Timbaland Launches An AI Artist Company

Grammy-winning rapper and music producer Timbaland is launching a company called Stage Zero that will generate artificial pop stars.

The High Note: AI is creating waves in the music industry, with some artists, like Timbaland, embracing the tech, while others, like Billie Eilish, deeming it an existential threat. But Stage Zero is taking things a step further by creating whole artists from generative systems, which could put them on a collision course with human artists who definitely don’t want to battle bots for people’s attention.

Behind the Artists: It’s no secret that some of the biggest pop stars in the world are manufactured by their labels… but Stage Zero is taking that concept to the next level.

• Stage Zero, which was co-founded with Rocky Mudaliar and Zayd Portillo, has “signed” its first AI pop star — a young, female persona named “TaTa.”
• Timbaland says TaTa will be a “living, learning, autonomous music artist built with AI” and represent the first of a new genre called “artificial pop” or “A-pop.”
• The company is using tools created by Suno AI to generate the artist’s songs, drawing from Timbaland’s demos and human-written lyrics.
• TaTa will also star in music videos and maintain a social-media presence, similar to the long-running avatar-influencer Miquela.

Encore: Mudaliar told Billboard that “the artists of tomorrow won’t just be human, they’ll be IP, code, and robotics that are fully autonomous. That’s what we’re building at Stage Zero.” While co-founder Timbaland clearly agrees with that, especially after toying around with Suno, many in the music industry don’t feel the same way. Sony, UMG, and Warner are all suing Suno for allegedly illegally scraping their artists’ music.

Prediction: It’s only a matter of time before an AI pop star is behind the song of the summer… which is really going to throw people for a loop.