Timbaland’s New Artist Is Young, Photogenic — and Not Human

Legendary producer Timbaland has taken his fervent embrace of AI music production to a new level, launching a new AI entertainment company, Stage Zero — and an AI-generated “artist,” TaTa, who will be dropping a debut single soon. Timbaland, who co-founded the company with his current creative partner, Zayd Portillo, and film producer Rocky Mudaliar, tells Rolling Stone he’s had the idea for the venture since he began making music with the generative AI platform Suno last year.  ”I saw the path,” he says, “but I had to wait till everything caught up.”

TaTa is intended to be the first of many personas launched by the company, and the co-founders have dreams of the characters becoming virtual influencers and even starring in movies and TV shows.  ”Ultimately what Tim’s here to do is to pioneer a new genre of music — A-pop, artificial pop,” says Mudaliar, who originally met with Timbaland to discuss a documentary on his career. TaTa will maintain a social media presence, with music videos generated by various AI video tools.  

TaTa and other potential artists from the company will have their music created via a collaborative process between human creators and the AI music platform Suno. (Timbaland is a creative advisor to that company, but Stage Zero is entirely independent of Suno.)  Timbaland and Portillo have developed a workflow where they upload Timbaland demos created by conventional means to the platform, have Suno extrapolate upon them, and then insert human-written lyrics. TaTa’s voice first appeared a Suno generation that caught Timbaland’s ear: “It came to a point where I’m like, ‘Yo, this voice, it’s  amazing,’” the producer says.  He’s able to capture and reuse that specific voice via the platform’s Personas feature, introduced last October.

“We have these stacks of music that needed to be finished,” Portillo says. “And then it just so happened that the TaTa ones were just getting finished faster. There was just something about those songs that were just like. ‘Man, this just flows.’”

Stage Zero arrives as the music industry and artists continue to wage legal and cultural war against AI music tools. Major labels have filed massive lawsuits against Suno and competitor Udio over their use of copyrighted material in training data, although recent reports suggest settlement talks are under way.   Artists including Billie Eilish and Stevie Wonder have signed open letters denouncing AI as a threat to human creativity. 

Timbaland and Portillo have suggested the backlash will die down, and Mudaliar agrees.  ”It’s gonna be a bit of a battle,” he says, “but it’s not going anywhere…. We were thinking about the example of the influencer itself and how ridiculous that might’ve sounded 10 years ago, where we’re like, ‘Nah, there’s no way YouTubers can be bigger than actors.’ And now they’re the biggest stars in the world.”

From Rolling Stone US.