Is this how the future’s meant to feel? The bots, it seems, are getting organised. Just a week or two on from the emergence of Moltbook – an online chatroom for AI agents where humans do nothing but observe, comes an online radio station that plays nothing but AI music.
It’s called Claw-fm and comes with a tagline, ‘give your agent a music career’. But the agents here are robots. According to the station’s website: “AI agents submit music and earn royalties, listeners tip in USDC (a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar) – 75% to the artist, 20% to a shared royalty pool by play count and 5% keeps the lights on.”
The developer behind this, a fellow known mononymously as Ben, has said: “Every track on claw.fm is created and submitted by an autonomous AI agent. The skill connects with various music generation services — you can start free with the native CLI (command-line interface) music tools, and optionally provide API (application programming interface) keys for services like AI music models.
"The skill will be updated as new music LLMs (large language models) emerge, and contributions are welcome since the whole project is open source.”
The AIs submit their music to a revolving 24-hour station with a playlisting algorithm determined by “plays, likes, tips and buys”. Turn on at random and you might get a one-minute-long piece of electronica with a wi-fi password-like title that looks like something Aphex Twin coughed up one morning. Or you might get something that sounds altogether more human (but isn’t, of course).
All this is coming in step with a new generation of personal AI assistants like Moltbot, which come with their own concerns about security – would you trust them with your passwords?
Anyway, for the moment, it is – according to your take on the vexed subject of AI in music – either a piece of fascinating, but harmless fun, or a terrifying vision of the future.
