Grammy-winning artist and producer Timbaland has launched a brand new AI-focused leisure enterprise, referred to as Stage Zero. The corporate has launched with its first AI artist, TaTa, in keeping with a press launch on Thursday (June 5).
Timbaland mentioned: “She shouldn’t be an avatar. She shouldn’t be a personality. TaTa is a dwelling, studying, autonomous music artist constructed with AI. TaTa is the beginning of one thing greater. She’s the primary artist of a brand new technology. A-Pop is the following cultural evolution, and TaTa is its first icon.”
Timbaland co-founded Stage Zero with Rocky Mudaliar, the award-winning producer behind Inmate #1, Bisping, and Breaking Olympia, and Zayd Portillo, an AI music strategist and co-creator of Timbo I-Do.
Along with co-founding Gentle Power Labs, the creator-tech studio behind CamUp!, Portillo additionally advises Suno on music AI integration.
“She shouldn’t be an avatar. She shouldn’t be a personality. TaTa is a dwelling, studying, autonomous music artist constructed with AI.”
Timbaland, Stage Zero
Stage Zero operates individually from Suno regardless of Timbaland’s strategic advisory function. Suno, the AI music-making platform being sued by the report majors over copyright infringement, shaped an official partnership with Timbaland in October 2024, after what it says had been “months” of him “being a prime person of the platform.”
Stage Zero’s founders informed Rolling Stone that the music they create depends on a collaborative course of with Suno, the place Timbaland uploads typical demos to the system, permitting Suno to course of it and incorporate human-written lyrics.
Timbaland informed the information outlet how TaTa’s voice originated from a Suno technology that caught his consideration: “It got here to some extent the place I’m like, ‘Yo, this voice, it’s superb.”
In a press release, Timbaland mentioned: “I’m not simply producing tracks anymore. I’m producing techniques, tales, and stars from scratch.”
Mudaliar added: “The artists of tomorrow gained’t simply be human, they’ll be IP, code, and robotics which might be totally autonomous. That’s what we’re constructing at Stage Zero.”
“The artists of tomorrow gained’t simply be human, they’ll be IP, code, and robotics which might be totally autonomous. That’s what we’re constructing at Stage Zero.”
Rocky Mudaliar, Stage Zero
Timbaland, who has collaborated with artists like Aaliyah, Ludacris, Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé and Madonna, has been vocal about his assist for AI music manufacturing.
Chatting with Billboard in April, Timbaland mentioned: “The know-how of as we speak is ideal for what that is. What used to take me three months solely takes me two days. To start with, it was like a toy. It was like going to a toy retailer. You gotta undergo gluttony, as a result of you possibly can’t consider that it’s right here.”
Timbaland’s partnership with Suno comes because the AI music startup, alongside its rival Udio, are in talks with Sony Music Leisure, Common Music Group and Warner Music Group to license the music giants’ recordings. Reviews of the talks come regardless of the three majors suing Suno and Udio final yr for copyright infringement.
In the meantime, Stage Zero hinted at plans past TaTa. “That is only the start although. Stage Zero includes music and a lot extra to be revealed quickly,” the enterprise mentioned.
Stage Zero marks Timbaland’s newest music trade enterprise after launching beat market Beatclub in 2021 together with his long-term supervisor Gary Marella. Beatclub attracted funding from Hipgnosis and Anthem Leisure in 2023 as a part of its sequence A-2 funding spherical. It then expanded to China final yr by way of a partnership with NetEase Cloud Music.
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