Recording industry giant Universal Music Group said Thursday it had struck a licensing deal with AI music generation startup Udio, in an industry-first tie-up aiming to launch an AI creation platform next year.

Universal and Udio said in a statement that their platform, as yet unnamed, “will be powered by new cutting-edge generative AI technology that will be trained on authorized and licensed music”.

They added that they had settled an outstanding copyright infringement case, without specifying the financial terms.

The agreement comes as artists, from authors to musicians and video game developers, fear eventual replacement by AI models trained on decades of human-produced creative output, while music streaming platforms already report a rising flood of computer-generated songs.

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