UMG and NVIDIA team up to build responsible AI for the future of music discovery
Universal Music Group and NVIDIA are joining forces to develop ethical, artist-first tools that could reshape how fans discover, create, and connect with music.
Universal Music Group (UMG) and NVIDIA have announced a new partnership focused on using AI to drive music discovery forward. UMG has already used NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure to train its own Music & Advanced Machine Learning Lab (MAML). Now, the companies plan to go beyond the genre and tempo-driven discovery systems that currently dominate music platforms. Instead, they’re exploring how AI can better understand music in a more human way to serve up better recommendations.
Importantly though, both companies are putting artists’ first in their approach at a time when AI conversations in the music industry are dominated by copyright and creativity concerns.
What are UMG and NVIDIA actually working on?
At the heart of the partnership is NVIDIA’s Music Flamingo model, which the pair are looking to level up. The model is designed to understand music in a more human-like way, across harmony, structure, timbre, lyrics, and even cultural meaning.
According to UMG, Music Flamingo already outperforms leading models across more than 10 benchmarks, including music captioning, instrument recognition, and multilingual lyric transcription.
The model’s chain-of-thought reasoning is deployed to interpret songs more holistically. That means analyzing chord progressions, emotional arcs, and cultural narrative. It then surfaces tracks based on how they feel and what they mean, which is a big deal for discovery. It opens to recommendation systems that reflect emotional resonance and cultural relevance, rather than simply using genre and tempo of tracks.
Responsible AI development within the industry
Perhaps the most important of this announcement is its focus on responsible and ethical uses of AI, something that has rarely been the case in the music industry. UMG and NVIDIA have been clear that artists’ rights come first. The AI tools developed through this partnership will be trained and deployed in ways that protect artists’ work, ensure proper attribution, and respect human creativity.
To reinforce this, the development process will include a dedicated artist incubator. Artists, songwriters, labels, and publishers, and producers will all be involved in co-designing and testing the tools. That way, they’ll be able to build AI systems using original, authentic inputs without relying on AI-generated content, while truly placing artists at the center of responsible AI innovation.
Plus, NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure will also be purpose-used specifically for the development of responsibly trained business and creative applications.
Why this matters for the music industry
For those in the industry, this partnership is worth paying attention to. AI-powered discovery tools that better understand the nuance within music could have massive potential. It could change how new music is recommended, helping new artists break through and get discovered, while giving fans more of the music they’ll enjoy.
At the same time, the emphasis on ethical AI development shows just how AI and music can coexist to push innovation within the industry, all without undermining human artists and their work.
“We eagerly embrace the opportunities that AI presents… We look forward to working closely with NVIDIA to direct AI’s unprecedented transformational potential towards the service of artists and their fans as we work together to set new standards for innovation within the industry, while protecting and respecting copyright and human creativity.”
Sir Lucian Grainge, UMG’s Chairman and CEO