Firstly, if you have written a song and recorded the song yourself, with no other musicians involved, then you own 100% of the publishing and master recording rights – you can do anything you choose with the song without limitations.

However, should you wish to replace your vocals with another voice, then the performance of the vocal should be credited to the vocalist and any performance royalties given.

The problems start if that voice is an AI voice – The law hasn’t decided how to handle AI generation of artworks including music, so you have no way of knowing whether using the AI vocal as an acapella version of your song will be judged legal or illegal. At the moment the advice is to stay away from ‘monitising’ anything AI in music, including vocals. But if you do proceed and use an AI ‘Arianan Grande’ to sing your song, I would credit the AI in the title so everyone knows and that gives the owner of the voice the chance to object and ask you to delete the acapella version of the song.

This is a scary form of AI in my opinion. Imagine you are ‘Arianan Grande’ and you hear your voice singing songs you have never sung! Some artists would love the thought, some would be horrified – Personally, I think until I know that the artist is okay with me using their AI voice and given musicians the go-ahead to use it I will stay away myself. Good luck if you experiment.

Please note: I am not a legal person and this is not legal advise, simply my interpretation, please do your own research.

How about I wrote the song, then record song, then I generate my Acapella by AI cover for examlpe Ariana Grande model, this is legal? Can monetize ?

Great comment. Yes agree, there is nothing more valuable than time. Play the game however makes you happy. Create art however ‘feels’ right. The most important thing is to enjoy your own ride! There is a great freedom in creating and letting go without any further thought for what happens next. It focuses the mind…create/release, create/release…create/release……..

As long as we keep deluding ourselves into thinking money has more value than time, we will keep missing the point of art and artistic process.

Yes, so cool, the first thing that jumped out at me when trying AI music as an experiment was how great the arrangements were. They were always top class. If the sounds weren’t great, the arrangements always were. Getting a quality arrangement from the start is key to making the subsequent mix and master easy. The best arrangements will mix themselves. Without any instruments clashing the balancing is straightforward. A poor arrangement and you’ve got to work hard to force the magic to happen. I have to say I am neither for nor against AI music generation – let’s see what it brings, but for me, if I was starting out right now, I’d study how AI arranges musical elements.

This is very cool indeed

Great comment and so true. If you look back through musical history, most musical trends were driven by new technology. AI could be the new catalyst for something great. It would be wonderful if this transpires to inspire and elevate music for musical ears and not just server to generate more ‘content’ more quickly. Wouldn’t it be great to get music back to valued music and not simply content to be generated.

Just my opinion, but I feel it is about degrees of change/similarities. To change a few words in a lyric using ChatGPT would be no different to using a rhyming dictionary or app to help finish a song. The works would still feel like your creation. To ask ChatGPT to write you a verse, chorus or complete song could result in you losing connection with the song. That would depend on how you interpreted the lyric though, and if you are using a whole GPT chorus, you could never be certain that the chorus has not been taken from an existing work.

Yes, just to clarify – you would need to own the copyright for a backing track for video if you wanted to monitise the audio from the video. I am thinking of vlogger’s, YouTube, TikTok etc where the video and backing track are not related i.e. the creator just wants a soundbed to their images and are not concerned with moitising. If you are making a video to your song as a musical artist then yes, you want to own the copyright (or the company you have licensed it to).