Your Next Pop Music Star Might Be Chosen By An AI

AI is not something new to us, as well as musicians, anymore. Some of the new music arrangements by Arca and Björk got the assistance of artificial intelligence. However, the application of AI does not stop there.

Recently, Snafu Records announced that it could use artificial intelligence to pick out the next big artists long before their talents are discovered by the best talent scouts.

Snafu Records claimed to be the world’s first AI-enabled record label. For now, it usually takes labels from four to six weeks to identify new talents from when they make public their first songs. Snafu said that with its algorithm, this time could be reduced to just a few days.

What the AI does is to skim through around 150,000 tracks posted on TikTok, Spotify, YouTube, and SoundCloud each week. The system also takes tweets, blog posts, and playlist additions. Each track will receive a score, which determines whether it can make it to the weekly pool consisting of only 15 to 20 artists.

After the list of the week’s best has been compiled, a human team will listen to the tracks to see if they can find any potential talent.

According to Ankit Desai, CEO of Snafu Records, what the AI is trained to identify is tracks that are 70% to 75% similar to Spotify’s top 200 list. So in short, the label looks for artists that can create something similar to those that are already popular but still different enough to sound fresh.

Since Snafu is just a new name on the market, it is hard to say whether its artificial intelligence approach will become a hit. It has had 16 artists so far and the most popular now is MishCatt.

Other labels have already harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to benefit their business. There are tools like Chartmetric that analyzes similar metrics. But no company dares to depend on AI as much as Snafu does.

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