| Udio | |
|---|---|
 Logo used since 2024 | |
| Developer | Udio |
| Initial release | April 10, 2024; 22 months ago (2024-04-10) |
| Stable release | Udio v1.5 / July 23, 2024; 18 months ago (2024-07-23) Udio v1.5 Allegro / March 18, 2025; 10 months ago (2025-03-18) Udio Playground / October 9, 2025; 4 months ago (2025-10-09) |
| Type | Generative artificial intelligence Music generation |
| Website | udio.com |
Udio is agenerative artificial intelligence model thatproduces music based on simple textprompts. It can generate vocals and instrumentation. Its freebeta version was released publicly on April 10, 2024. Users can pay to subscribe monthly or annually to unlock more capabilities such asaudio inpainting.
Founded in December 2023 by a team of former researchers forGoogle DeepMind headed by Udio's CEO, David Ding, the program received financial backing from theventure capital firmAndreessen Horowitz and musicianswill.i.am andCommon, among others. Critics praised its ability to create realistic-sounding vocals while others raised concerns over the possibility that itstraining data contained copyrighted music.
Udio was created in December 2023 by a team of four former researchers forGoogle DeepMind, including Udio's CEO David Ding, Conor Durkan, Charlie Nash, Yaroslav Ganin, as well as Andrew Sanchez[1][2] under the name of Uncharted Labs.[3] Theventure capital firmAndreessen Horowitz; the music distributorUnitedMasters; musicianswill.i.am,Tay Keith, andCommon; investorKevin Wall;Instagram cofounderMike Krieger; and DeepMind researcherOriol Vinyals all provided financial backing for Udio, and it was valued at $10 million inseed funding (plus the original $8.5 million raised previously).[3][4] It spent several months in aclosed beta phase before being publicly released in itsbeta phase on April 10, 2024 on the Udio website.[5] As of April 2024[update], it allows users to generate 600 songs per month for free.[6] Sanchez described it as "enabl[ing musicians] to create great music and ... to make money off of that music in the future".[1] Udio's release followed the releases of other text-to-music generators such asSuno andStable Audio.[7]
Udio was used to create "BBL Drizzy" by Willonius Hatcher, a parody song that went viral in the context of theDrake–Kendrick Lamar feud, with over 23 million views on Twitter and 3.3 million streams onSoundCloud the first week.[8]
In August 2024,Verknallt in einen Talahon (In Love with a Talahon) a song generated with Udio by Austrian producerButterbro became the first AI-generated song in the German Top 50.[9]
Udio bases the songs it creates on text prompts, which can include theirgenre (includingbarbershop quartet,country,classical,hip hop,Germanpop, andhard rock, among others),lyrics, story direction, and other artists to base their sound on. The process used to generate the music itself, as of April 2024[update], has not been disclosed.[10] The program generates two songs based on the prompts and users can "remix" their songs with further text prompts.[11] Songs are first generated as roughly 30 second-long pieces, and can be extended by additional 30 second increments.[6] Paying subscribers can access advanced functionality such asaudio inpainting.[12][13]
Mark Hachman, the senior editor ofPC World, compared Udio toAI art generators and praised its ability to turn "a few rather poor lyrics" into a "rather catchy" song, also calling the vocals it generated "incredibly realistic and even emotional".[6] Sabrina Ortiz ofZDNET described the songs it generated as being "impressive" and sounding "as though they were produced professionally". She also called them "fuller and richer" than those of other text-to-music generators, which she said it had "more personalization options" than.[5]Tom's Guide's Ryan Morrison wrote that Udio had "an uncanny ability to capture emotion in synthetic vocals" and was the only AI music generator "to have captured the passion, pain and spirit of a vocal performance".[14] He added that the program was geared toward "people with no or minimal musical ability".[2] Brian Hiatt ofRolling Stone wrote that Udio was "more customizable but also perhaps less intuitive to use" than Suno and added that "some early users have suggested that on average, Udio's output may sound crisper than Suno's".[1]
ForArs Technica, Benj Edwards wrote that Udio's generation capability was imperfect and "less impressive" than Suno's, noting that its songs were substantially shorter than Suno's. He also called the songs it produced "half-baked and almost nightmarish".[10] In response to the company's announcement of Udio's beta release onTwitter,Telefon Tel Aviv memberJoshua Eustis tweeted that Udio was "an app to replace musicians" and called into question the data that it used. Udio has also been criticized online as "soulless" and for having the potential to createaudio deepfakes.[11][7] Lucas Ropek ofGizmodo stated that Udio was "full of acoustical nonsense" and that its songs were "extraordinarily bad".[15]
Critics of Udio have questioned what data was used to train it and if that data consisted of copyrighted music.Rolling Stone wrote that there was "substantial reason to believe" that both Udio and Suno were trained with copyrighted music, while Benj Edwards ofArs Technica wrote that its training data was "likely filled with copyrighted material".[10][11] Udio does not directly recreate copyrighted songs if prompted.[6] Ding has stated that Udio has "extensive automated copyright filters" and that the company is "continually refining [its] safeguards".[7]Stability AI took a different approach with Stable Audio 2.0, and used an explicitlylicensed dataset of music called AudioSparx.[16]
In June 2024, a lawsuit, led by theRecording Industry Association of America, was filed against Udio andSuno alleging widespread infringement of copyrighted sound recordings. The lawsuit sought to bar the companies from training on copyrighted music, as well as damages of up to $150,000 per work from infringements that have already taken place.[17][18]
In October 2025, a copyright lawsuit fromUniversal Music Group was settled down with licensing agreements. Udio agreed to launch a platform only trained with "authorized and licensed music".[19] Udio then announced that existing users would have 48 hours to download their creations before the company transitioned to a new streaming-based business model.[20]
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