Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder, has jumped back into the music industry, and he tells The Information that he’splaying by the rulesthis time. (Asking for forgiveness rather than permission didn’twork out so welllast time around, he readily concedes.)
Two years ago, he joined an$80 million rescueof Stability AI, the image-generator startup that nearly collapsed after overspending andinternal turmoilled to founder Emad Mostaque’s ouster. Now Parker and his longtime friend Prem Akkaraju, who became CEO, are taking the wraps off what they’ve been building.
The big idea, Parker says, is to turn Stability into the go-to AI toolmaker for music professionals. Toward that end, in late August, the company announced$76 millionin funding from, among others, Sony, Warner, and Universal, which also licensed their catalogs for training as part of the deal. Stability has since released three new audio models and AI music-editing software. The AI can generate whole instrumental tracks or short snippets from text prompts. Parker says an upcoming update will let users hum a melody or beatbox a drum pattern to steer it.
