The co-founder of the app that nearly broke the record business is rebuilding Stability AI as an AI toolmaker for musicians, with Sony, Warner and Universal among its investors.
In 1999, Sean Parker helped launch the app that taught a generation that music could be free. Twenty-seven years later, the record labels that fought Napster are funding his next music project.
Parker told The Information that he’s playing by the rules this time, TechCrunch reported on Oct. 2. He readily admits that asking for forgiveness instead of permission didn’t work out well the first time. Napster, after all, lost its copyright fight with the record industry and was shut down in 2001.
His new vehicle is Stability AI, the company behind the image generator Stable Diffusion. Two years ago, it was nearly out of money: overspending and internal turmoil had pushed out founder Emad Mostaque, and Parker joined an $80 million rescue. His longtime friend Prem Akkaraju became CEO. Now the two are showing what they’ve been building, and it’s music.
The goal, Parker says, is to make Stability the go-to AI toolmaker for music professionals. In late August, the company raised $76 million from investors including Sony, Warner and Universal, and all three majors licensed their catalogs for training as part of the deal. Since then, Stability has released three new audio models and AI music-editing software. The models generate full instrumental tracks or short snippets from text prompts, and Parker says an upcoming update will let users hum a melody or beatbox a drum pattern to steer them.
That’s a very different pitch from Suno’s. Suno generates finished songs for anyone with a prompt, and Universal and Sony are still suing it. We wrote about this case here. Stability is courting producers and engineers, and it has the majors on its cap table instead of its court docket.
The man who once made the record business panic is now one of its AI partners. A quarter of a century changes things.
Sources: TechCrunch · The Information
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