Niko MoonThe world of country music has historically been one that prides itself on organic creativity, legitimacy, and the idea of differentiating itself from the manufactured nature of pop music.
While concepts like numerous co-writes slowly moved into the genre, so too did other typically-pop exclusive concepts like autotune. Now, as the likes of AI starts to pervade other genres, Niko Moon has informed us that country is certainly not immune from the phenomenon.
Speaking to Bobby Bones for his BobbyCast podcast recently, Moon – himself a celebrated songwriter – revealed that AI has been used as a way to provide a proof of concept for musicians to help convince them to agree to new songs,
“I've been hearing that here in [Nashville] with songs that are being pitched to artists that one of the guys in the room will sing the demo, and then they'll transfer it over into Jelly Roll or Morgan [Wallen]'s voice or something,” Moon explained. “So that when they hear that song pitched to them, they're actually hearing themselves.”
“Now you can really hear yourself singing it,” he added. “So if you're an artist who's taking pitch songs, now you're really able to hear like what you would sound like singing it, and probably make better choices on what songs you want to cut.”
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“It's really happening,” agreed Bones. “We're going to have to trust each other to commit to not cheating by using it, but it can also make us way better.
“Meaning, you're a songwriter, but let's just say someone pitches you this song that you're in love with, and they're like, ‘Niko, we put your voice on this. Listen to how you would sound.’ We're going to have to trust that you don't go, ‘That's so good, just put that out.’”
In December, Harvey Mason Jr. – the boss of The Recording Academy and the Grammys – explained that AI usage was not a dealbreaker when it came to being considered for the industry's top honour. He also pointed out that AI usage had become so rampant, that almost every songwriter or producer he spoke to had used AI in the studio in some way.
“It runs the gamut of people texting lyrics or ideas or how they feel when they wake up and generating an entire track, lyrics and melody from it,” Mason explained.
Moon looked toward AI as being something similar to a tool that is currently being used in the same way that artists like Cher or T-Pain used autotune back in the day, but ruminated on what this could mean for the direction that music is heading in.
“I mean at a certain point, artists will be like, ‘If the Al can maybe even sing better than me and then I go into the studio and I record for like, three hours this vocal and it's 90% as good as the Al one…’” he muses. “What does that mean for music?”
