When Siddharth Bhardwaj and Mansoor Rahimat Khan started working on building an AI-based music creation tool, they always thought of helping creators make original background music without getting into the hassle of licensing. “We knew about the problem, and we wanted to solve it using tech,” says Bhardwaj, who started Bengaluru-based Beatoven.ai along with Khan in 2021. Bhardwaj, 31, always wanted to fuse music with technology and so after graduating from IIIT-Allahabad, he got a master's degree from Music Technology Group, UPF, Barcelona, Spain. Having previously worked with startups specialising in signal processing, deep learning and music technology, Bhardwaj had an understanding of artificial intelligence and its applicability in music generation. Starting an AI-focused company of his own was a natural progression after Bhardwaj met Khan, a seventh-generation sitar player of the Dharwad gharana. Music licensing and the accompanying copyright questions can make any creator, especially someone who has just entered the field, nervous. Do you have a right to use this background music in your podcast? How long does copyright last? What does royalty-free mean? That’s where this AI-based music creation tool starts making sense: simplifying how to create original, royalty-free background music in videos and podcasts and helping creators. Bhardwaj says the music-generation AI tool works like any music director would. Essentially, you need to set the duration of the music piece you want, then pick up things like tempo and genre, and leave it to AI which analyses the database and offers you five pieces of music that go in sync with the theme of the video or podcast. You can then publish and release the video or podcast wherever you want to. If needed, you can customise the sound and tweak the instrument layers. The system works using deep learning networks, a type of AI that analyses large amounts of data. “AI arranges all of those loops and samples that we have sourced from the artists… We train our AI-based models to generate a structure that combines all of these layers vertically and horizontally, so as to create a whole coherent track,” Bhardwaj explains. “For a one-minute track, the AI will take 10 seconds to generate five options for you.” Bhardwaj says his company works with hundreds of musicians who create a 10-second guitar riff or a piano melody for 15 seconds for the platform. Beatoven.ai’s database now boasts 50,000 such samples, sourced from 200 artists. “It's not a tool for musicians,” clarifies Bhardwaj. “You cannot upload any kind of sounds to it… it's more of an instrumental background music tool for videos or podcasts.” “It is not like you can train AI and it will create a nice piece of music,” he says. “The single biggest problem with music is that copyrights are strictly enforced, unlike text or images,” he explains why it is nearly impossible to take historical music data and train an AI model. “No one can do that. That's why we even choose our own data set.” AI can educate how to compose music, help freelancers in mixing and mastering, and even help artists with idea generation but it cannot replace musicians. Many recording artists have experimented with AI for lyric generation, the most famous being David Bowie with the song Hallo Spaceboy. In 2018, Francois Pachet, musician and tech researcher, released the first pop album composed with artificial intelligence, Hello, World. “For a creative endeavour like music, it will be a collaboration between a human and AI,” Bhardwaj says. “AI is already creating something for you but it is your job to curate and customise it to meet your needs. It cannot be a generic tool for everyone, rather it should be highly personalised,” he adds. Bhardwaj believes AI is not just cost-effective but has the potential to increase engagement and improve the culture of storytelling with compelling background music. “Whatever you hear on our platform is not synthetic or AI-generated, but it's always human-composed music,” he said." When AI tools and chatbot gain popularity, there will be legal battles. "Consent is important," he agrees. "Copyright enforces that but it has to be updated in the era of AI boom." Bhardwaj’s company makes money through a subscription-based model, with the base tier costing $20 a month and top-one costing $100 a month. There are over 28,000 users with YouTubers making up the majority. But Bhardwaj says he has seen people using the tool to create background scores to be used in video games too. The demand for royalty-free music in India is huge, Bhardwaj says, with searches for such AI tools estimated to be between 5 and 6 lahks. To convert more users, Bhardwaj’s company is speeding its efforts to focus on Indian classical and royalty-free regional music for which it is collecting data and working on building AI models. In the coming months, Bhardwaj plans to launch another AI-based tool which analyses the video, reads scene changes and mood, and tries to offer a perfect piece of music for the same.
