AI MUSIC VIDEOS FOR ALL?

Generative AI-Driven Music Video Platform: A Deep Dive

Framing the Opportunity

A generative AI-driven music video platform would let users instantly create music videos for any song – either using their own tracks or AI-generated music – paired with AI-made visuals. Unlike MTV’s era (which offered professionally made videos of hit songs in a broadcast format), an AI platform could produce videos on-the-fly for any track, even niche or newly created songs. Every creator or listener could get a personalized music video experience, not just top artists. This on-demand approach could turn passive music streaming into a more visual, interactive experience.

  • Exciting because democratizes music, nostalgia fix, added layer to music experience, a new tool for creators.
  • Meh because commoditized not cultural, competition for visual attention, present day costs, customer spending expectations.
  • Making the music itself via AI is very affordable, on the order of a few cents or less per track.
  • Higher fidelity models and multiple generations can drive current costs between $9 and $90 Per video; excluding human editing in the loop.
  • There is a massive overlap ~80% with music discovery, conception and video based social such as TikTok (mostly TikTok tbh)

But the question is could “A PLATFORM” be as big, as central and as culturally significant as MTV was by offering on demand generative music videos for everybody.

My personal take is no. That already exists. It’s TikTok with a bold line of other players behind it. This is more of a feature for consumers and a tool for creators to stand out. But, let’s explore with the help of our wonderful colleague Amelia..

Jonathan said a thing. As a fan of MTV, MuchMusic and WinAmp.. i thought about it.. and disagreed.. now here we are.

Immediate Comparisons / TikTok & Spotify

TikTok and other short-form video apps have already blurred the line between music and visuals – 68% of social media users discover new music via short-form video contentlbbonline.com, and an astonishing 84% of songs that hit the Billboard Global 200 in 2024 went viral on TikTok firstnewsroom.tiktok.com. TikTok proves that visuals (like dance clips or memes) set to music can drive songs up the charts. However, TikTok relies on user-generated videos – not every song has an accompanying video unless creators make one. Spotify, meanwhile, is great for listening but largely audio-only (aside from small looping visuals called Canvas). An AI music video platform bridges this gap: it could automatically generate visuals for any song, giving even obscure tracks a compelling video. In essence, it offers the continuous music stream of Spotify, the visual engagement of TikTok, and the ever-fresh content that only AI can provide.

U.S. Music Industry

Music consumption is huge and increasingly intertwined with video and AI. The U.S. recorded music industry hit an all-time high of $17.1 billion in revenue in 2023riaa.com, thanks largely to streaming. Americans now spend over 4 hours a day listening to musicriaa.com, and music is deeply embedded in social media – 9 in 10 social media users engage in music-related activity on those platformsriaa.com. This shows a massive audience that’s already combining music with visual/social experiences.

Short-form video is a key driver of music trends: TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels have revolutionized music discovery. TikTok alone has over a billion users globally and reported that music is a feature in 90% of its top videoslbbonline.com. The “TikTok effect” – where viral video clips cause streams of a song to explode – is now a dominant force in the industrylbbonline.com. In fact, TikTok’s own research with Luminate confirms TikTok is “a key driver of music discovery, monetization and chart success”newsroom.tiktok.com. For a generative video platform, this trend is encouraging: consumers enjoy pairing music with compelling visuals, and an AI platform would ensure there’s always a visual available even if no fan has made one yet.

Explosion of music content: On the supply side, there’s an unprecedented flood of new music. By late 2022, roughly 98,500 new music tracks were being uploaded every day to streaming servicesmusicbusinessworldwide.com – and that number is likely well over 100k/day now (2024-2025). Over 96% of those daily uploads are independent artistsmusicbusinessworldwide.com, not major-label acts. This long tail of millions of songs is mostly audio-only (few indie artists can afford music videos). It’s a pain point and an opportunity: a generative AI platform could help these millions of creators get video content for their songs, helping them stand out in what Universal Music’s CEO calls an “ocean of noise” from so much music being releasedmusicbusinessworldwide.commusicbusinessworldwide.com.

Generative AI Trends

The past couple of years have seen creative AI go mainstream. Overall generative AI in the creative industries is expected to grow more than 12x from 2022 to 2032 (from $1.7B to $21.6B)magichour.ai. This growth is fueled by everyday creators and even brands adopting AI for content.

  • AI music generators like Suno and Udio have made it possible for anyone to create original songs with a text prompttomsguide.com. There’s also intense interest (and some controversy) around AI-generated music imitating artist styles – showing how far the tech has come. A Technavio report predicts AI in the music market will grow by $4.75 billion between 2023 and 2027 (32% CAGR)lbbonline.com.

