyrics for originality or do the background research for you.
I know you don’t judge production but Suno made changes to my melody and phrasing was my point. It did a bit of that rewrite you mentioned was part of the placement process. It shortened it by :20, removed breaks and tempo changes, changed vocal melody lines, changed the genre slightly. It made the song substantially different than my intent.
Anywho, I’m no expert. Just my two cents. And I guess to be more direct, I would not enter a competition in the future that allowed such entries. Again, please don’t read that as being harsh or accusatory. I really don’t mean to offend you or anyone else. Just my opinion as a musician. 🙂
Thank you. That was very helpful.
We may have to find another way to raise funds if we can’t come up with a solution to this problem. We encourage musicians to write their own songs but this is a world-wide issue.
We had already decided to not allow AI songs but it becomes a matter of trust for the songwriters who enter to say, as our guy did, that he wrote the lyrics & melody but only used the AI in the production because, as I mentioned, we had already suggested that he get a better singer for his songs if he wanted to use them as demos. (The guitar work on his other/previous entries was good — he does play the guitar). However, as a retiree, he said he did not have the money to hire people to play and/or record his songs.
Barb
From a Facebook conversation in Colorado Tribute and Cover bands:
I’m posting anonymously in case someone is in this group.
What would you do if you had a friend and fellow musician that has become addicted to making music on AI/Suno. He is actually convinced he wrote the music because he cloned his voice and supposedly wrote the lyrics. He’s using verbiage that he “released an album”, wrote the music, etc.. it’s even on Spotify. He seriously thinks this is okay and I’m concerned for him and his reputation. He’s actually a great singer and piano player but even the voice is not him. Sadly, people are putting encouraging comments about it on his social media as well.
Let me know your thoughts please!
Mercer Sr. Chris: SMH…. Damn shame.
Drusilla Steele: Eek
Rick DT: I’d make fun of this person. That’s what friends do when they’re screwing up.
Eric Fischer: Be careful, the admins and mods know who post anonymously and they have been known to use that power against anonymous posters
Tom Parrott: Mind your business and let whatever happens happen. The truth always comes out. People need to be held accountable for their actions. That’s how we learn.
Jock Mirow: Sadly, I know people who are doing the same thing in the art space: two lines of typed instructions does not make you Rembrandt. Even if you print it out, make it big and frame it.
Martin Epp: Who cares? There’s phonies everywhere in every aspect of life.
Bill Rupert: Basically what studios have been doing for years…it can be done at home now. Why does this concern you?
Scott Uhl: The Suno life isn’t for me. But musicians should focus more on creating their music and perfecting their craft over being concerned about what others are doing on their music journey.
Dani Alkaid: A true artist can articulate what they hear. AI is what is “heard,” because by the time AI has generated it, it’s in the past and not music that was heard in the artist’s head or body before the music existed in the public plane.
It’s unfortunate to see so many talented people ignore what is in them to see what can be “generated.”
Don’t forget who you are and always strive to allow that space for your creativity to shine through. It’s a gift. Don’t put AI above it.
Paul Baker: Take them behind a barn, little peanut butter on a shotgun should do the trick..
Barbara R. Segal: How does this affect you? It seems that you have more of a problem with it than your friend.
Dutch Opperman: None of my business
Joie Rey Cohen: (sick to my stomach emoji)
Anonymous member: I’m not sure I explained well enough. He didn’t write the lyrics, didn’t create the melodies, it’s not his voice, the “album” was created in a few days and “released “ on Spotify. Like the whole thing is completely fake, not real at all. He even sent we a song he “wrote” for me. If you asked him to perform even one of these songs, he could not. I’m surprised people don’t think this is weird and possibly even a little unhealthy. He’s posting about what inspired songwriting etc. Idk, I think this is just wrong. It’s insulting to real songwriters who put the work in and everyone in our industry who has seen it is laughing at him.
Jeff Lane: Songwriter here (I’m this group to spy on some friends in Denver cover bands).
I would let it go. Songs written entirely by Suno are not copyrightable in the U.S. I have a friend who is now a “songwriter”… released an album in a day or so doing the exact same. It is so unlistenable – I couldn’t get through one track. Just think of all the “I sharted” tracks that started showing up on YouTube a while back. If you saw them, you probably already forgot about them.
I’d ask yourself why you’re so worried about it, because you shouldn’t be. Kids recognize AI slop and swipe left (or right, or whatever it is). If anything, I’d mock your friend as any good friend would.
Jake Kantor: Take him to AI rehab duh
Nick Lockwood: AI psychosis is no joke
Dave Stremel: When a friend sends me a demo of a song he wrote and it sounds like Mutt Lange slaved over it for a year, I know it’s AI. Kinda bums me out but it is what it is. We are not putting the Genie back in the bottle.
Doug Bohm: This is likely the wrong group for this discussion. Musicians that hate tributes and cover bands are the most anti-AI. There’s a lot of reactive people among them. I get it. I did 5 albums with my first band and any time we covered someone it was completely sarcastic and in jest.
