For Anand Roy, making music used to mean jamming with his Bengaluru-based progressive rock band. Today, the former metalhead can now create music at the touch of a button through his startup Wubble AI, which allows users to generate, edit and customize royalty-free music in over 60 different genres.
In 2024, Roy and co-founder Shaad Sufi founded Wubble in a small office in Singapore’s central business district. Since then, his platform has produced music for global giants such as Microsoft, HPL’Oreal and NBCUniversal. They are even used in Taipei subwayAI-generated music can soothe busy commuters.
Generative AI has long been a contentious topic in the creative industry: Artists, musicians and other content creators worry that companies will train AI on copyrighted material and eventually automate it entirely, eliminating the need for human creators.
However, Roy sees Wubble as a way to repair a broken music scene. Artists receive micropayments on streaming sites, e.g. Spotifyonly for the most famous artists.
Roy spent nearly twenty years disneyThere he oversaw network and studio operations in major cities including Tokyo, Mumbai and Los Angeles. He said his experience leading Disney’s music team taught him the tedious process of licensing music.
“Many licensing deals fail to get approved due to the sheer volume of paperwork, red tape and the fact that the entire process is expensive, complex and convoluted,” he said. However, existing music companies “don’t have much incentive to streamline the process.”
Wubble is trying something different, working directly with musicians and paying them for the raw materials used to train Wubble’s artificial intelligence. “If we were looking at Latino hip-hop, we would go to a recording studio in Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro and tell them we need ten hours of Latin music,” Roy said. Wubble then negotiated a deal and offered them a one-time payment for their work, a rate that Roy said was more competitive than other companies offering music streaming services.
However, he acknowledged that the one-time payment isn’t a perfect solution, adding that he’s currently exploring how technologies like blockchain can uncover new ways to compensate musicians for helping train Wubble’s AI model.
David Gunkel, who teaches communications at Northern Illinois University in Chicago, believes that using artist-commissioned materials to train artificial intelligence is a smarter business move than just searching the web for copyrighted content.
Production companies such as Disney, universal For example, Warner Bros. is suing AI companies such as Midjourney and Minimax for copyright infringement, saying users can easily generate images and videos of protected characters, e.g. Star Wars’Darth Vader.
“If you are curating your datasets and compensating and acknowledging the artists used to train your models, you won’t find yourself in litigation,” he explains. “It’s a better business practice in terms of your long-term viability as a commercial actor.”
text-to-speech generation
Wubble currently only offers instrumental music and audio effects, but Roy sees speech as the next step. Roy said that by the end of January, his platform will offer AI-generated voiceovers created from written scripts for customers who want narrative-led soundtracks. “As a result, an enterprise’s entire audio content workflow can be hosted on Wubble,” he concludes proudly.
Artificial intelligence music startups are popping up around the world, hoping to use powerful new technologies to make the process of creating tunes and songs easier. Some companies, like Suno, focus on generating complete songs, while others, like Moises, provide tools for artists.
In Asia, South Korean AI startup Supertone also offers speech synthesis and cloning services, using samples to generate new audio tracks. The startup, founded by Kyogu Lee, was acquired by HYBE, the entertainment company behind Korean pop music BTS, and now operates as a subsidiary. Supertone even debuted a completely virtual K-pop girl group, SYNDI8, in 2024.
At last year’s Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore Summit, Lee said he views musical artists as “co-creators,” not only in terms of licensing their sounds but also asking them to help improve the technology.
He told the audience that AI “will democratize the creative process so every creator or artist can try this new technology to explore and experiment with new ideas.”
Roy from Wubble also sees artificial intelligence as a way to make it easier for more people to participate in music creation.
“Music making has always been a privilege. It’s the domain of those who have the time and resources to learn an instrument,” he said. “We believe everyone should be able to create – and AI enables that now.”