Udio Unveils Details Of Its AI Music App, Starstruck

Music-tech research firm Water & Music has uncovered details about Udio’s long-awaited licensed AI app, Starstruck.

Private showing:

• The information came from a private webinar that Udio hosted with Kobalt on April 30, a recording of which was shared with Water & Music Founder Cherie Hu by a peer.

• Udio CEO Andrew Sanchez presented a live demo of the app with Kobalt’s CEO Laurent Hubert and Chief Digital Officer Bob Bruderman also on hand.

• Kobalt and Udio inked a licensing agreement in April, with the AI platform having also completed deals with Universal, Warner, Merlin and Believe.

What is Starstruck:

• As Water & Music explains, it’s a consumer app that lets fans remix, cover, and reimagine songs by their favorite artists.

• Rights holders receive a royalty every time a fan creates a new song.

How it works:

• The app will offer four modes.

• Cover will take an existing song and reimagine it if performed by a different artist – “for instance, hypothetically, a Charli-XCX-style cover of a Taylor Swift song,” says Hu.

• Reimagine rewrites the music entirely but keeps the lyrics.

• Remix “applies genre or style shifts to existing recordings.”

• Create allows users to “write their own lyrics and pair them with a selected artist’s voice, subject to guardrails around topic, language, and style.”

• The app will have two subscription tiers – Standard and Pro – each with a capped number of monthly creations.

Who owns the music?

• Ownership of each new creation remains with the rights holder of the participating artist, not the fan who created it.

• Bruderman said “the songwriter [will be] paid significantly more than they are in the traditional streaming construct,” as per Hu.

• Each song will live inside the app’s “walled garden,” meaning it can’t be exported or distributed anywhere.

Launch date:

• Starstruck is due to launch later this year.