How to Create Your Own Christmas Music With AI -- and Why You Should Just Stick With Human Artists

When it comes to holiday music, Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You is a mood setter. It's fun and upbeat, and it gets you through all those holiday chores, like cooking and gift wrapping. I'm certainly a sucker for her holiday hit, but it's the same song every year. 

I live above a restaurant that plays Sinatra's White Christmas on repeat. Now that's a timeless song. Romantic and cozy. A very different vibe.

While it's comforting to listen to the same Christmas songs every year, how cool would it be to create your own soundtrack with a song dedicated to each family member around the table? That's now possible with AI. Just like you can use it to create customized gift wrap, holiday cards, design your Christmas lunch tablescape, create personalized coloring pages for the kids and turn leftovers into recipes.

Given how well the gift wrap I made with AI turned out, I used Adobe Firefly again to attempt to create my own timeless Christmas song. According to Adobe, Firefly Audio Model creates fully licensed, studio-quality instrumental tracks. It's only trained on content that Adobe has rights to. 

Firefly launched in March 2023 and is available under Adobe's membership tiers, starting at $10 per month. However, you can use Firefly for free with limited access. 

Getting set up 

If you don't have an Adobe account, go through the setup process, then visit its soundtrack-generating tool. 

You can either upload a video and let Firefly suggest the perfect vibe, style or purpose, or you can start from scratch by selecting from the preset tags.

Using the interface, you can also populate the energy, tempo and duration of your song. 

Before you start playing around with the music generator, you should pause to reflect on the type of song you're creating -- where you'll play it, who it's for and what feeling you want to communicate.

Create your AI song

With most of our celebrations happening after Christmas Day, I wanted to test out Firefly to create a cute track to play with my wife while we open presents. 

To start, I uploaded a video of a recent snow day we had, just to see what type of song it would create from that. 

It populated the brief, as well as the energy, tempo and length. I selected "Peaceful" for the vibe, "Cinematic" for the style, and added "Personal" for the song purpose. I wanted it longer than 11 seconds (what it was preset to), so I adjusted it to one minute, then hit Generate. 

It gave me four track options.

I liked all of them, but track 1 was my favorite. It wasn't really Christmassy, though. It was cinematic and could definitely be used for background music in an Instagram video, but not so much as an annual festive banger.

AI vs. human music artists

I went back to the original link to start over with custom prompts:

I changed the song length to 3 minutes, which increased the credits to 60.

It generated four tracks again, and the songs were OK. They had nothing on Mariah, though. To test its "talent" once more, I entered these prompts: "A festive song with Mariah Carey style, for Christmas morning."

But they were pretty generic and certainly didn't get me in the Christmas spirit. 

While they were all passable for background music, I'd much rather throw on a Spotify Christmas playlist or open my window and listen to Sinatra. It would be cool to be able to say, "I made this song," but that was about it. 

Best to stick to the human artists.

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