Copyright Billboard
Universal Music Group and Stability AI have announced a strategic partnership to develop music creation tools powered by “responsibly” trained generative AI. The two companies said on Thursday that the collaboration will aim to support artists, producers and songwriters by integrating AI into the creative process while ensuring commercial safety and proper licensing. Stability AI’s research and product teams will work closely with UMG and its artists to explore new recording and composition methods, gather feedback and tailor tools to the needs of the creative community. This alliance follows UMG’s quite recent agreement with Udio, which included a legal settlement over copyright infringement and a licensing deal that compensates artists for both AI training and outputs. UMG has been a pioneer in AI innovation, forging partnerships with platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Meta, while actively defending artists’ rights against unauthorized AI training. Stability AI, known for its two-year-old Stable Audio models, specializes in generating high-quality, licensed music using text-to-audio technology. Their models, trained on professional datasets like Audio Sparx, offer control over audio generation through “latent diffusion” — a technique first introduced in their image-based Stable Diffusion product. Beyond music, Stability AI has recently partnered with Electronic Arts to innovate game development and with WPP to enhance marketing through AI. “This agreement is an extension of our fundamental orientation that our artists and songwriters are the cornerstone of our business,” said UMG’s chief digital officer Michael Nash. “With AI, as with everything else we do, we start with what best supports our work to help them achieve creative and commercial success and build from that foundation to forge new and better commercial and creative opportunities. And as we’ve made abundantly clear, we will only consider advancing AI tools and products based on models that are trained responsibly.”
