Universal Music partners with AI company building an ‘ethical’ music generator

Universal Music Group (UMG) announced a new deal centered on creating an “ethical” foundational model for AI music generation. It’s partnered with a company called Klay Vision that’s creating a “Large Music Model” named KLayMM and plans to launch out of stealth mode with a product within months. Ary Attie, its founder and CEO, said the company believes “the next Beatles will play with KLAY.”

The two say the model will work “in collaboration with the music industry and its creators,” without many details about how, while Klay plans to make music AI “more than a short-lived gimmick.”

This is how the companies explain their shared goals:

Building generative AI music models ethically and fully respectful of copyright, as well as name and likeness rights, will dramatically lessen the threat to human creators and stand the greatest opportunity to be transformational, creating significant new avenues for creativity and future monetization of copyrights.

As for how whatever it is they’re working on will affect human artists:

KLAY is developing a global ecosystem to host AI-driven experiences and content, including accurate attribution, and will not compete with artists’ catalogs in traditional music services.

UMG’s new partnership comes as it is involved in lawsuits against AI music generator sites and Anthropic, and in May, it ended a short stand-off with TikTok by signing a new licensing arrangement that covered, among other things, AI-generated music.

Klay is also run by chief content officer Thomas Hesse, who was previously Sony Music Entertainment’s president. Former Google Deepmind researcher Björn Winckler, who led the development of Google’s Lyria AI music model, is joining the company as its head of research.