Under a new partnership between Universal Music Group (UMG) and Udio, Taylor Swift will soon be able to flip the AI-music switch and allow users to create all the songs they want in the superstar’s style — as would every other artist signed to the world’s biggest label.
“It’s their choice,” Udio’s CEO, Andrew Sanchez, told Billboard shortly after the deal was announced. “But yeah, in the new service, you would be able to do that, and you’d be able to make extraordinary music.”
Unsurprisingly, Swift was unavailable for comment. But would artists be open to tossing their songs into a generative AI machine to see what the robots can do with them? Maybe, some top managers say. Sia, for example, “views Sia as an avatar,” says Jonathan Daniel, who manages the “Chandelier” hitmaker as well as Miley Cyrus and UMG artist Lorde. “It’s like anyone can be a pop star. That’s why she wears the wig.”
On Oct. 29, UMG was the first major label to settle a lawsuit with Udio, one of the top AI-music services, agreeing to develop a new creation and streaming platform that’s set to launch next year. Under the deal, artists will be able to opt in to the platform in “granular” ways, according to Sanchez, allowing them to choose — by essentially selecting from a menu of options — exactly how fans are allowed to use their music and voices to create songs.
Although Daniel says many of his other clients, including Green Day and Nirvana, are unlikely to submit their catalogs to AI, he adds, “Not all artists, but certainly a lot of artists, are less worried about AI music than people that sound worried about it. Artists are in the magic business, right?”
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AI has spent 2025 creeping into the music business, as artists like Xania Monet and Unbound Music have hit the Billboard charts via streaming and track sales. As Matt Pollack — a senior manager at Monotone Inc., which represents Jack White, Vampire Weekend, LCD Soundsystem and others — puts it, artists, managers and labels must suddenly contend with a future that “wasn’t happening eight weeks ago, and now it is.”
The idea of opting into an AI-music service, even if it’s legal under the terms of the UMG-Udio deal, remains daunting for many artists. (The other two major labels, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, have pending litigation against Udio and, along with UMG, another AI-music firm, Suno; their complaint alleges infringement on “an almost unimaginable scale.”) “Once you start to put words in an artist’s mouth, you’re in a real danger zone,” says Jeff Jampol, CEO of Jam Inc., which manages the estates of The Doors, Janis Joplin, Charlie Parker and others. “The legacy is the art and their voice. Do I want to take that and co-opt it and twist it? No, I don’t.”
Corey Smyth, owner and CEO of Blacksmith Holdings, a management company for Vince Staples, De La Soul, the Max Roach estate and others, worries about the idea of major labels managing the AI future of the business. In his view, label executives profited greatly from the streaming revolution, while many artists received pennies for their work. “They’re going to screw you on it,” he says. “The industry’s not built like that. They’re not building it for you.”
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As for whether his Universal-signed artists might agree to the AI treatment, Smyth says, “It depends on where you are, what your business model is. Are you a legacy artist, [or] are you just a flash in the pan? Most artists are driven by the idea of creating. Anyone who wants to just have the thing done isn’t trying to create art — they’re creating commerce.” Daniel, manager of Sia and Green Day, adds that AI is a “great tool” that “might replace pretty good music,” but “great artists have a point of view. Is AI going to write American Idiot? I don’t think so.”
At Monotone, the management company, AI music is a central topic at weekly staff meetings, Pollack says, including the implications of their clients “opting in” to AI systems, as Sanchez suggested after the Oct. 29 settlement with UMG. One of Montone’s artists is working on short-form video content on a low budget and uses AI to save time and money. But he also finds the concept of managing an AI artist that is “not a breathing entity” a bit too surreal, whether major labels allow the possibility or not. Says Pollack: “That’s insane.”
“The reality of it is, I don’t really know,” he adds. “Nobody ever really planned for this. This was a science-fiction notion up to a year and a half or two years ago.”
