The Story
I have been a songwriter for nearly 30 years.
Like many singer songwriters, I chased the same Nashville dream of getting a song, just one, cut by a major artist and heard on the radio. In all that time, I had just three songs recorded by artists.The rest of my journey was filled with my own small venue performances, songwriter retreats, expensive demos, hopeful pitches, and too many songs that went nowhere despite the work, the belief, and the heart I poured into them.
A few months ago, everything changed.
Out of curiosity, I tried an AI software to create a demo from one of my songs. I was honestly stunned by the result. The song came out and very representative in melody and style of my original song but far more polished, modern, and radio-ready, without losing the soul of what I had created.
I presented that song to my Nashville Songwriters group. The response was overwhelmingly positive.
For the first time, I saw a real shift, a way for songwriters to hear their songs fully realized without spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and a way to experiment, explore, and present ideas at a professional level. AI was not replacing me as the songwriter. It was amplifying my songwriter creativity without the cost.I could hear my song in different styles and vocals while the core and heart of my song was maintained.
With only a modest background in web development, I set out to create an online home where my songs could live and be heard. It did not take long to realize it should not be just about me. Other writers started asking if I could showcase their songs too. It hit me how many talented, driven songwriters are out there whose work is still largely unheard, all chasing the same dream. The reality is that the Nashville idea of, just one big song on the radio, keeps getting harder to reach in the major-label, big-streaming world. At the same time, income from small-venue gigs is drying up, especially for older performers who never built a big following even locally. The good news is that todays AI tools can help singer-songwriters refresh and re-energize their catalogs and creat new ways to present, pitch, and resell great songs. Most of the successful financially secure singer-songwriters have always expanded their earnings by writing for other artists, and AI DEMOs now open even more doors and ways to do exactly that. I have included links to every song so songwriters can share their song DEMO's simply by texting,email and social media to build uf their following and sell and licence their "GOOD" songs to others.
So I built O3Tunes.
At its core, O3Tunes is a jukebox-style radio platform where song demos can be streamed easily and discovered naturally. It is designed to showcase songwriting first...lyrics, melody, and emotion, without all the gatekeepers or prohibitive time and costs. It initially opens with a random selection from all songs on the site for the first song and follows with a random shuffle so every song has an equal chance to be heard by anybody who visits the site. The visitor can then filter songs to their listening taste, favorite genre or particular song or songwriter.
O3Tunes also accepts demos created and produced using an AI component as long as the songwriting remains human-led,and production is human directed with lyrics and melody being more than 50% human created. The new technology must be only used as just another a tool,not not the author.Text based AI can be used only to help tune up a song. This is in line with the latest direction from performing rights organizations for the acceptance of copyrighting your songs. O3Tunes therefore only accepts songs that have been created by professional writers and accepted by the performing rights organisations.
Right now, I have just launched the site and now opened up the submission path for others.
Many of the initial songs are my wifes and my songs that I used to test and debug the site. Some are more personal stories related to my life and my family along with more commercial writes. My sister in law Janet, who only started writing after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, wrote her very powerful songs including defining the style, gender and type of singer as she heard them herself in her head. To listen to her songs in rememberance of her enter Janet Dolan in the seach box above the song list in the Jukebox.