AI + Music: Unlocking a New Era of Emotional Marketing Content

The best marketing reaches emotion, but most teams do not have the time or musical skill to create content that carries a feeling. I tested that gap by using AI to make a complete workout album from Psalms, then used the process to think through what marketers could do with music, video, and other emotional formats.

Start with a source and a feeling

The project began with lyrics from a public-domain Bible translation. I used Psalm 18 as the first source, then considered how the words should feel as a raw, energetic workout track. The same process could begin with a brand story, customer language, a campaign theme, or lyrics written with ChatGPT.

The important decision comes before the tool: what should the audience feel? AI can generate options, but the marketer still chooses the emotional direction and the audience it is meant to serve.

Generate, refine, and present

Suno was the music tool I used because it could create a longer song from the lyrics and style direction. A first pass is not always the final version, so the workflow includes listening, refining prompts, and selecting the tracks that actually work.

The album also needed a visual identity. I used AI to explore album art with a medieval-inspired direction, then thought about how Runway could animate the images for presentation. The work was not only about making sound. It was about packaging the sound so people could find it, understand it, and want to engage with it.

Turn the experiment into marketing

Music can support a jingle, a short social video, an event theme, or a branded audio experience. A marketer could create several variations for different audiences while keeping the core identity consistent. The same creative process can make a campaign more memorable than another static message.

The test also showed why quality control matters. AI makes production accessible, but the marketer still has to choose the source, direct the emotion, review the output, and decide where it belongs. The opportunity is not replacing creative judgment. It is giving more teams a way to experiment with formats they previously could not produce.

