Amper Music
by Amper Music, Inc.
Amper Music was an AI-assisted music composition platform that let users generate and customize royalty-cleared tracks for videos, podcasts, games, and other media. Shutterstock acquired the company in 2020.
Acquisition Details
Shutterstock announced its acquisition of Amper Music in November 2020 and subsequently incorporated Amper's technology into its music and content-design offerings; the original Amper service is no longer presented as a standalone product.
🩺 Health Signals
- HTTP Status
- —
- Response
- —
- SSL
- —
- Confidence
- 95%
- Domain expires
- —
- Last content change
- —
- Last tweet
- —
- API status
- —
📅 Timeline
Amper Music founded
Film composers Drew Silverstein, Sam Estes, and Michael Hobe founded Amper Music in New York to develop AI-assisted tools for composing production music.
Public platform launched
Amper announced the public launch of its AI music composition platform, allowing creators to generate and customize music by selecting parameters such as style, mood, and duration.
Raised $4 million
Amper announced a $4 million financing round led by Horizons Ventures, with participation from Two Sigma Ventures, Advancit Capital, Foundry Group, and other investors.
Acquired by Shutterstock
Shutterstock acquired Amper Music to expand its music capabilities and accelerate development of AI-driven tools for content creators.
Technology incorporated into Shutterstock Create
Shutterstock introduced an AI-powered music recommendation capability in Creative Flow, drawing on Amper Music technology acquired the previous year.
🔄 Alternatives to Amper Music
Udio
🟢ActiveUdio launched in April 2024 from ex-DeepMind researchers and raised $10M from a16z, will.i.am, and Common. It generates studio-quality vocal tracks from text prompts and quickly became Suno's closest competitor. The RIAA sued Udio in June 2024 over alleged training on copyrighted recordings. Despite the litigation, Udio has continued shipping new models, including v1.5 with full-song generation and remixing.
Soundraw
🟢ActiveAI music generation platform that creates royalty-free music for content creators.
AIVA
🟢ActiveAI music composer that creates original music for films, games, and commercials.
Suno
🟢ActiveSuno launched in late 2023 as a text-to-song generator that creates full vocal tracks with melody, lyrics, and instrumentation from short prompts. It raised $125M at a $500M valuation in May 2024 and crossed 12M users by mid-2024. In June 2024 the RIAA sued Suno (and competitor Udio) for copyright infringement on behalf of Sony, Universal, and Warner. The product keeps shipping new versions and signups remain open while the litigation runs.
🪦 Other dead Voice & Audio tools
VocaliD
🟡Acquired / MergedVocaliD developed personalized synthetic voices for people who could not speak and later offered custom voice technology for brands. The company combined donated speech recordings with a recipient’s vocal characteristics.
Lyrebird
🟡Acquired / MergedLyrebird developed AI systems for copying a person’s voice from short audio samples and generating speech in that voice. Descript acquired the Montreal startup in 2019 and incorporated its technology and team.
Play.ht
🔴Shutdown / DeadAI text-to-speech platform with ultra-realistic voices for podcasts, videos, and audiobooks.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
What is Amper Music?
Amper Music was an AI-assisted composition platform for creating customizable production music. Users could specify attributes such as genre, mood, and track length, then edit the generated result for use in media projects.
Is Amper Music still available?
Amper Music is no longer marketed as an independent service. Shutterstock acquired the company in November 2020 and incorporated its technology into Shutterstock products, so the record is classified as acquired rather than an active standalone tool.
Who founded Amper Music?
Amper Music was founded by film composers Drew Silverstein, Sam Estes, and Michael Hobe.
When did Shutterstock acquire Amper Music?
Shutterstock announced its acquisition of Amper Music on November 9, 2020. The financial terms were not disclosed in the announcement.
What are the best Amper Music alternatives?
Current AI music-generation alternatives in this catalogue include SOUNDRAW, AIVA, Suno, and Udio. Their licensing rules, editing controls, vocal support, and commercial-use terms differ, so users should review each service's current terms.