Major Labels Team Up on New AI Streamer Where Users Slop-ify Songs: Report

A new music streaming service created with the cooperation of all the major record labels will soon debut, with generative AI functionality as its centerpiece, Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw reports. The labels in question are Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music.

That report says the service is called “Klay,†a fun misspelling of a word for a mushy, formless substance. Incidentally, another word for a mushy, formless substance is “slop.â€

About a year ago, Klay struck a deal with Universal to team up on an AI music project touting itself as “ethical,†but reports at the time didn’t make it clear what kind of product or service that partnership might produce. 

Someone named Ary Attie is listed on LinkedIn as the founder of Klay. Klay has a website, klay.vision, where users can join a waitlist, and see the slogan “Music set free,†but there’s no other information.   

On the same day as Bloomberg’s report, news also broke that Warner, one of the companies involved in this deal, had settled a lawsuit with the AI music generation company Udio, and was preparing to join forces with Udio on a song creation platform—presumably a separate venture from Klay, although that’s not totally clear yet. (Gizmodo reached out to Warner for clarity, and will update if we hear back). Universal settled a similar suit against Udio on October 30.

Assuming the Bloomberg report is correct, it’s clear that these record companies have now fully evolved into a new form in which they see themselves as AI companies too. They never seemed especially hostile to the technology. Even with lawsuits against companies like Udio ongoing, Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) CEO Mitch Glazier said in a statement in June of last year, “The music community has embraced AI.†But Glazier and his allies would “only succeed,†he said, “if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.â€Â 

This new service apparently resolves all these concerns to the labels’ satisfaction, coming with “assurances that the artists and labels will have some control over how their work is used,†Shaw writes.

Details about how Klay would work are scant. Shaw indicates that it will resemble Spotify, but that AI functions will be available so the user can “remake†songs “in different styles.†By partnering with all the major labels, Klay was able to license “thousands†of hit songs for apparently legal training purposes. 

Reading between the lines, it sounds like there will probably be some sort of text input. Perhaps you’ll be able to fire up Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,†and type “make this a polka.†Presumably after some processing, Klay will spit out something that sounds a little like “Weird Al†Yankovic’s brilliant, faithful uptempo reconstruction of “Bohemian Rhapsody†with a new arrangement and a virtuosic polka performance, minus all the joy, spontaneity, and palpable love for the original material that such a feat of artistry entails. 

And since artists typically own their sheet music and their voice likenesses, if not their actual recordings, it stands to reason that they might have some legal say, which explains why there would be controls in place for the artist. For instance, while I’m not a copyright lawyer, it seems like the label probably wouldn’t be legally allowed to let the user create, say, a realistic Alicia Keys voice singing one of her actual melodies, but with words about poop and farts. 

And if Klay’s audio outputs are up to the standard set by the existing AI music generators, it will probably sound tolerable. A recent survey fairly convincingly showed that people can’t really distinguish AI-generated music from human-generated music at all. But 51% of respondents to that survey also said they think AI-generated music will lead to the existence of more generic, low-quality music in the world. 

Gizmodo reached out to Klay for confirmation and details, and will update if we hear back.