every marketer knows that the best marketing hits at the emotions of your buyers hits at what they're feeling what they're concerned about what their fears are what their dreams are what their aspirations are and every marketer knows it yet very few marketers produce content that actually map directly to those emotions and today I want to show you how you can use AI to hit there in a way marketers have never really been able to do so before at least not until now so welcome back to the AI driven marketer today I want to show you how I used AI tools to put out a full music album Now I want to say this music album is not related to marketing yet it was a test to see what I could actually do to produce to get an album out there that I can then start to use the idea for it um to enhance the marketing I'm actually doing so I actually created a full album around my faith I am a Christian and I produced an album called Suter workout music it is a essentially a taking the Psalms from the Bible and then turning them into music in a raw and energetic way so that uh myself and other Christians can use this in their workout flows and actually have something you know really positive and reinforcing to listen to but I wanted to show this as a case study of what's now possible for marketers with just a general rough sense of musicality and in video in order to create better content CU now that I've done this test project I my brain's churning with all the ways I can use this for actual marketing Endeavors so stay tuned to the end when I'm going to share how I plan to use this in marketing and the ways you can use it too but before I get into all the different ways this is actually going to be helpful I want to show you exactly what this album looks like and then how step by step how I made it come into reality so I'm going to open up my screen if you are joining me in audio just know I'll be talking through the whole process and you'll be able to hear the music here but if you want to join on video you could just open this up if you open up this whole thing on Apple podcast or you can actually watch the video on Apple podcast or you can join me on YouTube or on Aid driven marketer.com to get the video version of this episode so I am open here on YouTube where I've uploaded a whole playlist for Suter and again it's it's eight tracks uh seven different Psalms and one passage from second Timothy and let me just play a little sample here to show you how and then I'm going to break it down exactly uh the process I went through in order to create this but first let me hit play I think you'll be uh how good this is considering I'm literally just throwing a Psalm from the Bible which isn't is is music but it's translated from Hebrew and it's coming into English which doesn't know like music doesn't always translate well as the Rhymes are lost all that different kind of stuff I mean it's from thousands of years ago so just know that this wasn't made in English in order to be a song but AI is so good at turning it into music that it it it ended up becoming good good to listen to listen along here we go I love you oh Lord my strength the Lord is my rock my Fortress deliverer my God my rock my rock where I take refuge my shield my Defender my tower worthy of Praise is the Lord whom I call on he rescues me from all my foes the waves of death broke about me fearful floods of chaos shol through cords around me snares of death came to meet me in distress I cried to the Lord and shouted for help to my God in his Temple he heard my voice into his ears my C the Earth Shook and that's just a little preview if you want the whole album and listen to all the others like I'll drop a link in the description if you're interested in that but again this isn't about the Bible it's not about Psalms it's about being able to take a bunch of different elements and mash it together into something that's really fun and engaging and easy to listen to and again at the end of this episode I'm going to talk about how I'm going to be using this as a marketer I just put this album together to kind of like test it out and to get something out there something honestly I wanted um but now I'm going to walk you through the process of how I brought this to life so let's dive into it for starters uh if you need songs you need lyrics I actually got my lyrics straight from an open- Source Bible project as you know companies spend a lot of money to translate the Bible into different ways and I found one that was just public domain uh a modern translation I just took here Psalm 18 it's that song we just listened to and I literally just threw this into the AI app to use as the song um for you you might want to think about about what kind of lyrics you want luckily chat gbt is freaking really good at coming up with song lyrics in fact if you've been listening to this podcast for a while you now noticed I I had a preview of somebody a song that somebody had made with really awesome lyrics um I can't remember the topic of the song but like the lyrical ability of chat gp4 with its new creative update it just got a few weeks ago is actually pretty strong especially if you know how to ask for what type of lyrics or what time of type of song if you want more more ambiguity into it or if you want it to be more straightforward playful whatever it is that you want chat GPT or or any of the other AI tools really can craft really solid lyrics so think about uh think about the lyrics you want in this song or if even if you just want it to be instrumental it could do instrumental too so I have my lyrics here then I went to this app and I actually just paid for this app I paid for a whole Year's worth I got it as a Black Friday deal this is one of the AI tools that I plan on using regularly now because now that I've gone through a whole a whole album's worth of music with Psalms here I feel pretty comfortable with it and I've uh paid my dues and learned how to use it but let me show you a little bit about how how it works it's called sun.com and there are some other AI music tools out there I'd find that this one's my favorite right now because it just does really good on the first pass and it gives me really long some of the other music tools only