Sean Parker Rebuilds Stability AI Around Music, Label Deals

The second time Sean Parker is reshaping how music gets made, he is doing it with the labels, not around them. The Napster co-founder is rebuilding Stability AI around tools for music professionals, The Information reports, with Sony, Warner, and Universal all writing checks and licensing their catalogs for training.

Parker joined an $80 million rescue of the image-generation startup two years ago, after turmoil led to the ouster of founder Emad Mostaque. He and his longtime friend Prem Akkaraju, who became CEO, have been reorienting the company toward audio. In late August, Stability closed $76 million in fresh funding from investors including Sony, Warner, Universal, and Electronic Arts, with the three major labels also licensing their catalogs as part of the deal. Stability has since released three new audio models and AI music-editing software that can generate whole instrumental tracks or short snippets from text prompts, and Parker says an upcoming update will let users hum a melody or beatbox a drum pattern to steer it.

"Asking for forgiveness rather than permission didn't work out so well," Parker concedes of his first run at the music business, per the reporting. It is the third Stability-related story in our tracker over the past 90 days, after the August Series B.