Futureverse, an AI music company co-founded by a music tech veteran Sarah Senderoff, announced the alpha launch of Jen, the text-to-music AI model. Available for anyone to use WebsiteJen-1 is an AI model that can be safely used by creators since it was trained on 40 different fully licensed catalogs (and then verified against 150 million songs).
The company's co-founders, Senderoff and Aaron McDonaldfirst teased Jen's launch by publishing a research paper and conducting an interview with Advertising sign in August 2023. In the interview, Senderoff explained that “Jen is spelled JEN because she's designed to be your friend who goes in the studio with you. It's a tool.”
Some of Jen's features, available at alpha release, include the ability to create 10-45 second song snippets using text prompts. To extend the song to a full 3:30 length, you can use the 'continue' feature to request again and add additional segments to the song. Emphasizing her “commitment to transparency, compensation and copyright recognition,” as her press release states, Jen has made many of her inner workings publicly available through her research work, including that the model uses “latent diffusion”. The same process used by Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2 and Imagen to create high quality images. (It's unclear which AI music models also use “latent diffusion,” since many don't share this information publicly).
Additionally, when creating projects with Jen, users receive a JENUINE token, which verifies that the song was made with Jen at a specific timestamp. To be more specific, this token is a cryptographic hash that is then recorded on The Root Network blockchain.
In an effort to work more closely with the music industry, Futureverse brought in the founder/CEO of APG Mike Karen as a founding partner in the fall of 2023. While its mid-2024 release date makes it a late entrant to the music AI space, the company attributes this delay to ensuring that its 40 licenses were secured.
At this time, Futureverse declined to comment on which songs are included in the overall training catalog for Jen, but a representative for the company says that among those 40 catalogs it includes a number of production libraries. Futureverse says it's also in talks with all major music labels and will soon secure more licenses for Jen's beta release, which is expected in September 2024. Some licensing partners could be announced as soon as 4-6 weeks from now. alpha release.
In September, Futureverse has more features planned, including larger original song scores, inpainting (the process of filling in missing or blank parts of a piece of music), and a feature the company calls “StyleFilter,” allowing users to upload an audio clip an instrument or track, then change its genre or timbre at the touch of a button.
Also in September, Futureverse plans to launch a beat marketplace called R3CORD to go along with JEN. This will allow JEN users to upload what they produce with JEN to the market and sell the works to others.
So far, the US Copyright Office has advised that creations created entirely by artificial intelligence are not protected by copyright. Instead, they are considered “public domain” works and do not qualify to earn rights such as copyright, but any human additions made to an AI-assisted work can be protected by copyright. (Already, this guidance has been applied in the music industry in the case of Drake and Sexyy Red's “U My Everything,” where the fully AI-generated recording “BBL Drizzy” was sampled.)
“We have reached a defining moment for the future of the music industry. To ensure that art retains the value it deserves, we must commit to honoring the creativity and copyright of the past while embracing the tools that will shape the next generation of music making,” says Senderoff. “Jen empowers creators with tools that enhance their creative process. Jen is a partner. a studio buddy who works with you to think and iterate. As we bring Jen to market, we're working with music rights holders and aligning with the industry at large to deliver what we believe is the most ethical approach to genetic AI.”
“We're incredibly proud of the work that's gone into building Jen, from our research and technology to a strategy we continue to develop with artists' rights in mind,” says Caren. “We welcome an open dialogue for those who have yet to meet Jen. There is a seat at the table for every rights holder to participate in building this next chapter of the music industry.”
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/pro/futureverse-jen-ai-music-model-launch/