give you like you know 30 seconds to 60 60 seconds at a time and then you have to extend it this one just gives you like a full four minutes and you're just kind of like come on um it has some really cool abilities this isn't going to be an in-depth tutorial on sunno there's plenty of those on YouTube I'm just going to give you a taste here um and let you dive into like if you want to explore sunno more fully um find a few other AI creators that have talked about how to get the most out of it so right now I'm in this Creator stage they have a whole area where you can listen to other people's songs and stuff but right here I'm actually using the template I gave uh that used to create that song we just listened to for Psalm 18 and here you could see all the scripture that I've loaded into the lyrics and then it gives you a little space where you could put the style of the music you can even have another extra space to exclude Styles I've never even I haven't even played with that part yet and in this one I just wanted this like trap rap style male vocals and a fairly fast Rhythm because again it's it's workout music I wanted it to be a little faster and a little bit more I don't know to flow quickly if I'm running or lifting weights or something and then a title for it they also have this one feature that I kind of used off and on um called Persona where you can pull in a one of your songs and it will continue to pull like the the sound of the vocal so that like the same singer can be the you can have a similar sounding singer or rapper like throughout your other ones but I had a few different voices in mind um so sometimes I pulled from this one song particularly to be across the the different songs um and it's really good you like here I can just recreate it and every time you push create it gives you oh running into an error come on show me some songs it's so fast at generating songs like it actually starts giving you a preview of the first 30 seconds within maybe 30 Oh see it's even done already I could start listen G sometimes it sounds horrible but often times I'm amazed at how good it sounds on the first try I would usually for each song I I have eight different uh tracks on this album I probably had to produce about 10 to 15 different tracks and listen to them and say yes no yes know and try to like figure out what I needed to do in the prompt in order to make it better some lessons that I've learned abouto that I've gotten better at over time see this first one I actually was just throwing into the lyrics uh just as they were and I found out you can actually inject prompts into sunno through the lyrics Portion by giving it a little bit more Direction in Brackets kind of like code right if you've written ever written code you know there's like these curly bars oh let me get that in there you can get brackets in here let me show you one where I've done this by the time I was getting to some of the last tracks I was actually giving it more instruction and like hey this first opening line make this spoken word then in verse one make it trap wrap verse two trap wrap and when you get to this section go ahead and make this the chorus but sing it um and then move back to the Trap Rack in verse three trap rap and then chorus again right so I was giving it more Direction you can kind of use the brackets to insert prompts right into the music music so that it can get a little bit more sense of what you want I did find that in most cases when you're prompting AI it you can like refine it refine it refine it and get closer and closer with each try I did find that prompting sunno with music was much more squirly the AI would go all over the place but still it sounded pretty good most of the time but you know you sometimes you had a specific thing that you wanted um I not a musician I imagine if you're a musician and have any kind of sense of music you be able to give it such more you would give it clearer instruction of what you want and how you want it I had to Google and look up a ton of different YouTube videos on even to get to this point of figuring out what I I wanted I didn't even know what trap was even though I knew what I wanted it to sound like and what style I wanted I didn't know what the language was for it because I'm just not a huge audio file uh I know a lot more about like vocals on podcasts and what that sounds like because I'm a podcaster but as far as music goes I like to listen to it I just don't know much about it so uh if you're if you know anything about music it's going to go a lot farther because your prompts will be more tight and more specific but if you're like me like even just take giving some swings to it it'll it'll guess and come up with different styles for you and then you can just refine it and learn more as you go uh I found the whole process to just be really fun to dig into because I've never had to dig into this before and it's it's just really fun there's also a button for instrumental if you don't want any lyrics which I think will be helpful for some of the use cases I'll share at the end of the episode um so I went through the process and it took it honestly took took a long time to get to eight tracks I probably spent on my phone they have a nice little iPhone app uh in between some early mornings working on this project I probably put a good eight 10 hours into coming up with these and working them and reworking them and learning about it um I imagine it will be a lot faster the next time I put out a different album um which I'll talk more about in a bit but it did take me a while to get up to eight tracks that were like listen worthy that I actually liked listening to over and over again so that was Theo part but once you get the song You're not done yet because just just because you have a group of songs that's not the full album right you got to get some album art and I was like oh gosh like how can I use AI to kick some album art I am a graphic designer so that makes it a little bit easier but here's the process I took because um the I wanted the album to be called Suter which is kind of like an old way it's a Suter is like an old collection of songs to be to be read or to be sung it kind of comes out of the it feels like