Will AI music creators heat to a ‘walled backyard,’ closely restricted Udio 2.0?
For these heralding the delivery of a well-regulated, walled-garden Udio in 2026, a sticky query of survival emerges.
On paper, it makes good sense. Wrap the right licenses round AI-generated music, and voila: we’ve got the birthplace of a flourishing music-creation ecosystem that credit and pays creators.
“We’re approaching this new period with one precedence above all else: defending and empowering the artists and songwriters who’re our purpose for being,” WMG chief Robert Kyncl intoned in a message late Wednesday. “That is the second to form the enterprise fashions, set the guardrails, and pioneer the longer term for the good thing about our artists and songwriters.”
Kyncl is 100% proper — ethically, financially, and legally. However that doesn’t imply that Udio 2.0 will work.
Will AI-loving creators, who’ve already damned Udio’s about-face, stick round for a closely restricted reincarnation in 2026?
Immediately, that’s a gnawing query for the music business, even because it applauds the licensed dealmaking.
Already, we’ve witnessed a mutiny on Udio’s deck, one which pressured the platform’s CEO, Andrew Sanchez, to rapidly reopen downloads for a 48-hour interval. Udio creators, accustomed to cooking up concoctions with out limitations, have been crying foul ever since.
Now, they’re being requested to function inside a totally siloed walled backyard, one which disallows downloads and limits inputs to pre-approved, licensed sources.
Will that fly?
From the attitude of current Udio concocters, that’s like forcing Dr. Dre to downgrade from a 96-channel mixing board to a Fisher-Worth DJ toy. It virtually begs the query: is the thought to construct Udio up, or bury it?
Cue up the smallest AI-generated violin for these free-for-all producers. In spite of everything, their ‘masterpieces’ have been plucked from human-created — and infrequently copyrighted — works spanning centuries. However various business people are projecting that Udio is already toast, significantly given its heavy restrictions.
In the meantime, WMG’s groundbreaking take care of Udio is sort of being overshadowed by information from rival platform Suno.
First, there’s the $250 million Sequence C funding spherical, one of many largest of the 12 months in line with DMN Professional, which places the platform at a $2.45 billion valuation. However there’s additionally the curious case of ‘I Run,’ an explosively viral dance monitor from the beforehand unknown ‘HAVEN.’ The monitor was rapidly faraway from Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music, and disqualified by the UK’s Official Chart Firm and Billboard.
After going searingly viral on TikTok, that is rapidly turning into a complicated cloud of dispute. The allegation is that the producers behind HAVEN AI-regurgitated Jorja Smith’s voice to make the monitor. The producer set, led by Harrison Walker, has clapped again, claiming the monitor is definitely Kaitlin Aragon’s voice — hey, you be the choose.
(It’s additionally price noting that this — like the entire AI tracks charting thus far — is the work of savvy people deploying AI, not pure generative AI sans people.)
However eliminated or not, ‘I Run’ is already one of the vital profitable AI-generated tracks thus far, and one of many few to chart. And it nonetheless exists on TikTok, with YouTube Music additionally carrying the re-uploaded model, crediting Kaitlin Aragon.
And the supply of all this madness? You guessed it — Suno, which undoubtedly permits downloads and doesn’t have a ‘wall’ on its ‘backyard’.
The tough actuality is that TikTokers couldn’t care much less whether or not the monitor was AI-generated or the actual Jorja Smith—and that’s the scary half. Additionally scary: the monitor itself is fairly rattling catchy, with Suno positively glowing after the viral blowup. Up in Silicon Valley, that is the ‘disruption’ traders and entrepreneurs dream about.
In that gentle, Suno doesn’t fairly care about Robert Kyncl’s manifesto. And given Suno’s formidable struggle chest and severe market traction, will they agree so simply to a walled-garden settlement?
That’s to not undercut UMG’s (and WMG’s) necessary Udio agreements. However a walled backyard, heavily-restricted reboot may be a demise sentence — and a platform incapable of manufacturing viral and chart-topping success tales.
Possibly the reformatted Udio mannequin must open up a bit? The extra collaborating licensors and experimentation, the higher.
