Timbaland wants to create a new music genre

Timbaland, music artist and producer extraordinaire (Justin Timberlake’s "Cry Me a River", Jay-Z’s “Dirt off Your Shoulder", Missy Elliot’s "Get Ur Freak On", Beyoncé’s "Drunk in Love", etc.), last week launched Stage Zero, an entertainment company with the stated goal of blending AI with human creativity to create a new brand of music called “A-pop” (or “AI pop”).

It already has its first artist. An AI creation called TaTa (👆), driven by Suno AI, an artificial intelligence music creation program. The Grammy-award winning producer plans to handle a majority of production for this AI venture, per Billboard.

• Songs will be created via a workflow where conventionally made Timbaland demos are uploaded to the platform, extrapolated upon by Suno, and then human-written lyrics are inserted.
• Stage Zero hopes to launch many AI personas similar to TaTa, with aspirations to turn these characters into virtual influencers—TaTa will maintain a social media presence with music videos generated by AI tools—and even movie and TV stars.

“Say tata”: Backlash to the announcement was brutal and swift from fellow musicians, who say it is too late to apologize. Stage Zero’s launch comes as major labels have filed lawsuits against Suno and competitor Udio over their use of copyrighted material in AI training data.

Elsewhere…Oral arguments began this week in Getty Images’ landmark UK case against Stability AI, one of many other copyright cases involving the material upon which startups have trained chatbots.