it comes out of the Medieval ages actually know when when that word became a thing um but because I had this like medieval thing in my mind I went looking on Pinterest for styles of black letter design and black letter is the type of font that's like that medieval Gothic you know style writing that you find in old old Bibles and any anything medieval right it's got that like black letter looking look to it and I looked across this and this is actually I found this design work and I didn't copy it but I kind of took inspiration from this King Slayer modern black font I think this is actually an advertisement for this black letter design called Kings Slayer um and I didn't use this one I just did a Google search for black letter Google font black letter and then I discovered this free font called unifactor cook horrible name um but you could see here's the style of the black letter if you're looking at it um and cool the cool thing about Google fonts is if you're not a designer you can actually put the word that you want into it to preview it so here I put Salter and I'm like oh that looks good so I but that's not enough even though I that's the the word I wanted on the name uh the album the album cover name I needed more of a design and so I took some more inspiration from this King Slayer and they had it a white lettered black letter I know it's called black letter but they did it in the lettering white and then they had this like almost old school painting behind it that was like really like desaturated no colors all black and gray and it was like really dark like you can barely even tell it just adds more of a texture to it than anything so I went looking for an old painting that I had seen in a museum once uh from the Bible where Joshua was calling up to God and saying God we need to win this battle but we're losing daylight like hold the sun and the sky uh if if you went to Sunday school you probably heard this story if not then it's a story in the Bible and God held this held the Sun in the sky for like a full 24 hours or something like that and they continue to win and Israel won the battle so that's the story someone painted a really epic P picture of this um so I took took because this picture is uh really old the painting uh the public the this painting is in public domain so I Ed that for the the art uh brought that into Photoshop and then just did the work of using Photoshop to desaturate it uh turn darken it a lot so that it looked like that inspiration I had put the Salter font on it and then added a little another font that uh with some bright orange to kind of give it a little bit of color since it's like white letters on a really dark uh desaturated painting um is to say Salter workout music right so now I have the album art and it's looking good but you know like you can't just release it as music and I've already published it I found out you can't you can't release music on a podcast because Spotify will kick you out because it'll be like ah this isn't a podcast this is music I was gonna create a podcast for this uh like I did with that other um AI driven podcast I did a few months ago but I got kicked off because it's music and you have to submit music through a different so I luckily CD baby you can do you can release an album for like 10 bucks so I put it out there hopefully it'll be out in a few weeks um it takes a little bit of time to walk through the approval process so we'll see if I get there in the meantime I put it up on YouTube like you just saw and listened to at the beginning of this episode um but it's not enough I don't like static art and music I like it if there's just a little bit of motion so I'm like o how do I get a little bit of motion into this album art in order to create one video and just kind of use it across all the different videos I upload to Youtube I'm like haha this is a great time to actually explore AI video because I've done almost nothing with AI video like nothing and a lot of people have asked me about I don't really have any experience for it because there's so much to learn in just the text part so I'm like well let's use this project to do a little bit with Runway which is kind of the top uh performing AI video thing right now right AI generator because Sora hasn't been released yet for chat GPT and that's fine when it does I'm sure it'll be awesome so what I did for Runway and I just used a free account I don't even have a paid account I do have a paid account for sunno highly recommend that because their V4 is much better than V3 which is what you get with the the uh free account um but for Runway I just used their free account and uploaded that same painting and generated some video files with it so if you take a look at my first Generations I gave it no prompt I literally just uploaded the painting and said go and if you're looking at the screen you could see the results are a little lackluster it just kind of War hor doesn't really know what to do with the painting it looks horrible and I gave it another shot and this one was slightly better as the video pans but then it gets it starts like landscape just starts getting distorted in the painting it doesn't look good um but if you start giving it a prompt and give it a sense for what to do this next shot you're like o it's just like almost like a drone shot panning over the battlefield and you start to see these Armies come out from the distance and that's kind of cool but the problem with this drone shot I wanted to it only gives you these 10-sec little videos and I'm like oh I can't just put this on a loop uh because it just restarts at the same drone spot over and over again and I didn't really know how to get it to like Boomerang go back and forth uh so I ended up with one this last video that I got out of it where the camera is static and it just becomes I asked it to just to create a time lapse of the battle and of the clouds in the sky so then I ended up on this one and then this way I could Loop it throughout the whole video because it's kind of more consistent even you can tell where the loop is it it looks more reasonable so with this 10-second video I now have a little bit of a animation and emotion and look at that I mean they kind of instead