Udio and GRAI Adopt UMG and Liquidax-Backed AI Music Patents

Music IP Holdings (MIH) — an intellectual property development company formed through a strategic partnership between Universal Music Group (UMG) and Liquidax Capital — revealed on Thursday (Aug.

20) that AI music start-ups Udio and GRAI are the first two companies to license patents from its portfolio for use in developing their AI products.

According to a press release, the MIH patents will specifically be used to support “the development of licensed AI services including covers, remixes and a wide range of interactive music experiences.” So far, MIH holds and manages more than 24 patents and has over 50 patents pending, all of which provide frameworks for creating “responsible,” licensed AI content products.

The press release says MIH patents can help with everything from moderation, watermarking, identification tagging, authorization, licensed distribution and payment “across open and closed ecosystems.” Related Apple Music to Add Labels for AI-Generated Music Later This Year HYBE Pledges Over $300k for Colombia Earthquake Recovery BE:FIRST Is Ready for the World: Inside the J-Pop Superstars' Long-Planned U.S.

Breakthrough This essentially means that MIH, UMG and Liquidax Capital, an IP advisory and management firm, will receive compensation every time these patents are adopted for use in developing various AI products, opening up a potentially significant new revenue stream for the group of firms.

It is not disclosed which patents Udio and GRAI, a forthcoming “social streaming service for music,” have selected from the available offerings MIH has developed, but Udio CEO, Andrew Sanchez , calls this moment “a genuine inflection point for AI and music.

With MIH, we’re partnering to implement the infrastructure that protects artists and establish the guardrails that ensure AI amplifies human creativity.

That work — the technology, the licensing, the partnerships — is what makes the next chapter one artists can actually build on.” While little is still known about GRAI, the press release described the emerging AI company as being built on “GRAI’s own music foundation model, trained on licensed data and built to understand music…Every play and every change pays the artists and songwriters behind the song.” It was quietly founded last year by the team behind video-editing app Vochi, which was acquired by Pinterest, and has raised seed funding from Khosla Ventures and Inovo VC.

“Nobody has ever been just a listener.

We drum a song on the steering wheel, cry to it in a parked car, send it to a friend at one in the morning.

GRAI is building a social streaming service where music moves between people.

And when someone puts something of their own into a song they love, the artist is asked, credited and paid, every time.