  • AI video generation models have quickly progressed from rudimentary few-second clips to more coherent minutes. Runway ML’s Gen-2 and Gen-3 models (text-to-video) launched in 2023-2024, and OpenAI introduced Sora, a text-to-video model capable of up to 60-second clipsopenai.com. These models are rapidly improving in visual fidelity and length of output. The presence of major players (OpenAI’s Sora, Google’s Imagen Video, Adobe’s generative video in beta) indicates that AI video is a hot area of developmenttechcrunch.com.

Convergence of trends: In summary, U.S. consumers are spending more time with music and short videos, and they’re open to AI-driven creativity. This creates fertile ground for an AI music video platform. Users are already accustomed to algorithmic recommendations – extending that to algorithmic creation is becoming the new frontier. 

Cost to Generate a 3-Minute AI Music Video

Current day (May 2025) estimates based on generally available tools that could be used in a pipeline.

  • AI-Generated Song (3 minutes): Tools like Suno AI and Udio can produce songs at very low cost. For example, Suno’s Pro plan costs about $10/month and lets you generate ~500 songs. That works out to only 2¢ per song (assuming average length ~3 minutes). In other words, the audio portion of an AI music video is practically free on a subscription – just pennies for the compute required to generate a track. 

  • AI-Generated Video (3 minutes): Video is more resource-intensive. Using current state-of-the-art generative video models, one pays in either credits or compute time. For instance, Runway’s Gen-2 model (text-to-video) charges 5 credits per second of video. Runway’s pricing pegs 1 credit ≈ $0.01, so that’s about $0.05 per second of generated video. At that rate, a 3-minute (180 sec) video costs around 900 credits, i.e. $9. This is for standard quality (~480p to 720p, a few frames per second). 

  • Total for a 3-min AI music video: $10 (USD) using today’s tools. If higher resolution or more complex scenes are needed, it could be $20+. This cost will likely decrease over time as models get more efficient and as competition drives prices down (we’ve already seen some price drops in image generation and an explosion of new video models in development). It’s worth noting that $10, or even $500 for a full music video is incredibly cheap compared to traditional methods – professional music videos can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $500,000 or more to produce. 

  • Other considerations: To run a platform like this at scale, one would leverage economies of scale. Also, not every video generation needs full 3-minute unique footage. One could reuse certain AI-generated segments, use fewer frames with clever interpolatio. Or the use of mixed generation where AI is used to generate a few key scenes or backgrounds and then a simpler algorithm to animate or pan across them, which can be cheaper than full frame-by-frame generation.

Making A Music Video Today.. Like Now

Several youtubers are putting in the time and effort to generate AI music videos already. The same can be said for Instagram, TikTok, and even OF accounts that you might think are real people. Creative opportunists are cashing in on AI generative media and avatars.. and they are making bank because they are early and hustling. You can do it too! and here’s how.. and then the outcome of a one shot attempt at putting Jonathan in a music video (not great). 

Here's a simple n8n pipeline that could be built today to turn any song into a video. It would probably take around... a few hours to generate under optimal conditions. Probably a few minutes by the end of 2025. But not instant.
Making a 5 second clip from a starting image in Kling

Feeling inspired?

  1. You’ll want to create an account on make.com or n8n.io for the pipeline.
  2. Get Suno.com for song creation; can use an LLM like ChatGPT, Grok, Claude or Gemini for lyric help
  3. Get one of the LLMs to break your song lyrics or mood down into scenes every 5 or 10 seconds
  4. Use Kling.ai, Higgsfield.ai or openai.com/sora to generate 5 or 10 second clips
  5. Setup airtable or google drive or your own database setup to store things
  6. Map this all out into a pipeline in make.com or n8n.. or take the painful.. more painful path of manually doing it all
  7. You can get amazing results.. just do a youtube search .. 

Business Model Canvas for an AI Music Video Platform

  • Value Proposition: On-demand AI-generated music videos for anyone. Instantly transform a song into a visual experience. This offers music artists an affordable way to get a video for their track (within minutes instead of weeks, and for dollars instead of thousands). For consumers, it’s a new way to enjoy music – not just listening but watching unique, AI-crafted visuals that match the music. Creative Empowerment and Personalization.

  • Customer Segments:

    • Independent musicians and small labels: who want promotional videos for songs but lack resources. This could include the huge number of DIY artists releasing music on SoundCloud, Spotify, etc. every day.

    • Content creators and influencers: who might use AI-generated music videos as content for TikTok, YouTube, Instagram – for example, using unique AI visuals in the background of their posts or as stand-alone creative videos to attract viewers.

