YouTube is now letting creators remix songs through AI prompting

YouTube last year started letting select creators in the U.S. create AI-generated songs with prompts using the vocals of artists like Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, Demi Lovato, John Legend, Sia, T-Pain, and Troye Sivan. Now, the company is adding a feature to its Dream Track experiment that lets some creators remix tracks by describing how they want to change the style of the song.

The video streaming platform said it is making select songs available to creators for the remix experiment. Creator in the test group can select the “Retstyle a track” option on the Dream Track experiment for a song, and describe how they want to remix it. This will generate a 30-second snippet that creators can use in Shorts.

“If you want to give a song a different genre or mood, you simply enter your vision into the ‘Restyle a track’ prompt and you’ll soon have a customized soundtrack that reimagines the music while maintaining the essence of the original song’s vocals and lyrics,” the update reads.

Google noted that the remixed sound snippet will be credited to the original song through the Shorts and the Shorts audio pivot page. Remixes will also have an appropriate label to indicate that the track was modified with AI.

YouTube’s Dream Track feature, launched last November, is powered by the Lyria music generation model developed by Deepmind. At the time, the platform also released a tool that lets users create a track by just humming a tune.

To save itself from the music industry’s ire, YouTube last August declared — before releasing any of these tools — that it plans to compensate artists and rightsholders for using their work in its AI features. To that end, the company announced a partnership with Universal Music Group (UMG) to develop a structure to pay rightsholders.

YouTube is not the only company working on providing ways for users to remix tracks. Former JioSaavn exec Gaurav Sharma is building an app called Hook that lets users legally remix songs that could be used to create short videos.