Generative AI-Enabled Music Generation in Marketing and Consumer Response

Generative AI is revolutionizing the marketing industry by producing high-quality, cost-effective and time-efficient content. This study investigates the potential of AI-generated music in digital advertising. Two studies, a survey and a real-world A/B test, evaluate the different songs on chosen criteria: Overall, Melodiousness, Creativity, Naturalness, Correctness and Prompt following for the survey, and click-through rates (CTR) for the field experiment. The survey results show that AI-generated music can be comparable in quality to human compositions, even scoring significantly higher in the categories Prompt Following and Melodiousness. However, AI music showed significantly worse results in the category Creativity. The field experiment revealed no statistically significant difference in CTR between advertisements using AI-generated and royalty-free music, demonstrating that AI music can be a good substitute in supporting roles. This research underlines the possibility for AI-generated music to be used in hyper-personalized advertising, while addressing challenges related to perceived creativity and copyright. The findings contribute to understanding AI’s disruptive potential in marketing and offers practical insights to integrate AI tools effectively.