As the music industry wrestles with how to incorporate, and value, AI work, a third of artists are already using it for some form of inspiration.A new study from the Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music found that 33 percent of respondents “use AI to generate initial ideas, melodies, or reference tracks that are later reworked.” Perhaps even more surprisingly, a number nearly as large put it in the final product — about 26 percent of artists “use AI for full backing tracks in finished work.”“Had we done this study 18 months ago, these numbers would have been a lot lower,” Mark Ethier, who helped run the research, told The Hollywood Reporter, “and from that perspective it’s pretty shocking.”A somewhat smaller percentage, 18 percent, will play with the tools in the creation process but keep them out of the released track.
But in contrast to conventional wisdom newer musicians were less likely to use AI: artists who were “just starting out” used AI in “any way” at a rate of 56 percent while “full time” creators did so all the way to the tune of 92 percent.The study was conducted by the Berklee Emerging Artistic Technology Lab (BEATL), where Ethier serves as executive director, as part of the AIMS: AI Music Summit the school just held on its campus Wednesday-Friday and focused on AI music in video, as opposed to artists recording only sounds; the numbers of course could be different in that population.The Berklee study was conducted among more than 1,000 people associated with the music business, from artists to marketers, music supervisors and video creators.
