Song ideas

What makes an idea turn into a good song

Every idea on this page has the same five parts, in roughly the same order: who or what the song is about, one concrete detail, a genre, a tempo or feel, and a voice. The order matters less than the parts. The lyrics are written from your words, so the detail is the one thing that can't be made up for you, while the genre, the tempo and the voice decide what you hear in the first five seconds.

Here is the best-friend birthday idea taken apart:

Not every song needs all five. A study beat has no person in it and no voice; it needs instruments, a speed and a job to do. But when a song comes back sounding as if it could be about anyone, the missing part is nearly always the detail.

Make an idea yours before you press Create

The ideas are written to be edited. This is the edit that matters, shown on the long-distance love idea (“counting the days until the airport hug”):

• Keep the frame. Who it's for, the situation, the genre, the tempo and the voice can stay exactly as written.
• Swap the detail for yours. The seven-hour time difference, the voice notes at 2 a.m., the city where you'll finally meet. One or two specifics are plenty; ten of them turn the song into a list.
• Fill in the name. Ideas written for a person carry a [name] slot, and the studio won't start while it is still there, so nobody gets a song addressed to “name”. Use what you actually call them, nickname included: that's what gets sung.
• Change one sound word at a time. Slower, a different voice, acoustic instead of electronic: change that word, keep the rest, and you'll hear exactly what the change did.
• Or bring your own words. In Custom mode, paste your lyrics and put the idea's sound (the genre, the tempo, the voice) in the style box.

Then press Create. A preview plays 20 to 30 seconds later, and both finished takes usually arrive in about a minute. If neither is right, change one word and run it again rather than rewriting the whole idea.

What three of these ideas came back as

Visitors made these, and each one is shown with the exact words that made it. The first is today's breakup idea word for word. The other two came from earlier, shorter versions of the wedding and study ideas, from before the ideas were rewritten with more detail; set them beside the versions above.

Ideas for songwriting, if you'd rather write the words

If you write your own lyrics, as 45% of requests here do (the AI Song Report), a topic usually isn't what you're missing. What helps is a way in. Ten that reliably give you a first line:

• The text you'd actually send. Write the chorus as one message you would really send them: “Call me when you land, I don't care what time.” The verses are the reasons it's true.
• One object, ten minutes. Pick something within reach (a mug, a jacket on a chair, a key that no longer opens anything) and write down everything it has seen. Keep the three best lines.
• A place, a time and a smell. “The bus stop on Fifth, eleven at night, wet pavement.” Three facts like that make a verse sound lived in.
• The argument you lost. Give the other person the best line in the song, then answer it in the chorus.
• A list with a turn. Five things you love about a town; the sixth line is why you left.
• What your family always says. A saying from home is a ready-made hook, and it lands hardest sung in the language you heard it in.
• Then and now. Verse one is ten years ago, verse two is today, and the chorus is whatever didn't change.
• A letter that can't be read. To your younger self, a grandparent, the dog. The distance does the emotional work for you.
• Start from the title. A short phrase with two meanings (“Low Battery”: the phone, and you) hands the chorus its last line.
• Make it smaller. Swap “I love you more than anything” for the smallest true proof of it: “You warm the car up before I'm out the door.”

Mark the parts [Verse], [Chorus] and [Bridge], paste the lyrics into Custom mode, and put the sound in the style box. The song runs as long as the words take to sing, so a long page makes a long song: songs made from people's own lyrics run 3:19 at the median, and almost a third pass four minutes.

Music ideas with no singing

Some of the most useful ideas have no words at all: a beat to study to, a theme for a game you're building, a sting under a podcast intro. For these, turn on the Instrumental switch, because the switch removes the voice and a sentence asking for “no vocals” does not reliably; then spend the brief on sound instead of story. About 6% of requests here are made with it on, and the study, game and podcast ideas on this page open with it already switched on.

• Background for work or study: slow, around 70 to 80 BPM, one warm instrument and nothing that builds. You want it to disappear after a minute.
• A game: name the scene (a title screen, a boss fight, a quiet village), the era of the sound (16-bit chiptune, a full orchestra) and say that it should loop.
• An intro or a sting: ask for a short piece that ends on one clean hit, then trim it in your editor; a short brief is no guarantee of a short track.

Lengths, endings and fitting a track to an edit are covered on the AI music generator page.

What people actually make songs about

If you'd rather pick an idea by what's common than by what's clever, this is what six weeks of song requests on Tunely looked like (the AI Song Report). A request counts toward an occasion only when the person's own words name it, in any of the site's languages:

Most requests weren't for an occasion at all. They were songs people wanted to hear about their own lives, in a genre they already like; pop (18%) and rap (11%) were named most often. So if no idea here fits, that is the idea: whatever happened to you this week, in the style you listen to anyway.

When you're stuck

Change where you start, not how hard you think:

• Open your calendar. The next birthday, anniversary, exam or leaving party in it is a song with a deadline.
• Open your camera roll. Find the photo from last month you'd least like to lose; the song is whatever was happening just outside the frame.
• Describe a song you love, not its singer. A brief that names an artist is rewritten into a description of the style and made from that, at no extra cost, but describing the sound yourself (the instruments, the speed, the kind of voice) gets you closer.
• Let the studio pick. Surprise me fills the box with a ready-made brief that needs no name. Make it, then change one word.