Spotify and Universal sign licensing deal for AI covers and remixes

Spotify and Universal Music Group have signed licensing agreements allowing Premium subscribers to generate AI covers and remixes of songs by participating UMG artists. The offering is positioned as a paid add-on for Premium users and is built around consent, credit, and compensation, with artists and songwriters opting in and receiving a share of revenue from AI-generated versions of their work. No public release date or financial terms were disclosed, including how revenue is split among Spotify, UMG, and individual creators. The deal is the first formal generative AI license on top of Spotify’s catalogue and provides a concrete payment structure for AI-made music. It also aims to move AI music tools out of a legal grey zone by enabling generation within Spotify rather than uploading AI tracks.

"By licensing the rights at the platform layer and letting users generate inside Spotify rather than upload AI tracks to it, the two companies are sketching a structure in which the label, the artist, the songwriter, and the platform all collect on the same generated file. AI music tools have spent the last two years operating in a grey zone, with services such as Suno and Udio facing lawsuits from the major labels for training on copyrighted catalogues without permission."

Read at TNW | Spotify