Universal Music Group has signed the latest in a string of contentious deals between major labels and artificial intelligence companies, this time partnering with the chipmaking tech giant Nvidia. The deal opens Universal’s enormous catalog to the world’s most valuable company: Nvidia will use its AI infrastructure to develop new ways to make, discover, and engage with music, all while protecting artists and rightsholders, a press release claims.
At the heart of the partnership is Nvidia’s large audio-language model Music Flamingo, designed to develop a “human-like understanding of songs” that accounts for “harmony, structure, timbre, lyrics, and cultural context,” Nvidia’s research overview notes. The model’s way of parsing “emotional narrative and cultural resonance” will enrich the experience of music discovery, the press release adds (though websites staffed by humans, with emotions and cultures of our own, can help with that too). The prospect of song generation is given less attention, but UMG and Nvidia promise to establish an “artist incubator” where real artists, songwriters, and producers will co-design and test AI-powered tools. According to the press release, the incubator will offer “a direct antidote to generic, ‘AI slop’ outputs.”
Lucian Grainge, UMG’s chair and CEO, said in the press release that Nvidia would protect and respect copyright and human creativity. Richard Kerris, Nvidia’s vice president and general manager of media, reiterated Grainge’s assertion and added, “We’re entering an era where a music catalog can be explored like an intelligent universe—conversational, contextual, and genuinely interactive.”
