Welcome to Stems, a weekly newsletter about music, media, and tech. This week I lay out some concerns with the major labels' first big AI music deal, and hear a bouillabaise of retro (and yet not) sounds coming out of Brooklyn and Tokyo. Also: the world's best mini music crossword just got better. As always, write to me with tips and comments at [email protected]
AI Music-Maker Udio May Sleep With the Fishes After the Majors Are Done With It
Lord knows, I want to be positive about Universal Music Group’s deal with AI music maker Udio. In case you missed it, the world's largest record company settled its copyright lawsuit with the AI outfit. The two companies are now launching a joint venture in 2026.
In at least one way, the deal is good for artists and songwriters: It sets a new precedent that AI companies should pay them for training on their work. Speaking to my former colleague Brian Hiatt in Rolling Stone, Udio CEO Andrew Sanchez described the upcoming joint venture as a place where would-be AI music makers would be able to “consume and interact with favorite songs and artists in the same place,” making legal remixes or mash-ups within a “walled garden.”
If you look past the rosy public pronouncements, though, it looks more like Sanchez was being dangled out of a window by his ankles by Sir Lucian Grainge. In return for dropping their suit, UMG extracted an undisclosed payment amount from Udio and effectively crippled its existing business. Shortly after the announcement, Udio’s current 2.3 million monthly visitors (per SimilarWeb) – many of whom pay from $10-$30/month – were locked out of the ability to download the music they had made on the platform.
It’s hard to believe that any tech CEO would choose to abruptly inflict such a clumsy and potentially illegal blow to their customers — the same customers whom Udio and UMG presumably want to stick around to try their new service. On a Zoom call with furious Udio users on October 30th, Sanchez looked like he was filming a hostage video. As the chat filled up with subscribers calling him “coward” and demanding answers, Sanchez repeatedly said how pained he was and that he was “doing everything we can” to bring back downloads and that deal was a way to “fight another day.” Udio was eventually able to give users 48 hours to download their songs, but a class action lawsuit by customers against them looks possible.
It’s messiness like this that makes me question whether UMG and the other majors can actually pull off their goal: getting music makers paid in the AI era. There are some lessons from the Napster era worth remembering as they embark on this. One of them was: don’t go to war with your customers. It’s a bad flashback to the days when the RIAA were suing heavy MP3-downloaders and Metallica were in crisis-PR mode.
Blink twice if this is not a “partnership”: Udio CEO Andrew Sanchez explaining new “no downloads” policy to angry subscribers
Another lesson: Don’t try to get people to pay for something worse than what they already have. Faced with an existential threat from Napster, the record companies came back with services like PressPlay and MusicNet – services with partial catalogs, a thicket of copy protection and nutty pricing that were created in a lab to appease rights holders rather than music fans. The host of protections that UMG is requiring for this new service – a closed platform with no downloads, the addition of “fingerprinting, filtering and other measures,” a potentially limited catalog with a scrupulous ‘opt-in’ system for artists – all sound reasonable individually, but could add up to an app that is locked down within an inch of its life.
PressPlay in its early 2000’s glory
The services that succeeded last time around — Spotify, iTunes — were so obviously useful that people chose to pay for them instead of getting music for free. Can the music business pull off something similar in the AI era, or at least let someone else build it? Perhaps. But given their track record, they might need to stay out of their own way, and remember: don't alienate your customers, and build something people actually want.
Hit me with thoughts, fact-checks and tips at [email protected].
The Future of Retro Soul is Looking Bright
Shintaro Sakamoto; c. @zelone_records
I saw Shintaro Sakamoto at Brooklyn’s Knockdown Center earlier this week (thanks for the tip, Şan!) I’m still processing, which I have a feeling is par for the course for his shows. Sakamoto is almost a household name in Japan, thanks to his 1990s & 2000s work with psych/garage rock outfit Yura Yura Teikoku (check out their epic “Dekkai Question Mark”). His solo work is a combo of soul, soft-rock, city pop, Brazilian music and other influences, rescrambled by his superhuman four-person band into something utterly unique. One highlight was “Let’s Dance Raw” (from the 2016 album of the same name), a mix of precise, expansive funk and slightly mournful vocals. Also great was his new “Dear Grandpa,” which managed to be weird and airy and soulful all at once.
The evening also made me optimistic for the state of the retro soul scene that came out of Brooklyn in the 1990s/2000s, and hit its popularity peak with artists like Amy Winehouse (who was backed up by Brooklyn’s Dap-Kings on Back to Black), along with Sharon Jones, Charles Bradley and Lee Fields. One of Sakamoto’s recent collaborators is producer Leon Michels, who was DJing between sets under his usual stage name, El Michels Affair, playing everything from Can to un-Shazam-able cumbia songs (believe me, I tried). Michels has been a pillar of the retro soul scene since the days when it was, as much as anything, a source of R&B samples for hip-hop producers who had run of out actual ‘70s music. After producing everybody from the Carters and Black Thought to Kali Uchis and Clairo, Michels has become a musical polymath who, like Sakamoto, can give vintage sounds a new and different life; his latest El Michaels Affair album 24HR Sports features Sakamoto on the sunny but wistful “Indifference,”, along with everything from killer Brazillian funk to a gospel-style Rahsaan Roland Kirk. It turns out that, in the right hands, the past isn’t even past.
Harder, Better, Faster: The World’s Finest Music-Themed Mini Crossword Puzzle, Week 7
The Stems IT team has heard your concerns about needless scrolling up and down! Check out the brand new revamped layout with a special clue widget on top; this might improve your score by half a star or more.
As always, send comments, tips, and other feedback to [email protected].