The 5 Best AI Tools for Musicians & Creators in 2024

Last updated: 29 July 2024

It’s safe to say that AI is causing a paradigm shift in every industry, and the music industry is no exception. ChatGPT has become a household name, and the number of AI tools on the market is increasing on the daily.

In this article, we help you separate the must-have tools from the duds. Not only that, we also shed light on the AI music tools that are helping create a more level playing field for independent and DIY musicians who need a helping hand with getting stuff done. Here are our top picks.

5 AI tools for musicians that you need to check out

ChatGPT

From fake Nick Cave lyrics to songs that went viral due to ChatGPT-generated lyrics, it’s not an exaggeration to say that ChatGPT has taken the music world by storm. Apart from sensationalism and novelty, ChatGPT can actually be a useful AI tool for the more boring things every artist has to do – admin. And if you don’t have the capacity or knack for it, or the resources to get someone else to do it for you, ChatGPT can help you get organised.

ChatGPT can be the handy tool to help you flesh out the main steps you need to take to achieve your goals. Whether you’re planning a tour or album, need to organise your finances, or need an outline for a marketing or project plan, ChatGPT can help you with all that in as little as a few minutes.

Say you’re planning a tour without a booking agent and have to do everything yourself. It’s obviously an overwhelming task, but by using ChatGPT, you can get a head start without having to pay someone to do it for you.

Here’s a prompt we used to illustrate this example: “Help me organise a touring schedule to support my latest music project. My top fans are located in New York, Los Angeles and Seattle. The venues in the itinerary need to be 50-100 cap venues. The band consists of four people, and we’ll be driving ourselves. Include budget and accommodation options.”

Here’s what we got:

BandLab SongStarter

If you’re just dipping your toes into music production or currently experiencing a case of writer’s block, SongStarter is the perfect AI music tool for you. It’s essentially an AI-powered idea generation tool that acts as a starting point to craft your next project. Every idea generated is royalty-free, so you can build on it.

With SongStarter, you can either roll the dice and leave everything to chance, or add your own prompts, which can be anything from a lyric to an emoji. SongStarter then generates three unique musical ideas that you can tweak by selecting between three different moods: day, night and dusk icons. Once you’ve settled on an idea, you can use it as the building block for your next song.

Landr

Landr is a comprehensive music platform best known for its AI music tools – especially its AI-powered mastering. It uses a genre-adaptive AI engine that analyses each song and customises the process without the use of any presets.

As a result, the result is extremely high quality and sounds good on any speaker. You also have the opportunity to upload a reference track, unlimited revisions and free previews. What’s more, you can also incorporate Landr’s AI-powered mastering into your DAW via the LANDR Mastering Plugin Standard Edition plugin, which is game-changing if you want fast yet professional masters without relying on third-party software.

CapCut

Whether you’re social media obsessed or absolutely hate it, it’s safe to say that social media is an important medium for artists to promote their work and build a community. CapCut is quickly becoming the go-to video and photo editing app for artists and creators who want to quickly produce high-quality edits. And with CapCut’s seamless TikTok integration, using it is a no-brainer.

With CapCut, you not only get all the usual video editing features in app form, but also advanced AI-powered features such as auto-cut, text-to-video generator, speech-to-text and text-to-speech converter and picture colouriser. CapCut’s extensive range of features means you can uninstall all the other editing apps and software, and use CapCut for all your content needs.

MemAI

If you’re an organisational mess, this next one’s for you. On its most basic level, MemAI is a notes app. What makes this app special, however, is the fact that it’s an AI tool with many cool features that make admin a breeze.

Wrote some lyrics in the app that you now can’t find? Did you have a meeting a month ago and need to remember what was said? No problem. MemAI can dig up needle-in-a-haystack notes, summarise meeting notes, and write content based on your notes. Plus, it also links related notes and organises them into collections so that you can easily find them.

Final thoughts about AI tools

It’s important to acknowledge that there’s growing concern about AI and intellectual property rights, especially as the legal framework has not yet caught up. AI should never replace creatives, but simply serve as a tool that can spark ideas, help with automation, and offer independent and DIY artists more opportunities and resources to rise a few rung up the tricky music industry ladder.