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YouTube last year started letting select creators in the U.S. create AI-generated songs with prompts using the vocals of artists like Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, Demi Lovato, John Legend, Sia, T-Pain, and Troye Sivan. Now, the company is adding a feature to its Dream Track toolset that lets creators remix tracks by describing how they want to change the style of the song.
The video streaming platform said it is making select songs available to creators for the remix experiment. Creators in the test group can select the “Retstyle a track” option for a song, and describe how they want to remix it. This will generate a 30-second snippet that creators can use in Shorts.
“If you want to give a song a different genre or mood, you simply enter your vision into the ‘Restyle a track’ prompt and you’ll soon have a customized soundtrack that reimagines the music while maintaining the essence of the original song’s vocals and lyrics,” the update reads.
Google noted these remixed snippets will be credited to the original song through the Short video itself and the Shorts audio pivot page. Remixes will also have an appropriate label to indicate that the track was modified with AI.
YouTube’s Dream Track toolset, launched last November, is powered by the Lyria music generation model developed by Deepmind. At the time, the platform also released a tool that lets users create a track by just humming a tune.
To save itself from the music industry’s ire, YouTube last August said — before releasing any of these tools — that it plans to compensate artists and rights holders for using their work in its AI features. To that end, the company announced a partnership with Universal Music Group (UMG) to develop a structure to pay rights holders.
YouTube is not the only company working on providing ways for users to remix tracks. Former JioSaavn exec Gaurav Sharma is building an app called Hook that lets users remix songs that could be used to create short videos.
Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web. You can reach out to him at im[at]ivanmehta[dot]com
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