Lucian Grainge, chairman-CEO of Universal Music Group, doesn’t tend to shy away from new technologies, as he explained on Tuesday in a future-focused conversation with Nvidia entertainment exec Richard Kerris, in which he made apparent his enthusiasm for AI.
“I love change. I love disruption. I like it in my company. I like it in my personal life,” Grainge told the audience at Nvidia’s GTC conference — billed as the “premier global AI conference” — in San Jose, Calif., per Music Business Worldwide. “It is the same with technology. We have always done everything that we can to lean into everything. Every single piece of technology that has come along has ended up in growth and joy and partnership.”
Grainge did strike a cautionary note amid expressing his excitement for the future of AI. “An artist has the right for their voice and for their lyrics to be their work and shouldn’t be used on someone else’s music. The guardrails are about artistic expression, respect, monetization,” Grainge explained. “I can’t have an artist’s work be mimicked into something that is completely offensive to them. You and I wouldn’t want that for each other, and it’s my job to make sure that we don’t have that for artists.”
He balanced that inevitable warning against the positive opportunities that he said AI presents, particularly around “hyper-personalization,” which he described as “something that’s going to be a phenomenal opportunity… It can be an artist from 40 years ago, or it could be an artist that we signed this afternoon, where a fan is actually interacting with it and hyper-personalizing it within a computer game. So, when they’re driving, they make a turn on a racetrack, it syncopates to the chorus or the verse or the lyric, that means something to them.”
Recently, Grainge has been putting ink to paper around these priorities.
In January, Universal Music and Nvidia announced a collaboration that hopes to pioneer “responsible AI for music discovery, creation and engagement.”
Last October, the company settled a lawsuit against the AI music startup Udio, accused of “mass infringement of copyrighted sound recordings copied and exploited without permission,” and announced a strategic partnership with Stability AI – itself the subject of several copyright infringement cases, including one from Getty Images. Two weeks prior to that announcement, the three major labels (Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music) revealed they were partnering with Spotify on still-unspecified AI music products. Universal Music has struck similar AI-related deals with YouTube, TikTok, Meta, BandLab, Electronic Arts and others.
All labels, majors and indies alike, have stressed the importance of “responsible” AI adoption — essentially, that AI models and products be developed through fully licensed agreements with copyright holders and that artists have ultimate control over their work (to the extent their contracts allow).
Grainge pointed to Universal Music’s archive as another part of the business that could be leveraged effectively via AI, using the tech to more efficiently catalog and categorize the ”10 million assets of photographs, two-inch tapes, quarter-inch tapes” the archive contains and “the 20 million copyrights that we have,” Grainge said. The comedian Fred Armisen is set to host a CNN docuseries digging into Universal Music’s vaults.
The exec pointed to the enormous amounts of new media being created at low and high levels every day and suggested that only AI could keep up with making sense of it all. “There’s not a 15-year-old that’s working today to create music that has not recorded everything that they’ve done on video on these [phones] for the last five years… The amount of content, in an always-on TikTok Meta world, that creative people are recording is in the multiplication of hundreds.”
Grainge’s host, Kerris, amplified the point, saying, “This is an area where AI can help, because AI can understand it, and take all of those things and catalog them for you, or categorize them.”
Of the overall effect that AI will have on music and culture broadly, Grainge – No. 8 on Variety’s list of the most powerful executives in entertainment – said: “I have no idea how vast it can be.”
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