The Riff Journal
Prompts that actually work, what a custom song is worth paying for, and what to write when the song is for one specific person.
Start here/Ideas
Somewhere in the last year, drivers started writing songs about their passengers while the passenger was still in the car. It is the funniest format on the internet right now and it is very easy to get wrong.
Two minutes from a sentence to a finished track with vocals is now normal. What nobody explains is which sentence — so here is the whole process, including the parts that go wrong.
Most bad AI songs are bad for the same reason: the prompt described a category instead of a record. Here is the fix, and fifty prompts you can steal.
The honest answer is that “custom song” describes four different products at four wildly different prices, and most people compare them as if they were one.
Almost every argument about this is two separate questions wearing one coat: am I allowed to sell this, and does anybody own it. The answers are different, and only one of them is complicated.
Every one of these songs is about somebody else’s daughter. That’s the strange thing about the genre — you play it at the wedding, everybody cries, and not a word of it is hers.
The gap between a song that makes your wife cry and one that makes her politely say “aw” is not budget, talent, or production. It is how specific you were willing to be.
You will spend nine months choosing a song that two strangers wrote about their own relationship, and then dance to it in front of everyone you know.
Everybody gets the same four bars sung badly over a cake. Almost nobody has ever heard their own name in a real chorus.
There are about forty Christmas songs in total rotation and you have heard all of them roughly nine hundred times. None of them mention your uncle.