Some are calling it the Sora of AI-generated music—you can be the judge. Either way, the AI music landscape just got more interesting with the arrival of Udio, a new AI-powered music creation app that promises to make it easy for anyone to create extraordinary music in an instant. Developed by former Google DeepMind researchers, Udio has raised $10M in seed funding, and is backed by notable investors in both the tech and music industries, including a16z, will.i.am, Common, and Mike Krieger, co-founder and CTO of Instagram.
Udio was founded in December 2023 by David Ding, Conor Durkan, Charlie Nash, Yaroslav Ganin, and Andrew Sanchez. Their app, which was previously only available in closed beta, has already garnered attention from prolific artists and music producers who have provided feedback to enhance the user experience.
Having tested various AI music generation tools, including Music FX, Stable Audio and Suno, we have been left very impressed by the output of Udio. Here are some examples:
What sets Udio apart is its user-friendly approach to music creation. Users simply input a description of the desired music genre, provide personalized lyrics or a subject, and indicate inspiring artists. Within seconds, Udio generates fully-produced and mastered tracks. The app's "remix" feature further enhances creativity, allowing users to edit and iterate on their creations, turning everyday individuals into producers.
While the public launch comes just weeks after the viral success of rival AI music generator Suno, many early users have said that Udio's output sounds crisper on average, with less of the sonic fuzziness that can betray machine-created origins. However, achieving high-quality results still requires trial and error and significant human input, such as providing well-crafted lyrics (rather than using the ChatGPT option) and carefully selecting the best compositional parts from multiple generations.
The launch has also raised concerns among some musicians, who fear that AI-powered music generation services may use copyrighted material without permission to train their models. The company claims to have built-in measures to identify and block tracks that too closely resemble specific artists' work, but the legality of using copyrighted material to train AIs is still being decided in various court cases.
Despite these concerns, Udio's founders believe that their product will enable musicians to create great music and monetize it in the future. They emphasize that the app's output is "transformative," creating something new out of its training data, and invite creators to engage with them to better understand the tool's potential.