Universal Music Group To Transform Music Experience For Billions Of Fans With NVIDIA AI

Leveraging NVIDIA AI infrastructure and drawing from the world's leading music catalog comprising millions of culture-defining tracks, this collaboration aims to pioneer responsible AI for music discovery, creation, and engagement

SANTA MONICA, Calif., Jan. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Universal Music Group (EURONEXT: UMG), the world leader in music-based entertainment, announced today a collaboration with NVIDIA to pioneer responsible AI for music discovery, creation, and engagement leveraging NVIDIA AI infrastructure and UMG's industry-leading music catalog comprising millions of tracks covering every genre and era.

 

UMG is collaborating with NVIDIA to enrich and enhance the music experience of the billions of music consumers worldwide who enjoy the world's most popular form of entertainment. NVIDIA and UMG will undertake collaborative research and development to promote shared objectives of advancing human music creation and rightsholder compensation.

 

The collaboration will explore new avenues to enrich music experiences by utilizing AI to elevate discovery, engagement and consumption beyond current constructs of search and personalization. Further, the companies will pursue new approaches to leverage AI in order to protect artists' work and ensure proper attribution of music-based content. 

• Revolutionizing Music Discovery: NVIDIA and UMG are extending the NVIDIA Music Flamingo model to transform how fans discover music. Music Flamingo sets a new standard in music intelligence by moving beyond surface-level recognition to deliver rich, human-like understanding of songs. Built on NVIDIA's advanced Audio Flamingo architecture, the model processes full-length tracks—up to 15 minutes—with unprecedented precision, capturing harmony, structure, timbre, lyrics, and cultural context. It uses chain-of-thought reasoning to enable nuanced interpretation of musical elements, from chord progressions to emotional arcs. NVIDIA Music Flamingo outperforms leading models across 10+ benchmarks in music captioning, instrument recognition, and multilingual lyric transcription. By interpreting the deeper layers of each track, Music Flamingo enables listeners to explore music in ways that go far beyond traditional tags or genres, making discovery more personal and meaningful.
• Enhancing Fan Engagement: These technologies help unlock interactive experiences that allow artists to connect with audiences beyond conventional playlists or search. For artists, Music Flamingo opens new creative possibilities—providing tools to analyze, describe, and share their music with unprecedented depth. For fans, it powers richer discovery experiences, surfacing songs not just by genre or tempo, but by emotional narrative and cultural resonance, helping established artists reach fans in deeper, more interactive ways, while providing emerging artists with greater opportunities to be discovered by music lovers who are the most likely to become dedicated fans.
• Empowering Artists with Creation Tools: To ensure AI-driven music creation tools genuinely empower artists, NVIDIA and UMG will establish a dedicated artist incubator. This incubator brings together artists, songwriters, and producers to co-design and test new AI-powered tools, integrating them into real-world creative workflows. By prioritizing hands-on artist involvement, the incubator develops solutions that enhance originality and authenticity—serving as a direct antidote to generic, "AI slop" outputs, and placing artists at the center of responsible AI innovation.