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30-year-old Illinois travel agent Justice Washam is an on-again, off-again TikTok creator who has been posting about travel and parenting for almost a decade. But despite her 250,000 followers, as of early April, the mother of three hadn\u2019t made much money off the platform, and her goal of hitting a million followers by the end of 2026 seemed far-fetched. Then her best friend sent her a TikTok featuring screenshots of funny texts that had been turned into the lyrics to an AI-generated song: \u201cShe was like, \u2018Your daughter\u2019s messages are what this trend is made for!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Washam assembled some texts in which her persistent 11-year-old asked for Starbucks (\u201cstrawberry acai with no inclusions and light ice made with lemonade\u201d), permission to get a social media account (\u201call i want for Christmas is Snapchat\u201d), and other 21st-century tween stuff (\u201cmom\/I don\u2019t know what to do with my hair\/mom\/why aren\u2019t you responding?\u201d). She downloaded Suno<\/a>\u2019s AI-music-generating app, pasted in her daughter\u2019s words, and requested a song in an early-2000s Avril Lavigne vein. \u201cWhen I was her age, that kind of punk-pop music was popular,\u201d Washam says. She chose the first version it produced, then put her stamp on the video, lip-syncing the lyrics and dancing for the camera. (\u201dI have a hidden talent, that I can listen to a song and memorize it in one go,\u201d she says.) She made sure her daughter was OK with it, posted it, and went to bed. When she woke up it had already gotten a million views; five weeks later, it\u2019s up to 9.8 million, and Washam has gained nearly 200,000 new followers.<\/p>\n More from Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s become one of the hottest music trends on TikTok: friends, family members, acquaintances, and (sometimes) enemies turning their text histories into the lyrics to AI-generated songs. The timing of the trend is serendipitous for Suno, which is in a legal battle<\/a> with two of the three major record companies over how their model was trained, and who face distrust from swathes of the music industry. What if, instead of replacing musicians and producers, AI song-generation tools end up becoming something closer to, say, a Snapchat filter?<\/p>\n Some of the songs produced this way are a little therapeutic, like the one from a woman who made a Broadway-ish song out of texts from a boorish dude<\/a> asking her to refund him for dinner and an Uber because she didn\u2019t go home with him. (A capella break: \u201c$142.18 to be exact.\u201d) There is a subgenre of songs made from Slacks from pesky bosses<\/a>. (AI pop-rock singer: \u201cI need this done by end of day\/I know it\u2019s 4:47.\u201d) There are many, many, many emo songs built from texts from kids to parents. After a song suspiciously similar to hers blew up, Washam said of the creator, \u201cWow, our daughters sound the same, but she doesn\u2019t even have a daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the most epic viral hits tracks texts between BFFs when one of them is stuck in the bedroom of a man while his live-in girlfriend comes home; her all-caps \u201cHELP HELP HELP HELP\u2026\u201d becomes a rising, almost operatic gospel chorus. The original video has gotten 23 million views, and the song has become the soundtrack to more than 28,000 other videos.<\/p>\n Thanks to the trend \u2014 sometimes flagged with hashtags such as #texttosong and #textmessage \u2014 downloads of the Suno app quadrupled week over week in the U.S. in April, temporarily making it the most downloaded music app on the U.S. and U.K. Apple App Stores. Looking to pour gasoline on the fire, Suno\u2019s product and tech teams crashed a new feature that partially automates turning screenshots of text into songs. \u201cWe did that in about a week,\u201d says Suno\u2019s Chief Product Officer, Jack Brody.<\/p>\n Brody says that the trend shows how AI can open up new ways for people to be creative: \u201cWe\u2019ve seen this in other mediums,\u201d he says. \u201cOnce people had a camera on their phone, you saw totally new applications for photography and videography: shortform video content, how-to videos, livestreaming.\u201d<\/p>\n Olivia Jones, an analyst at the music and entertainment research firm MiDia, sees an emerging new lane of \u201cconsumer creators\u201d using full-song generation tools like Suno, separate from our traditional idea of musicians, artists, and producers. These consumer creators \u201cmay not ever intend to be professional music creators,\u201d Jones says. \u201cThey\u2019re playing around with these tools more as a way of expressing their creativity, as a hobby.\u201d<\/p>\n Suno\u2019s Brody sees the hobbyists and musicians as coexisting. Using the video analogy, he argues that shortform video content creators and livestreamers haven\u2019t done away with existing video, TV, and film jobs. \u201cHollywood blockbusters still exist,\u201d he says, \u201cNational Geographic<\/em> photographers [still] exist.\u201d<\/p>\n But as Jones sees it, even if these \u201cconsumer creators\u201d don\u2019t think of themselves as professional musicians, they\u2019ll still end up competing with them. She mentions research indicating that people using AI voice and music tools \u201care often more likely to engage more with fan-created versions of an entertainment than the entertainment itself.\u201d For example, Jones says, people might be \u201cmaking songs about a TV show they like, then listening to other people\u2019s songs and remixing them, and it becomes a cycle where they keep doing that even if they\u2019re not watching the show anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n In music industry terms: TikTok has become one of the most important ways for recording artists to get their music discovered. If the music that people are discovering and sharing on TikTok is increasingly user-generated AI material like the hiding-from-the-jealous-girlfriend song above, is that going to replace actual recording artists? \u201cWe\u2019re going to see a rise in creation competing for consumption time,\u201d Jones says. \u201cIt\u2019s not going to be explosive \u2014 as in, \u2018everyone\u2019s creating and no one\u2019s watching anything.\u2019 But it will be a gradual shift.\u201d<\/p>\n Some TikTok text-to-song creators have already put their songs on Spotify, despite some of the open questions regarding copyright that Suno creators are facing. Washam isn\u2019t there yet. \u201cI don\u2019t necessarily want people jamming out to my 11-year-old asking for Starbucks and Snapchat in the car,\u201d she says, half-laughing. \u201cI never really thought about it becoming more than just fun on TikTok.\u201d<\/p>\n It has made TikTok more financially rewarding for her, though. Because AI songs are longer than her usual posts, Washam says she\u2019s making more money than ever from ad sales on TikTok. (Generally, content needs to be longer than one minute for creators to monetize it.) In the last month or so, she has made $4,000.<\/p>\n Even with that success, she still calls it her \u201c5 minutes of fame\u201d: \u201cA few years from now, we\u2019re all gonna be like, do you guys remember when people were making songs with their text messages?\u201d<\/p>\n Nonetheless, non-musicians will likely keep coming up with creative uses for AI music tools. One brand-new example: On May 20, the day that Meta laid off 8,000 of its employees, one worker used AI tools to launch a 24\/7 internet radio station<\/a> featuring songs like the Frank Ocean-style \u201cMeta Layoff\u201d and the acoustic, folkie \u201cMissing the People,\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think AI music is going away,\u201d says Washam.<\/p>\n Best of Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for RollingStone’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n