Artificial intelligence (AI) could make it easier to find your next favourite song.
That's the mission of a new partnership announced on Tuesday, between AI company Nvidia and the world's largest music rights company, Universal Music Group (UMG).
The two industry giants announced they are joining forces to develop "responsible AI for music discovery, creation, and engagement," according to a press release.
The collaboration will tap into UMG's catalogue of over 3 million recorded songs to expand Nvidia's AI model Music Flamingo, a large audio–language model that allows the AI system to listen to, interpret and reason about music.
"We're entering an era where a music catalogue can be explored like an intelligent universe – conversational, contextual, and genuinely interactive," Richard Kerris, Nvidia's vice president of media said in a statement.
Nvidia's Music Flamingo processes full-length tracks of up to 15 minutes with "unprecedented precision, capturing harmony, structure, timbre, lyrics and cultural context," according to the company.
With more data to train on, Music Flamingo will be able to help fans discover new songs based on "emotional narrative and cultural resonance," going beyond traditional search categories like genre or tempo. The system will also deepen its own knowledge of music, learning to interpret it more like humans do.
According to the company, this will make it easier for emerging artists to find fans who will connect with their sound. Artists will also be able to analyse, describe, and share their music with more depth on Music Flamingo.
"By extending Nvidia's Music Flamingo with UMG’s unmatched catalog and creative ecosystem, we're going to change how fans discover, understand and engage with music on a global scale," Kerris said. "And we'll do it the right way: responsibly, with safeguards that protect artists’ work, ensure attribution and respect copyright."
The partnership will also develop new AI-driven music creation tools for artists. To guarantee artists are the ones reaping the benefits of these tools, Nvidia and UMG said they will create a dedicated artist incubator.
The companies said the incubator will invite artists, songwriters, and producers to help design and test the new AI-powered tools, promising to serve as an "antidote to generic, 'AI slop' outputs."
It isn't the first time UMG and Nvidia have teamed up – UMG's Music & Advanced Machine Learning Lab (MAML) previously trained its models using Nvidia's AI infrastructure.
