Built for Show HN
A record-label simulator for fictional AI bands.
Brainy Records takes a genre prompt and generates the band around the song: name, members, lore, album cover, and a vocal track. The goal is not just another song generator; it is a shareable fictional act with music attached.
Listen before trying it
These are real published bands from Brainy Records. Each one includes a generated concept, cover, and playable song.
What it generates
Band identity
Name, tagline, genre, member roster, personalities, and backstory generated by Gemini.
Visuals
Album covers and member portraits generated with Imagen, stored and reused on server-rendered band pages.
Vocal music
Lyria 3 generates the paid full vocal song path. Realtime/instrumental previews stay on the cheaper model branch.
Technical notes
Model branching
The backend branches by Lyria model ID. Lyria 3 uses REST generateContent with inline MP3; realtime previews use the websocket Live API path.
Credit accounting
Paid AI calls reserve a credit in Firestore before the model request. Infra failures refund; safety-filter rejections do not, because the upstream call still costs money.
SSR for crawlers
Band pages, genre pages, pricing, blog, and this page are server-rendered from Express. The SPA owns creation and studio workflows.
Honest state
- 14 published bands, mostly seeded.
- One free vocal song per Google account.
- $0.99 for one more full song; packs start at $4.99.
- Zero completed paid orders so far; this launch is a funnel test, not a victory lap.
- Lyria 3 vocals are useful for ideation and novelty, not radio-master quality.
Useful feedback
The most useful feedback is where you lose interest: before trying it, after hearing samples, at sign-in, at pricing, or at PayPal. That tells me whether the issue is positioning, product value, trust, or checkout friction.