Singapore-based startup founder Anand Roy thinks generative AI can help fix a broken music sector

For Anand Roy, making music used to mean jamming with his progressive rock band based out of Bangalore. Today, the one-time metalhead now makes music with a simple tap of a button through his start-up Wubble AI, which allows users to generate, edit, and customize royalty-free music in over 60 different genres.

Roy started Wubble with his co-founder, Shaad Sufi, in 2024, from a small office in Singapore’s central business district. Since then, his platform has generated tunes for global giants like Microsoft, HP, L’Oreal and NBCUniversal. They’re even used on the Taipei Metro, where AI-generated tunes soothe harried commuters. 

Generative AI has been a controversial subject in the creative industry: Artists, musicians and other content creators worry that companies will train AI on copyrighted materials, then ultimately automate away the need for human creators at all.

Roy, however, thinks Wubble is a way to fix a music sector that’s already broken. Artists are awarded micro-payments on streaming sites like Spotify, which only works for the most famous artists. 

Roy spent almost two decades at Disney, where he oversaw operations at its networks and studios in major cities like Tokyo, Mumbai and Los Angeles. He said his time leading Disney’s music group opened his eyes to the tedious process of music licensing.

“So many licensing deals were not going through because of the quantum of paperwork, the amount of red tape, and how expensive, complex and convoluted the entire process was,” he says. Yet, the incumbent music firms “don’t have a lot of motivation to streamline processes.”

Wubble is trying something different, collaborating directly with musicians and paying them for the raw material used to train Wubble’s AI. “If we’re looking at Latino hip hop, we’ll go to a recording studio in Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro, and tell them we need ten hours of Latino music,” Roy says. Wubble then negotiates a deal and offers a one-time payment for their work, at rates Roy argues are more competitive than other companies offering music streaming services.

He admits that a one-time payment isn’t a perfect solution, however, and adds that he’s currently exploring how technologies like blockchain can uncover new ways to compensate musicians for their help training Wubble’s AI models.

David Gunkel, who teaches communication studies at Northern Illinois University in Chicago, thinks training AI from artist-commissioned material is a smarter business move than just trawling the web for copyrighted content.

Production companies like Disney, Universal and Warner Bros., for example, are suing AI companies like Midjourney and Minimax of copyright infringement, arguing that users can easily generate images and videos of protected characters like Star Wars’s Darth Vader. 

“If you’re curating your data sets, and compensating and giving credit to the artists that are being utilized to train your model, you won’t find yourself in a lawsuit,” he explains. “It’s a better business practice, just in terms of your long-term viability as a commercial actor.”

Text-to-speech generation

Wubble currently offers just instrumental music and audio effects, but Roy thinks voice is the next step. By end-January, Roy says his platform will offer AI-generated voiceovers created from written scripts, to cater to clients who require narrative-led audio tracks. “So, the entire audio content workflow for a business can be housed on Wubble,” he concludes proudly. 

AI music startups are popping up around the world, hoping to use the powerful new technology to make the process of creating tunes and songs easier. Some, like Suno, cater in generating full songs, while others like Moises offer tools for artists.

In Asia, too, Korean AI startup Supertone offers voice synthesis and cloning, using samples to generate new vocal tracks. The startup, founded by Kyogu Lee, was acquired by HYBE, the entertainment company behind K-pop sensation BTS, and now operates as its subsidiary. Supertone even debuted a fully virtual K-pop girl group, SYNDI8, in 2024. 

At Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore last year, Lee said he saw musical artists as “co-creators,” not just in terms of licensing their voices, but also asking for their help in refining the technology. 

AI “will democratize the creative process, so every creator or artist can experiment with this new technology to explore and experiment with new ideas,” he told the audience.

Roy, from Wubble, also sees AI as a way to make it easier for more people to get involved in music creation.

“Music creation has always been a privilege. It’s been the domain of those who have the time and resources to learn an instrument,” he says. “We believe that every human being should be able to create—and AI enables that now.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com