I love pen and paper. Sole human authorship is a beautiful thing, and I'm not here to talk anyone out of it.
I was against AI myself for a long time. I still am, for most of what it's being used for. I came around on the parts where it actually helps someone — medicine, teaching, and, as it turned out, me.
Two very different things get called AI music, though, and they're not the same job at all.
Suno makes the record. You type in a line and a minute later there's a finished track, vocals and drums and all.
It's a company worth a fortune, trained on other people's songs, and it's in court over exactly that. Warner settled last November and took a licensing deal. Universal and Sony didn't — they're still suing, and this spring they moved to expand the case from a few hundred recordings to more than sixty thousand. Suno's defence is that training on all that music was fair use. Meanwhile the American musicians' union is suing the labels over those settlements, because the money from deals made about other people's recordings isn't reaching the people who played on them. And when it's finished, it hands you a whole track. Mine doesn't do that.
Ask ChatGPT for a song and it'll write you one, and it'll do a reasonable job of the words. What it won't do is put the chords over the words, or play them back so you can hear whether a change lands where you thought it would. You can't tap a chord to hear it, swap it for one you like better, or drag it onto a different word. And the song doesn't really live anywhere — it's a message in a chat you'll have lost track of by next week.
That's not a knock on it. It's a text box, and a good one. It just isn't built for songs, and it isn't built for somebody sitting there with a guitar or on the keyboard.
It gives you a structure. A rough draft — a verse, a chorus, chord options, and the chord sitting above the words. Then you change it. Swap the chords around, drag one onto a different word, type straight onto the lyric lines and rewrite whatever isn't true yet, add a verse, put a bridge in. You sing it yourself, in your own voice, at your own speed. Nobody's recording is anywhere in it, and nothing gets sung for you. Then you can easily save and store in-site, or on your device, and go write another.
I built it for myself, at first. I'm a piano and guitar player and a songwriter, and the playing was never my problem. Structure was. Finishing was. I had a head full of songs and a folder full of half written ones. I ended up writing a long post on what each part of a song is for, because it was the thing I most needed explaining to me.
Somebody asked me why an aspiring songwriter would use this unless they weren't any good at songwriting. But so what if they aren't? So what if I'm not? So what if someone finds it hard, gets stuck all the time, and wants a hand?
There are kids who could learn to play from this. Older folks getting back into music who just want to have fun with it. People who have songs in them and can't quite get them out. If it gets one more person writing--I'll take it.
Using AI to help you write isn't cheating. But a song you ordered and a song you wrote are two different things, and only one of them has your fingerprints on it.
Your first whole song is free, revised and all, and it never asks for a card. After that it's $11 a month, and it isn't a profit machine. It's what keeps a one-person operation online and improving — it costs me money every month and a fair bit of my time most days. And if you want to try it properly and can't spare the money, write to me and I'll set you up.
Quick honest note: SongFriend uses AI under the hood. I'm not a tech company — I'm a piano and guitar player who wanted this help for myself and figured other players and anyone might too. What it makes is a starting point, not a finished song. You're still the one at the instrument, and you're still the writer.
If you want to check it out, it's at-- thesongfriend.com.
— Pete