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Artificial intelligence (AI) could make it easier to find your next favorite song.
That’s the mission of a new partnership between AI company NVIDIA and Universal Music Group (UMG), the world’s largest music rights company, announced Tuesday.
Two industry giants announced they are partnering to develop “responsible AI for music discovery, creation, and engagement.” press release.
This collaboration leverages the UMG catalog of over 3 million recorded songs to extend NVIDIA’s AI model Music Flamingo, a large-scale audio language model that enables AI systems to listen to, interpret, and reason about music.
“We are entering an era where our music catalog can be explored like an intelligent universe in a conversational, contextual and truly interactive way,” Richard Kelis, NVIDIA’s vice president of media, said in a statement.
NVIDIA’s Music Flamingo processes full-length tracks up to 15 minutes with “unprecedented precision, capturing harmony, structure, timbre, lyrics, and cultural context,” according to the company.
With more data to train, Music Flamingo will be able to go beyond traditional search categories like genre and tempo to help fans discover new songs based on “emotional narrative and cultural resonance.” The system also develops its own knowledge of music and learns to interpret it in the same way humans do.
The company says this will make it easier for up-and-coming artists to find fans who share their sound. Artists can also further analyze, explain, and share their music on Music Flamingo.
“By expanding NVIDIA’s Music Flamingo with UMG’s unparalleled catalog and creative ecosystem, we intend to transform the way fans discover, understand, and engage with music on a global scale,” said Kelis. “And we do it the right way: responsibly and with safeguards in place to protect artists’ work, ensure attribution, and respect copyright.”
The partnership will also develop new AI-driven music creation tools for artists. To ensure artists can benefit from these tools, NVIDIA and UMG announced the creation of a dedicated artist incubator.
The companies said the incubator invites artists, songwriters and producers to help design and test new AI-powered tools, promising to serve as “an antidote to the common ‘AI slop’ output.”
This is not the first time UMG and NVIDIA have teamed up. UMG’s Music & Advanced Machine Learning Lab (MAML) previously used NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure to train its models.