Universal Music Group and Stability AI announced on October 30, 2025 a strategic alliance to develop AI music creation tools for artists, producers, and songwriters globally, according to a joint release from Stability AI.
The collaboration will involve Stability AI’s research and product teams working closely with UMG and its artists to research needs and technical approaches for music creation tools. The parties said they will explore new recording and composition concepts, gather artist insights, and study how artists adopt and engage with these technologies.
What the companies said
Michael Nash, Chief Digital Officer and EVP of Universal Music Group, said in the release: “This agreement is an extension of our fundamental orientation that our artists and songwriters are the cornerstone of our business. With AI, as with everything else we do, we start with what best supports our work to help them achieve creative and commercial success and build from that foundation to forge new and better commercial and creative opportunities. And as we’ve made abundantly clear, we will only consider advancing AI tools and products based on models that are trained responsibly.”
Nash added: “We’re looking forward to working with Stability AI to deeply integrate AI tools development with the vision and creative ambitions of our artists and to the results and rewards this initiative offers to all.”
Prem Akkaraju, CEO of Stability AI, said: “UMG has long been a leader in technological innovation in music. This partnership marks the next chapter of music creation. At Stability AI, we put the artist at the center and build AI around their unique needs because real transformation has always come from a combination of art and science.”
Licensing as a design constraint
Both companies emphasised that the tools will be built on fully licensed, commercially safe models. Stability AI’s Stable Audio models, which underpin the planned tooling, were trained exclusively on licensed data, according to the release.
UMG has previously signed AI-related agreements with YouTube, TikTok, and Meta, according to the release. The company has also actively contested unlicensed training and copyright infringement in the AI space. The release states that UMG is “committed to helping develop responsibly trained AI products that will provide accurate attribution and tools designed to empower, protect and compensate artists.”
The announcement did not name specific artists involved in the initial research phase, provide timelines for tool availability, or detail financial terms of the alliance.
The UMG announcement followed Stability AI’s disclosure of a separate partnership with Electronic Arts to develop generative AI tools for game development, which the UMG release noted had been announced the previous week.