Great news for YouTube Shorts creators. The all-conquering nosey parker of the internet has just added AI-powered music generation and sync-to-video features to its Shorts spin-off – the snippet-length mini movies that are easy to make and quick to consume.
Now they’re even easier to make because you don’t need to worry about paying a musician for their use of their music, or employing a musician to make the music for you. Yay…
And – by virtue of the music magically matching your edits to quickly create professional video that’s ‘cut to the beat’, you can even give your video editor the sack too. Double yay…
Both of which are great news for creators, of course, who, let’s face it, might have music-making skills or the spare Google income to pay someone else for theirs. Fair cop…
Simply put, YouTube’s new “Custom instrumentals” will magic up some perfectly fitting, copyright-free background music from your text prompts. And if you’re a user with access to the Creator Music Beta inside YouTube Studio you can start messing with the first, early version of the software right now.
YouTube first began testing Creator Studio back in 2023 when they added “Custom Instrumentals” to a new “Music Assistant” tab. Now that feature is getting powered up to create music that’s actually themed to your instructions, all for free and all without any subsequent copyright worries.
And with no copyright worries, users won’t have to live in fear of accidentally triggering a copyright takedown and having their potential viral smash hard work sentenced to uncontactable kangaroo court YouTube purgatory.
“We’re gradually rolling out a feature that allows you to create custom instrumentals for your videos with the help of AI. You can access this feature in a new ‘Music Assistant’ tab in Creator Music,” explain YouTube.
How does it work?
It’s all very simple. Now creators have a new text box to fill where they can describe how they’d like the music to sound for their video and AI will kick in and serve up something (hopefully) perfect. Or at least suitable.
You just tell it the ‘mood’ of your video, what kind of instruments you’d like and what type of video it is and it’ll get busy in the background.
The idea is that the easier they can make the process of putting effective, watchable, Shorts live, the more people will make them, the more people will watch them, and the more they can make money from ads next to them.
And this thing works both ways
Alternatively if you’ve got the music you want and it’s the pictures you're having trouble with, YouTube has an app for that too.
Beat matching for Shorts will take a piece of music of your choice and then edit your selected photos and videos to fit with the beat of the song.
It’s the kind of thing we all take for granted in professional videos, but which can take an age to create yourself with conventional editing tools.
“When you select multiple photos and video clips from your phone’s gallery, you’ll now have the option to automatically create a short video synced to music. Just choose the media, pick a song, and it’ll arrange your clips to match the beat,” say YouTube.
So it’s good news, right?
It’s great news if you’re a video content creator with little interest in music, yes.
But if you’ve built a business specifically producing royalty free music for YouTube creators, or are a musician or video editor specifically making the kind of thing these new tools effectively replace, then you might not be so happy.
Eat my Shorts
The hope is that removing barriers such as ‘making a good video with good music’ can only increase quality levels and the monetisation potential both for new and current users and – of course – Google and YouTube itself.
And in a similar vein YouTube have also introduced a new identity verification method for monetization, skipping the physically mailed out PIN process that can take weeks.
Now a quick facial scan and comparison with government-issued IDs means that everyone can start making money faster than ever.
Face it. You’re living in the future already. Good luck out there.
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