Universal Music Group (UMG) announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to explore responsible AI applications in music, leveraging NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure and UMG’s catalog of millions of tracks. The partnership aims to enhance music discovery, engagement, and creation while safeguarding artists’ rights and ensuring proper attribution.
The collaboration extends NVIDIA’s Music Flamingo model, enabling deep, human-like understanding of full-length tracks. Music Flamingo captures harmony, timbre, lyrics, and cultural context, allowing listeners to discover music based on emotional and structural elements, rather than just genre or tempo. This comes amid findings from a Deezer–Ipsos survey showing that 97% of listeners cannot distinguish AI-generated music from human-created tracks, underscoring the importance of ethical AI use and proper artist compensation.
For artists, the technology offers tools to analyze and share their work, fostering creative opportunities and fan interaction. A dedicated artist incubator will give songwriters and producers hands-on involvement in designing AI-powered creation tools, emphasizing originality and authenticity. UMG will also integrate AI into creative and business processes using its Music & Advanced Machine Learning Lab and iconic studios, including Abbey Road and Capitol Studios.
UMG CEO Sir Lucian Grainge highlighted the goal of responsibly harnessing AI to benefit the creative community, while NVIDIA VP Richard Kerris said the collaboration will transform how fans discover and engage with music globally. The initiative seeks to set industry standards for innovation, artist empowerment, and copyright protection.