Generally, the tribute/cover scene is more forgiving on the flyer design side of things. We are doing a copy of other people’s songs, and mocking up a flyer based on that bands album covers or famous posters is an homage to the acts. So they don’t die on this hill.
That said, many in this group have never wrote and recorded an original song. It’s not their thing. They enjoy getting better and tighter at doing the songs the way people remember.
From a recording and engineering side of things, it can be a tool for PROFESSIONAL producers and songwriters. It integrates well with hardware and digital audio workstations so it’s not going away.
The issue is the billionaire tech bros, and the AI coders that make this stuff are generally idiots and have very little undertstanding of human interaction, vibes, reading a crowd, emotional intelligence. Maybe AI will figure it out on it’s own, but the humans around it will always be lame AF and people that are communicating with it in place of true collaborators are in need of some counseling.
Barb Dye: The Colorado Music Business Organization COMBO runs a songwriting contest every year. This year’s winner swore he wrote the lyrics & melody (really does sound like his entries in previous years) but that he used AI in the production as he was not a strong singer and did not have the money to go into a studio. So now we have to come up with someway to run the contest with having only “humans” writing songs. I’m going to be reading this post very seriously to see what ideas y’all come up with.
Barry McCann: Simple. Have the songwriters perform the song live. Performance is a large part of songwriting. The song may not sound as good as the final studio recorded production, but you’ll know if I’m for real. No quantize. No autotune. No fake instruments. That’s real songwriting, not piecing together midi beats, assigning instruments or being able to describe what you want and having an LLM make it. Maybe you should create a new contest for AI written music. It’s a different animal.
Barb Dye: Barry McCann Good idea. Actually, we’re holding our annual Songwriters Showcase on Monday, Nov. 16th at Bar 404 where some of the winning songwriters will be performing their entries.
Ash Conn: Suno can be a great tool to add instrumental pieces to a song when you’re stuck. If you already have the song written and most parts charted, it’s good for putting a song together when you don’t have a full band handy to play it out . I would never suggest allowing suno to write your songs for you. This is an artform, I feel like that takes the power of art out of it.
Don Kalil: Well, for the$0.0010 the individual may get from “their” song for each download, let it fly and have a good laugh about it.
Jen VolcanoLife Arquero: I moved permanently to Ometepe just before Covid. I do not play instruments besides percussion/ritmo. I cannot afford to pay musicians. I live alone in a jungle on a volcano. (One of my songs is about this.) And I do not have time or resources to learn all the instruments I am using. I wrote my own lyrics. Sang them into SUNO. I made the arrangements. I wrote the detailed prompts using my own refined & curated algo. I did the cover art in Canva, which uses AI, but I choose the look, vibe, fonts, placement, animation, etc for my videos. I have played and/or streamed the songs live, acapella or with an accompanist, so there is proof they are my creations. I produce my songs in male/female voices and 2 languages. I sing them in both languages. Soon they will be released with my own voice. The songs are my art pieces collab with AI. I own the copyrights. My song, vocal, bilingual & poetry students are now creating AI collab works too. I will not stop writing songs because “real” musicians want me to. This has been my dream since I was a child & SUNO has provided me an opportunity that does not require me to go into debt or deal with tempramental, addicted, entitled humans who want to distort my vision. My songs are [mine.]
Barry McCann: Encourage him to go out on tour with his new album.
Tracy Reynolds: Listen, this is going to be part of the future. Accept it or don’t, but he’s creating art, regardless of whether you agree with how he’s doing it. If people like it and are enjoying it, then let him do his thing. Art comes in many forms, and you don’t have to agree with all of them to appreciate that others do. ❤
Heather Wolf: So he is “cheating’? Let him.
Gary Patton: Intervention!
Steve Pavey: I actually have some stuff digitized and loaded onto my laptop from WAY back, between about 1969 and mid-1973. Some of it I cringe listening to now and some of it sounds good. The difference between then and now is that back then I had to collaborate with other people. I could sing them a melody to go with a lyric but I couldn’t write the staff and couldn’t play anything but drums, congas, timbales etc – no keys or strings or horns.
Now with AI, such as Suno, I can do the same thing but without needing someone else to write it on staff paper. I can upload electronic drums and percussion, sing bass lines, keyboard lines, horn lines, guitar lines(while playing air guitar!) and sing the vocals to lyrics that I’ve written.
Here’s the interesting part for me: after doing that, I can then tell Suno to give the same song, that I have outlined the melodies for, as a funk tune or R&B, piano ballad etc. I can then mix and match arrangement ideas, and I CAN honestly say that the melody and lyrics are MY original ideas, not a computer program.
I was curious about what Suno would do with just basic prompts, rather than lyrics and melodies I wrote. My experience was that Suno is terrible at generating lyrics from prompts. Depending on genre, it ranges from bad to fair to very good, although I have yet to have Suno come up with a melody as good as what I come up with. And lyric -wise, it sucks.
Photo: Suno program | From the Suno page | https://suno.com