    • General music fans / consumers: especially younger audiences in the U.S. who are tech-savvy. They might use the app for entertainment – e.g. generate a cool video for a song to share with friends, or to play on a second screen while listening. Think of people who love visualizers and screen savers – this is the next level. (lets be honest, people who love screen savers are boomers and nostalgic millennials.. they do however have more disposable income than zoomers).

    • Businesses and venues: as a secondary segment, places like cafes, bars, or retail stores that play music and could display AI-generated visuals on screens. 

    • Early adopters likely overlap with the existing user base of generative AI apps (e.g. people who have played with AI art or AI music) and the TikTok/YouTube creator community. The U.S. market focus means catering to English-speaking content and perhaps popular genres in the U.S., but generative visuals can be quite universal.

  • Channels: Mobile app and Web platform, Social media and community, Partnerships

  • Key Resources: Generative AI Models & Compute Infrastructure, Development talent, Training data and IP, Community/content management, Brand and relationships

In summary, the business model centers on leveraging relatively low-cost AI generation to offer a high-value creative service, that the majority of users want for free.

 

Revenue Streams: This isn't the kind of business that makes money. You're going to need to burn it like you're in Weimar Germany and it's mid winter and there's no logs left. Perpetually extending freemium plans, until you get acquired for the value of your user behavioral data or some vanity metric.

John Doesnt

TAM and SAM (U.S. Market)

Total Addressable Market (TAM): The TAM for a generative music video platform in the U.S. spans multiple existing markets – digital music, video streaming, and creator tools – because it’s at the intersection of those activities. We can size it in a couple of ways:

For a rough figure, if 200M users is TAM and we assume an ARPU (average revenue per user) of perhaps $2/month (blending free and paid users, similar to Spotify’s global ARPU), that TAM could be on the order of $4.8 billion/year in the U.S. (200M * $2 * 12 months). This is speculative, but it shows the ceiling if the platform became the new MTV.

However, TAM is the broad universe. Not everyone will immediately want AI-generated videos. Many are fine with Spotify or YouTube as is. So we refine to SAM:

Serviceable Available Market (SAM): These are the segments most likely to adopt in the near-to-medium term, given current trends:

  • Independent artists and active music creators in the U.S.: There are millions of tracks uploaded each year by independent U.S. artists. Let’s assume 500k U.S. indie artists could use this tool. Many of them won’t pay a lot, but tools that help promotion are something they do invest in – even if it’s $10 here or $20 there.

  • Enthusiastic content creators and “prosumers”: If 2–5 million U.S. users became regular users of an AI music video generator (either free or paid), that would be a huge win. 

Realistically, in the initial phase (first few years), the Serviceable market in the U.S. might be on the order of 10–20 million users. That includes a mix of creators and viewers who are excited by generative media. Within that, paying customers might be the few hundred thousand to low millions who get serious use out of it (e.g. the indie artists and content creators). For instance, if you captured 500k paying users (which is <0.2% of the U.S. population and quite achievable if the concept catches on), at an average of $10/month, that’s $60M annual revenue – a strong business, yet a fraction of the whole market, implying room to grow.

Long-term TAM vision: sell to TikTok or Meta or whatever.

Forward-Looking Generative Media Concepts

The idea of AI-generated music videos is just one example of how generative AI can redefine media experiences. Looking ahead, here are a few other generative media concepts that could become viable businesses:

  • Generative Binaural Beats for Wellness

  • AI-Generated Royalty-Free Venue Music

  • Dynamic Generative Mobile Games: Imagine mobile games where the levels, characters, and story are generated by AI uniquely for each player. 

  • Personalized AI Bedtime Stories: Bedtime story apps are popular for kids – now imagine an app that can generate a unique bedtime story (with illustrations) on demand. 

  • AI-Generated Music and Video for VR/AR Experiences: Looking a bit further out, as AR glasses and VR headsets become mainstream, there will be demand for immersive content. 

  • AI Narrative Companions and Entertainment: Consider AI that generates podcast-style audio shows or conversational companions. For instance, a fully AI-generated talk show where you pick the topics and virtual hosts (maybe historical figures or fictional characters) and it produces an engaging dialogue. 

 

more power, more creation, more consumption.. moaaaaar

Verdict.. Yes But Not Like That

We are entering an era where content creation itself can be automated and individualized, which is as disruptive as when content distribution was democratized by the internet. Just as YouTube allowed anyone to broadcast and Spotify allowed anyone to access a music library, generative media will allow anyone to manufacture new content for themselves. This opens up not only new business models but also questions about creativity, ownership, and quality.

Is this the new MTV (TikTok) moment? Ya i dunno bout that. Definitely a feature though. A monetizable feature for sure.

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