04-03-2025
This AI Tool Creates Custom Songs in Seconds. But Here's What It Sounds Like
As content creators continue to flood publishing platforms with thousands of audio-visual media by the minute, song selections in 2025 are sometimes more about utility than taste.
Artificial intelligence tool Riffusion, which launched in beta in January 2025, was created using a fine-tuned open-source version of Stable Diffusion, which itself creates products that allow you to generate still images and video from simple text prompts.
Riffusion takes that concept and applies it to song, potentially making the painstaking work of sourcing and selecting royalty-free tracks for content creation, for example, more fun.
Getting started with Riffusion is fairly simple. A standard sign-up requires either an email or linking the account to another form of authentication, like a Google account. After that, aspiring song creators can generate full-length music, either with or without lyrics, with a single text prompt.
I put the tool into the hands of two student content creators and asked them to generate some tracks, then judge them based on how much they liked the music, how likely they were to listen to the songs again and whether they could see themselves generating bespoke pieces for their YouTube channel content.
Here's the lowdown on, and how to get the most out of, tools like Riffusion, and what my student content creators thought about the AI songs they were able to create.
Like many text-to-generate-media-product AI tools, Riffusion riffs on whatever prompt you give it. A simple request to generate a background track for a podcast about surfers gives the tool a lot of latitude with sound.
If you want a track that sounds a very specific way or features specific instruments, include those details in the prompt or prepare for some impromptu elements to make their way into the work.
For example, one of the students prompted the AI tool to create a "diss track about a baby with a gritty British rapper with prominent cowbell and jazz flute," while the other asked for "background music for a podcast about surfers."
Adding specific instrumental notes, like soft jazz flute and more cowbell, or instructions for the vocalist, like breathy vibrato or gritty British grunge, produces music that's pretty close to what you might be looking for.
You can also make precise edits to sections of generated songs with the Remix option if you like the overall track but want to tweak things like sound and length or pump up the volume on the "weirdness" metric for a more creative take.
Student content creators called the tracks they generated with Riffusion boring and soulless, taking on a hollow feel in the instrumentals, vocals and lyrics.
None of the pieces they generated merited a second listen, they said, so there's no threat yet of tools like Riffusion taking the place of your favorite artists on the Billboard 100.
Check out the baby diss track and mellow, beachy podcast theme Riffusion generated, and you be the judge.
Read more: AI Created 3 Songs for Me, and They're Really Catchy. Give a Listen
The consensus from the student content creators was that Riffusion is great for creating background music for videos or theme songs for things like podcasts, but vocalists spitting hot fire on the mic or generating notes that bring grown men to tears are not in the cards for this music-making AI tool.
At least not yet.
