Italian Solutions Provider M-Cube Now Using AI-Generated Music For In-Store Radio

January 14, 2025 by Dave Haynes

The Italian digital solutions provider M-Cube, one of Europe’s largest pro AV integrators, has started using AI-generated music for in-store radio in the luxury retail market that is its main customer base.

M-Lab is described as an AI-powered music catalog designed exclusively for the retail industry, with all the music in M-Lab created using AI tools and offering a high degree of customization that can serve different target markets.

Mike Sponza, M-Cube co-founder and Group Music & Licensing Director, tells Sixteen:Nine content partner invidis: “M-Cube has been creating bespoke sound experiences for all types of retail environments for the past 25 years and is now bringing together its extensive musical knowledge for leading brands in fashion, luxury, automotive and wholesale. Coupled with research in sound psychology, experiential marketing and copyright expertise, M-Lab is an indispensable tool for all retailers to help them meet the challenges ahead.”

The company says the new M-Lab catalog is not a replacement for its traditional offerings, but an “innovative addition that provides retailers with unparalleled flexibility.”

Unspoken, but readily apparent, is that that AI-generated music doesn’t come with licensing fees from the original artists, so it can be offered up to retailers at less cost.

AI is still in its early days, and there is plenty of discussion around intellectual property and what was used to train the AI platform to then generate music. So if the prompt is a “a sultry female singer using a sophisticated blend of soul, funk, jazz, and Afro-Cuban rhythms” and it comes out sound like Sade, how did that happen?

This AVIXA Exchange post gets into some of the gen-AI music issues.

A big company like M-Cube is going to tread carefully with this, as you might well imagine. Using gen-AI music is also probably easier to pull off in something like a retail setting because it is background music meant to set a mood for the store. It’s not the sort of thing that gets, presumably, a lot of careful listening.

I have no idea if some of the other big omni-platform solutions companies, like Mood Media and Montreal’s Stingray, use AI-generated music. But if they don’t, they’re probably looking at it.