To answer the question posed in the headline: no (at least, not yet). But there’s a chance that some of the stuff coming out lately in the realm of AI music production could get you started on the road to stardom.

I myself am a hobby musician; I spend hours every month writing, recording and producing my own jams that I share with friends and occasionally even publish online. 

So naturally, I was pretty intrigued when I saw a pitch email for HitCraft, a new AI app which promises to use the power of generative artificial intelligence to “turn sketches into polished songs in minutes.”

After speaking with HitCraft’s creators, I can say that there’s certainly something to be gained here, though I don’t think I’m ready to call the HitCraft experience a one-way ticket to headlining at Coachella.

AI for humming hobbyists

HitCraft is the offshoot project of the big-time Israeli music company Session 42, founded in 2021. Though relatively young, Session 42 has become a notable brand in Israel, thanks to the savvy of its cofounders.

They built a 600-square-meter studio and began signing and developing unknown artists. Over time, they expanded into music distribution, publishing and other aspects of the business. They released 160 songs with major artists in Israel and abroad, won awards and even participated in Eurovision song contests (they’re the production team behind Noa Kirel’s “Unicorn,” as a matter of fact).

As generative AI tech started to take off a couple of years ago, Session 42 cofounder and CEO Oudi Antebi steered the company towards AI-assisted music production, culminating in the creation of its new AI-powered music production platform.

Play a song idea for HitCraft, indicate what genre you want that song to sound like, and the app adds instruments to your recording and presents choices for how your song could sound. 

Once you choose one of three or four demos, the AI is off to the races, ultimately handing you a finished product that you can share with your friends, family and fans.

If you’re a perfectionist, you can download the virtual instrument data (known in the biz as MIDI) and the raw audio files (“stems”), import them into whatever music mixing platform you prefer and mess around with things until they sound just right.

Antebi says that depending on what the ultimate goal is for the song, “We give you something that is 80 percent there if you’re thinking of professional quality for radio or streaming.”

He notes that many users will likely be satisfied with the product that HitCraft serves after the initial back-and-forth process.

Keeping humans in the market

I hear what you’re thinking. “It’s 2024 and I know a lot about generative AI — if this platform knows how to produce songs, that means it was trained on a large dataset of music production data, right?”

Great question.

HitCraft’s technology is built on a library of genre-specific productions created by real producers. The AI uses these for training and generates unique variations of these templates, adapting them to fit the user’s original song.

You may now find yourself asking: “Okay, but doesn’t that cut music producers out of the picture? Shouldn’t they be making money for their work?”

I did ask that, and I got a decent answer from Antebi.

He believes that, by working directly with producers and allowing them to get paid when their production templates are chosen by users, they’re keeping the production industry in the picture while giving musicians more access to the craft.

“People have called us the industry-friendly [AI music platform] because one, we give opportunity to producers; two, we push users to download and use the plug-in software that those producers used; and three, we’re democratizing this whole thing for songwriters, for human creators,” he says.

That “human creators” aspect is a big factor in the philosophy of Antebi and the team behind HitCraft. 

“The urge to create music will never go away. We’re not afraid that AI will ever replace that urge,” says Antebi. 

“The question is, what’s going to be the balance? If everybody goes full [AI-generated music] and it becomes 95 percent of the music that gets created, then that’s very unfortunate. I think that people would still want to feel the emotion of a human being writing a song. And so we want to give human creators the power to express themselves; we want to keep human creators alive for years to come.”

The part where the guy says their mission

Pricing is still being finalized, but the company is considering both per-song and subscription models. 

A single production may cost around $50-60, while monthly subscriptions could range from $30 to $200 depending on usage.

As the music world grapples with the impact of GenAI and what it means for creatives, HitCraft aims to strike a balance by empowering human creators with AI assistance rather than replacing them entirely. 

Will it hit the mark? As the closed alpha and eventual beta open to the public, we’re certainly going to see a fairly decent swing at it.