How Voice-Swap Makes Ethical AI Music Profitable: Q/A with Co-founder Dan Stein

In this interview series by Website Planet, I talk to executives from the best digital companies, who share their stories, tips and perspectives on what it really takes to create a successful website and online business. A deep dive into decades of hands-on experience and technical expertise to learn untold truths and practical advice that will immediately help you build and grow your website.

Dan Stein, also known as DJ Fresh, is a prominent figure in the music industry, but his 25-year experience intersects with tech as well, having held AI engineering and management roles at General Bioinformatics, GLG Group, and Stability AI. He joined us today to introduce Voice-Swap, a startup he co-founded that creates licensed AI voice clones for artists and pays them a 50% revenue share when the clone is used by one of their over 220,000 users. A great way to profit with AI while prioritizing artist rights and ethics.

To start, tell us briefly about you. What is your current role at your company, and what are the measurable achievements you are most proud of?

We’re very proud to be the first platform to pay music artists royalties for the use of their AI voice model. Nico Pellerin and I founded Voice-Swap in June 2023, and since then we’ve been featured on some of the biggest international news platforms (and now on Website Planet too!).

For me, the best thing we’ve done has been – with features like watermarking, licensing, copyright checks and preferential monetisation for artists – challenging the status quo in AI and offering artists hope that this technology will be used first and foremost to benefit the creators, to benefit humans.

What pain point(s) do you solve for your customers? What was the “aha Moment” that led to the idea? Can you share that story with us?

As a multi-platinum Brit-Award nominated producer, I have repeatedly experienced the pain of debating endlessly who to approach to demo a song idea. You know that it will be a waste of time for some singers because their version won’t get used, but you don’t know who until you try.

For bigger artists time in the studio is rare and very valuable. Some artists pay tens of thousands of dollars in advance for a feature and have no idea what they’re going to get.

Our technology allows labels, artists, producers, and managers to quickly and safely trial lots of voices to validate their ideas and help them decide on the best voice for their songs, while also generating a revenue stream for the voice owners. It also gives people who don`t have a singing voice (like myself) a sound, allowing you to put your ideas out into the world.

How Voice-Swap’s subscription model ensures the ethical use of AI-generated voices and fair compensation for artists giving their voice:

Artists subscribe to Voice-Swap to access a collection of licensed AI voices. This allows them to create demos and experiment with different AI vocal styles. No need to record in a studio.
Users can release music commercially only if they obtain a license from the artist whose voice they used. The terms and pricing for these licenses are set by the artists themselves.
Artists receive a 50/50 revenue split for the use of their AI voices. Alternatively, Voice-Swap has a fixed-fee licensing option, allowing users to know the costs upfront. Artists must respond within 48 hours to licensing requests, to make the process straightforward.

What do you think makes your company stand out? What are you most proud of?

We fight for artists and rights holders. We are a music and voice company that specialises in AI, not an AI company that sells a music-based product and service. That gives us a very different perspective.

Between the team, we have maybe 100 years of experience in the real music industry as well as some of the hottest talent in AI.

What’s the one key lesson you’ve learned about building a website and business that you wish you knew when you started? What’s the story behind this realization?

Don’t rely on other small startups for your backend. I’m not going to name and shame anyone but this has been a painful lesson for us. It’s tempting to forego creating your own custom infrastructure, and initially, that may not be a sensible option anyway when you are prototyping but as you scale using smaller third-party platforms can end up becoming very expensive and unstable.

For us the problem was time, but when we were forced to create our own solutions we began the journey that led us to the platform we now have which we hope everyone will agree is extremely fast and responsive.

In your opinion, which aspect of running a website tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?

Customer support. Hands down. This takes up an insane amount of time. And at least for us, it’s incredibly important to work with your users, they are your disciples they are the ones spreading the word about what you do. They need to be your friends, and you have to put time into building a relationship with them, helping them on their journey with your product, and listening to their needs.

Is there any advice you’ve received in your career that you now wish you never followed? What happened?

Not really but there’s much advice I wish I had followed. The most important thing I have learned is when you find good people, hold onto them. On that note massive shout out to Ausrine, Declan, Mike, Benn Jordan, Chris Gilbert, Chris Bishop, Lester, Josh, Aaron, Ken and all the Voice-Swap team!