of a war it looks like they're dancing a little bit more but you know what it was close enough uh it gives me the animation in the clouds there's some movement going down here in the battle uh it's pretty good considering I'm going to change this and the color recolor eyesee it to look more like the album art uh I went with this I downloaded it again it was it was free I was amazed what I was able to get for free cuz this is really useful I then took it into cap cut and then took some of my design elements right like the logo um dro the music in and then just again just dup I duplicated that 10-second clip over and over again to just kind to create a loop of it so it would just keep repeating the same video over and over and over again again I did the same uh took the same elements of desaturating it and darkening it dramatically and then dropping in the lettering of Suter workout music on the top so that the background that video just becomes a bit of like motion texture in the background of the video so that's how I did it all the different steps combined of finding the lyrics uploading it to sunno and working through the process of uh engineering the prompt to get the music that you want working through getting some inspiration for the album art going ahead and finding free fonts and open domain paintings and using Photoshop to bring it all together into one piece uh then using run runway ml.com in order to animate a little bit bit of it taking into cap cut to clean it up and actually create the the video so that I can actually upload this whole album and a whole playlist of a album to YouTube and soon to be on all the M different music apps out there so that's how I got Salter into the world I am now a published I'm not I can't call myself a musician but I'm publishing music uh really weird thing but this is is so it I felt more creative walking through this process than I have felt in a long time I feel like those who say that AI destroys creativity are haven't really tried using AI to come up with something themselves yet this has made me feel so creative and maybe it's because I'm a generalist and I kind of know how to do a lot of these things across the board um I can now dabble in ways that I've never felt I could dabble before and now I'm like dang like I can actually start doing music projects I wonder how that can impact my video I wonder how that can impact other creative endeavors but enough about in Creative Endeavors let's get to that last part how is this actually useful for marketing remember at the beginning of this podcast I talked about how all marketers know we don't sell through logic oftentimes we sell through emotion we at least get people to take baby steps based on emotion and what's more emotional than music so there's a lot of different ways we can use music in order to bring emotion and feeling back into our marketing some simple ways is to just use it to create background music instead of going to stock uh music files for your YouTube videos and your podcast you could just create original scores with AI so think about how I'm going to start doing this for AI driven marketer I'm going to try to figure out how to come up with some background music and some transition songs just for my own podcast Now using sunno um maybe even for YouTube I might have a have a different soundtrack for it so we'll we'll figure that out so it's good for background music and of course marketers have been using AI to come up with Jingles all the time right like that was a really popular thing in the Madmen era of coming up with a uh marketing jingles and I still think that applies today it's still something we see in radio work YouTube um they have different sign outs and different slogans set to music and I think that's still something that's possible sunno but what I really excited about what I really think this opens up for us is to come up with how to incorporate music in as original content for our content marketing efforts this is something that I'm really excited about my next project I'm going to try to hit in this vein and I'm going to come up with an album directed purely for marketers because how like if have you ever heard music just for marketers if you have it's kind of like a funny take or it's something comical and I still think there's a lot of room for that but I want to come up with something more serious that I think will attract marketers and use it as like a personal branding thing to put out an album for marketers um but also use it to Showcase what AI is capable of like I did with Salter and I think a lot of people can be doing this and I think Cutting Edge content marketers and I've seen a few of these out there where they're using music to come up with little tracks or diss tracks or product announcements instead of just releasing a product announcements and telling them what the new features and benefits are what if you created a rap about it what if you created a music holiday jingle we're almost at Christmas time about your product it's just more fun to consume so I think us as marketers especially content marketers now can put music into our our tool belt as a way to enhance our marketing uh I can imagine you can put mix mix and match music into all different places within our content marketing from our product marketing at top of the funnel and and especially our social media marketing I think there's a lot of room for play here that I'm going to be exploring over the next year so this is just a drop one for me so stay tuned because this is just a preview of I think of what's to come for people like me and maybe maybe yourself Soo is a very cheap tool it's like it's like that like a lot of AI tools it's kind of like a 20 b Buck a month type of thing but I think the value we can get out of a tool like this one can go really far so thanks for following along with me on this podcast again if you want to listen to this full album I'll drop a link to the YouTube playlist and if you're not subscribed to my newsletter yet please take a look it's at Aid driven marketer.com and the sign up list is right at the top of the page but sign up if you want to separate the help from all the AI hype out there and want to grow your AI skills faster