My first post! AI music agaaaaain?

Honestly, I'm struggling to know what to write about! This is so weird! On the one hand, I am nervous about putting this out there on the internet for everyone to see, but on the other, I feel like nobody will actually see this in the sea of content that already exists (aside from family and the friends that are susceptible to bribery).

Maybe I'll start by talking about the strange news I heard recently, and tie it into something that's quite topical for me at the moment. It looks like there's finally an ethical AI music generator on the market! I watched Matt Wolfe's weekly AI News roundup where he talked about ElevenLabs' new AI music model "Music v2" that promises to be "trained on licensed data and cleared for commercial use", as Mr Wolfe put it. I can't put into words just how tempted I was to try it out, but if you've watched my YouTube video "One Year On" you'll know why I hesitated. I'd just closed my chapter on AI music about 10 days before learning about this new ethical tool.

So instead, I went over to the ElevenLabs' own announcement to verify the claims, and there it was again in black and white. So I started wondering if this was as groundbreaking as it seemed to me. Cue the rabbit hole! I won't go into everything I read, but the closest thing I found to ElevenLabs' offering was Stable Audio by Stability AI. As I write this, the tool sounds familiar, but I can't remember why I didn't start using it instead of Suno, because it's been around since 2023. But something I have learned since looking into it again is that artists were given the chance to opt out of letting their music train the model. That's certainly better than indiscriminately grabbing music and using it to train a model, but I imagine some people may have missed the memo. At least they are compensated though...

I couldn't find anything on ElevenLabs' site about how they tackle the fact that some artists may not want their music to train AI models, but I did find something that made me very hopeful. An August 2025 TechCrunch article about ElevenLabs Music (the first version). A representative from Kobalt, one of the digital platforms that have a deal with ElevenLabs, said that the artists voluntarily opt-in to let their music be licensed to train AI models. Music to my ears, if you'll pardon the pun!! I presume (or maybe just hope) the same applies to the other ElevenLabs partners, and also applies to the new Music v2 offering, but I couldn't find anything definitive.

This doesn't mean I'm going to get back on the AI Music bandwagon though. At least not as intensely as before. Maybe I'll test out Music v2 when I've completed some of the projects I started after the music flame was extinguished. Let's see if that revives some of the passion that I had.