Roy started Wubble with his co-founder, Shaad Sufi, in 2024, from a small office in Singapore’s central business district. Since then, his platform has generated tunes for global giants like Microsoft, HP, L’Oreal and NBCUniversal. They’re even used on the Taipei Metro, where AI-generated tunes soothe harried commuters. 

Generative AI has been a controversial subject in the creative industry: Artists, musicians and other content creators worry that companies will train AI on copyrighted materials, then ultimately automate away the need for human creators at all.

Roy, however, thinks Wubble is a way to fix a music sector that’s already broken. Artists are awarded micro-payments on streaming sites like Spotify, which only works for the most famous artists. 

Roy spent almost two decades at Disney, where he oversaw operations at its networks and studios in major cities like Tokyo, Mumbai and Los Angeles. He said his time leading Disney’s music group opened his eyes to the tedious process of music licensing.

“So many licensing deals were not going through because of the quantum of paperwork, the amount of red tape, and how expensive, complex and convoluted the entire process was,” he says. Yet, the incumbent music firms “don’t have a lot of motivation to streamline processes.”

Wubble is trying something different, collaborating directly with musicians and paying them for the raw material used to train Wubble’s AI. “If we’re looking at Latino hip hop, we’ll go to a recording studio in Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro, and tell them we need ten hours of Latino music,” Roy says. Wubble then negotiates a deal and offers a one-time payment for their work, at rates Roy argues are more competitive than other companies offering music streaming services.

He admits that a one-time payment isn’t a perfect solution, however, and adds that he’s currently exploring how technologies like blockchain can uncover new ways to compensate musicians for their help training Wubble’s AI models.

David Gunkel, who teaches communication studies at Northern Illinois University in Chicago, thinks training AI from artist-commissioned material is a smarter business move than just trawling the web for copyrighted content.

Production companies like Disney, Universal and Warner Bros., for example, are suing AI companies like Midjourney and Minimax of copyright infringement, arguing that users can easily generate images and videos of protected characters like Star Wars’s Darth Vader. 

“If you’re curating your data sets, and compensating and giving credit to the artists that are being utilized to train your model, you won’t find yourself in a lawsuit,” he explains. “It’s a better business practice, just in terms of your long-term viability as a commercial actor.”

Text-to-speech generation

Wubble currently offers just instrumental music and audio effects, but Roy thinks voice is the next step. By end-January, Roy says his platform will offer AI-generated voiceovers created from written scripts, to cater to clients who require narrative-led audio tracks. “So, the entire audio content workflow for a business can be housed on Wubble,” he concludes proudly. 

AI music startups are popping up around the world, hoping to use the powerful new technology to make the process of creating tunes and songs easier. Some, like Suno, cater in generating full songs, while others like Moises offer tools for artists.

In Asia, too, Korean AI startup Supertone offers voice synthesis and cloning, using samples to generate new vocal tracks. The startup, founded by Kyogu Lee, was acquired by HYBE, the entertainment company behind K-pop sensation BTS, and now operates as its subsidiary. Supertone even debuted a fully virtual K-pop girl group, SYNDI8, in 2024. 

At Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore last year, Lee said he saw musical artists as “co-creators,” not just in terms of licensing their voices, but also asking for their help in refining the technology. 

AI “will democratize the creative process, so every creator or artist can experiment with this new technology to explore and experiment with new ideas,” he told the audience.

Roy, from Wubble, also sees AI as a way to make it easier for more people to get involved in music creation.

“Music creation has always been a privilege. It’s been the domain of those who have the time and resources to learn an instrument,” he says. “We believe that every human being should be able to create—and AI enables that now.”

The vice president, who made his critiques in a rare appearance in the White House briefing room and on social media, was the most prominent example yet of the Trump administration quickly assigning culpability for the death of 37-year-old Renee Good while the investigation is still underway. Good was shot and killed by an ICE officer while she tried to drive away on a snowy residential street as officers were carrying out an operation related to the administration’s immigration crackdown.

Vance said at the White House that he wasn’t worried about prejudging the investigation into Good’s killing, saying of the videos he’d seen of the Wednesday incident, “What you see is what you get in this case.”

Vance said he was certain that Good accelerated her car into the officer and hit him. It isn’t clear from the videos if the vehicle makes contact with the officer. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said Wednesday that video of the shooting shows arguments that the officer was acting in self-defense were “garbage.”

The vice president also said part of him felt “very, very sad” for Good. He called her “brainwashed” and “a victim of left-wing ideology.”

“I can believe that her death is a tragedy, while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left who has marshaled an entire movement — a lunatic fringe — against our law enforcement officers,” Vance said.

His defense of the officer, at times fiery, came as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and President Donald Trump likewise said the officer’s actions were a justified act of self-defense. Trump said Good “viciously ran over” the ICE officer, though video footage of the event contradicts that claim.

Trump has made a wide-ranging crackdown on crime and immigration in Democratic cities a centerpiece of his second term in office. He has deployed federal law enforcement officials and National Guard troops to support the operations and has floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act to try to stop his opponents from blocking his plans through the courts.

Trump officials made it clear that they were rejecting claims by Democrats and officials in Minnesota that the president’s move to deploy immigration officers in American cities had been inflammatory and needed to end.

“The Trump administration will redouble our efforts to get the worst of the worst criminal, illegal alien killers, rapists and pedophiles off of American streets,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday before Vance spoke.

She called Good’s killing “a result of a large, sinister left-wing movement.”

Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate last year partly for his ability to verbally spar, especially with the media. He opened his remarks by condemning headlines he saw about the shooting, at times raising his voice and decrying the “corporate media.”

“This was an attack on law and order. This was an attack on the American people,” Vance said.

He accused journalists of falsely portraying Good as “innocent” and said: “You should be ashamed of yourselves. Every single one of you.”

“The way that the media, by and large, has reported this story has been an absolute disgrace,” he added. “And it puts our law enforcement officers at risk every single day.”

When asked what responsibility he and Trump bore to defuse tension in the country over the incident, Vance said their responsibility was to “protect the people who are enforcing law and protect the country writ large.”

“The best way to turn down the temperature is to tell people to take their concerns about immigration policy to the ballot box,” he said.

Vance also announced that the administration was deputizing a new assistant attorney general to prosecute the abuse of government assistance programs in response to growing attention to fraud in childcare programs in Minnesota.

He said the prosecutor will focus primarily on Minnesota, and will be nominated in coming days. Vance added that Senate Majority Leader John Thune told him he’d seek a prompt confirmation.

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Associated Press writers Konstantin Toropin, Will Weissert and Jonathan J. Cooper contributed to this report.