For many years, the music trade has been outlined by excessive obstacles to entry. To launch an expert report, you usually wanted years of instrument mastery, costly studio time, a sound engineer, and a report label to again you up.
However as we shut out 2025, the GenAI revolution has utterly dismantled these gates. Over the vacation break, I made a decision to place the most recent know-how to the take a look at to see if I may go from idea to printed artist with out an agent or a recording studio.
The result’s my debut EP, Vibe Code to This, and the method behind it’s a testomony to how accessible creativity has grow to be. This isn’t nearly enjoyable experiments anymore, we at the moment are at a degree the place AI instruments can produce commercial-grade inventive belongings that rival human manufacturing.
Suno v5 gives gorgeous capabilities
Core to this undertaking was the music service Suno, particularly their newest v5 Giant Language Mannequin. In case you have performed with text-to-audio instruments up to now, you may keep in mind them being low-fidelity or missing construction, however v5 is an enormous leap ahead.
A yr in the past, I performed with Suno and located it technically attention-grabbing, in the best way it may create songs from textual content, however the output was enjoyable and entertaining, not of a top quality that was one thing I’d placed on within the automotive to take heed to whereas driving. Fortunately, they saved investing, and issues have modified rather a lot.
Suno v5 understands musical concept, vocal cadence, and genre-blending in a approach that feels shockingly intuitive. The platform operates on a credit score system, however for the standard of output you get, the fee is negligible in comparison with hiring session musicians.
The method begins with a textual content immediate, however it requires extra than simply typing “make a cool tune.” To get the precise tech-themed aesthetic I needed, I needed to be exact with my directions and refine it time and time once more, however inside a brief time period, I had one thing I used to be fairly pleased with.
Once you create in Suno, it is advisable to present 3 issues. You should outline the fashion of the music, the lyrics within the tune and the title for the tune.
This yr, I’ve gone forwards and backwards between Grok 4.x and Gemini 3.x, and for this process, I turned to Gemini because of their Gem function. This permits me to retailer an instruction set and immediate towards it, rushing up duties which might be more likely to be repetitive (like making a number of songs).
Having outlined what Suno wanted and the general theme of what I used to be chasing, I constructed a MusicGen Gem in Gemini, then set to work. I then took the output from Gemini and copied that into Suno and hit Create. A couple of seconds later, I had 2 choices to select from.
I might take heed to each, analyse what I appreciated, what I didn’t, then replace the prompts and run by way of the cycle again and again. Whereas this took a while, it was extremely quick in comparison with conventional music creation. This felt like a superpower.
The prompts specified kinds like “driving synthwave,” “staccato basslines at 128 BPM,” and “emotional feminine vocals.” The mannequin’s capability to stick to those constraints was spectacular, and after a while within the recreation, I grew extra assured in crafting the immediate to get the fashion of tune I needed.
The generated lyrics additionally took an equal quantity of iterative cycles to attain. We don’t discover Expertise references in songs fairly often, and the mannequin desires to rhyme every little thing, so it was frequent to get ideas to alter phrases or acronyms for the betterment of the tune, however then may make one thing illogical or technically incorrect. This was a enjoyable problem to work by way of, and an upcoming tune on the second Album, referred to as ‘The Chilly Aisle’, is one other nice instance of this.
From technology to distribution
Creating the audio recordsdata is simply the primary half of the battle. To truly be an “artist” within the trendy sense, your music must dwell the place the listeners are, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Tidal.
Traditionally, you couldn’t simply add MP3s to Spotify straight, you wanted a distributor. That is the place the trade used to drive you to interact administration businesses and signal contracts with labels, however the tech sector has solved this too.
I used a platform referred to as Amuse.io to deal with the distribution. It’s a streamlined, app-based report label that enables unbiased artists to push their tracks to all main streaming providers with out signing away their life rights.
Amuse is one in all a variety of providers listed on the Spotify for Artists web page, supplying you with confidence it’s legit, and naturally, you don’t have to make use of this one, choose any on this checklist, every providing totally different pricing.
The interface is extremely clear and tech-forward. You merely add your lossless audio recordsdata (WAV or FLAC is important for high quality), add your cowl artwork, and fill within the metadata.
To enrich the music, you’ll want some graphics, Cowl Artwork to your monitor, album, artist profile pic and header backgrounds for the streaming providers. For this, once more, I turned to GenAI, leveraging Google Gemini Nano Banana to take the lyrics from a tune and create a related picture for the one. This once more took iteration, and over time, I received higher and sooner at prompting, even creating one other Gem to deal with the picture technology process I might to make use of for every tune.
On paid plans, Suno gives the power to obtain in .WAV format, and better tiers provide even greater high quality outputs. Simply obtain the Audio, add to a Launch in Amuse, fill in particulars concerning the music rights (if you happen to did all of the work, this bit is sort of straightforward).
I opted for the ‘Professional’ tier to make sure the discharge occurred on my timeline. The price was roughly A$35.99 per yr, which is a tiny funding for international distribution capabilities.
Retaining rights and royalties
One of the vital essential features of utilizing a service like Amuse is the possession construction. In conventional music offers, the label usually owns the grasp recordings.
With this contemporary tech stack, I retain 100% of the rights and 100% of the royalties. Once you stream a monitor from the EP, the income flows straight again to the creator, filtered by way of the Amuse dashboard, the place you may monitor streams and analytics in real-time.
This transparency is one thing the music trade has desperately wanted for a very long time.
Having now had the music dwell for a variety of days, the service is now beginning to present aggregated listening analytics, whereas additionally exhibiting a breakdown of listeners from totally different providers, permitting you to focus promotion or investments based mostly on information.
The democratisation of creativity
What this undertaking proved to me is that the definition of a “creator” is increasing quickly. I’m not a singer, nor can I play the drums, but I used to be in a position to produce an album that sits comfortably alongside human-produced digital music.
Critics usually fear that AI will change artists, however I see it in another way. These instruments unlock creativity for individuals who have the imaginative and prescient however lack the technical motor abilities to execute it on a bodily instrument.
It permits us to concentrate on what you need the music to really feel like and if you happen to care, the specifics of the lyrics, to create one thing really distinctive. The heavy lifting of compression, mixing, and mastering is dealt with by the algorithm, releasing the human to concentrate on the path and the story.
The timeline from “I’ve an concept for a tune” to “this tune is on Spotify” has compressed from months to mere days and I’ve executed precisely that, had an concept, run it by way of this worklow I’ve created and had a tune I’m happy with, that I can share with mates, household of all the world in an extremely quick time period.
Last ideas
In case you have ever had an concept for a melody or an idea for an album, there has actually by no means been a greater time to execute it. The instruments are reasonably priced, the standard is skilled, and the gatekeepers have been eliminated.
My debut EP is dwell now, and whereas I hope you take pleasure in listening to it, I hope much more that it evokes you to open up these instruments and see what you may construct your self.
“All the things’s binary, black and white. However I’m seeing colors within the neon gentle.”
For extra data, head to https://techau.com.au/techau-launches-debut-ep-vibe-code-to-this-for-the-late-night-creator/
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