Udio launches in beta
Backed by Andreessen Horowitz and artists including will.i.am, the free text-to-music beta arrived weeks after rival Suno's v3, intensifying competition in AI music.
- Models & capabilities
- Minor
Five former Google DeepMind researchers launched Udio, a text-to-music generation platform, in a free public beta. The tool let users generate music, including vocals and instrumentation, from short text prompts, entering a category dominated up to that point by Suno, which had shipped an improved model of its own weeks earlier.
The launch was notable for its backers as much as its technology. Investors included Andreessen Horowitz, and the company’s advisers and early users included musicians will.i.am and Common, producer Tay Keith, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, and — pointedly, given his current role at a rival AI lab — Oriol Vinyals, who led Google’s Gemini effort. Music distributor UnitedMasters was also involved, giving Udio a route into the existing music industry rather than positioning it purely as a novelty consumer app.
Udio and Suno quickly became the two reference platforms in AI-generated music through 2024, drawing comparable levels of attention and, several months later, comparable legal exposure: both companies were sued by major record labels over the training data used to build their models. Udio’s launch marked the point at which AI music generation had moved from a single-company niche to genuine two-way competition, with both companies attracting the interest — investment in Udio’s case, and outright industry-figure participation — of people already working inside the music business.