Top AI Music Companies Leading the Future of the Industry in 2026

It’s impossible to make a list about the companies leading the future of AI music without talking about Suno. Fresh off a $250 million Series C fundraise and a valuation of $2.45 billion, the Cambridge Mass.-based start-up has quickly become the most well-known company for creating realistic AI-generated music today. According to an investor pitch deck, obtained by Billboard, Suno generates a Spotify catalog’s worth of music every two weeks and has the goal to launch a social media service in the future. If successful, Suno’s ambitions have the possibility of upending the current state of the music business. And while the company is still being sued by Universal Music Group and Sony Music for copyright infringement, it recently settled with WMG, showing signs that, in 2026, it might be able to make amends with the music establishment.

Though historically Udio has often been mentioned alongside competitor Suno, Udio is now carving a different lane for itself in 2026, and it’s worth watching to see how it goes. Udio and Suno were both sued by the three major music companies in the summer of 2024, but Udio came to the table to start settling its disputes, beginning with a deal with Universal in late 2025. As part of that deal’s announcement, Udio vowed to pivot its service away from creating new songs with a simple prompt based on unlicensed training data to become a fully-licensed music remixing and fan engagement platform. Since then, Udio has also struck a similar deal with Warner Music Group. (Sony Music is still pursuing its part of the 2024 lawsuit).

While ElevenLabs is best known as an AI audio company, creating voice models for both superstars and hobbyists alike, the company has become increasingly invested in song-making too with its music model, Eleven Music, launched in August 2025. At the time of its launch, it also announced AI licensing deals with Merlin and Kobalt, the first-known of its kind, opening up a new revenue stream for participating songwriters and artists who were open to the model training on their work. At the time of its launch, Eleven Music was described by Kobalt, in an email to its signees, obtained by Billboard, as a “scalable, AI-driven production music library that creates custom audio for studios, brands and creators. It’s not meant to replace traditional uses of [one’s] repertoire, but to add value alongside them.” Recently, however, ElevenLabs released an album of AI-generated songs made alongside artists like Liza Minelli and Art Garfunkel, possibly hinting at more consumer-facing ambitions for its tool.

In October, Spotify announced that it was partnering with the major labels, Believe and Merlin to create generative AI tools in the near future. While the details of what exactly these tools are remain unclear, the company laid out a list of principles. This includes that artists have to choose to participate and that the tools will be focused on “artist-fan connection.” On Billboard’s On the Record podcast, shortly after the announcement, Spotify’s global head of marketing and policy, music business, Sam Duboff, was asked if these tools included AI-powered remixing of current songs, he said: “Yeah… it’s just in that space of existing artists and connections and building on artists’ catalogs with their consent — not tools that are built to compete or kind-of siphon off [royalties.]”

A research lab for large music models and a powerful AI detector, SoundPatrol has caught the attention of the major music companies. Universal Music Group and Sony Music are collaborating with the firm to “protect artists from the unchecked copyright infringement activity coming from AI music generators.” To do this, the company employs a patent-pending forensic AI model that uses audio fingerprinting and neural embeddings to identify the influence of human-made works in fully or partially AI-created music. According to Foley and Lardner, the law firm that represents SoundPatrol, the company can “identify covers, remixes and generative-AI derivatives — while continuously learning from new releases.” It’s a technology that could prove critical for large music companies, attempting to police their millions of copyrights in the AI age against unauthorized exploitation.

French streaming service Deezer has become the industry’s most valuable source of research on the growing phenomenon of AI-generated music. To date, most streaming services are approaching the growth of AI content on their platforms with caution, announcing little to no AI-specific policies to curb its distribution or popularity, but Deezer has decided to be much more bold in its approach to AI music. Since January 2025, the company has been transparent about how many fully AI generated songs are being uploaded daily. The first tally showed 10,000 fully AI generated songs were uploaded daily — and by the end of the year, that number was up to 50,000. To address this, the company is barring fully AI songs from editorial or algorithmic recommendations, and it is adding a visible tag on the content to distinguish it from other human-made works.

Splice became one of the most beloved music tech companies in the 2010s as a massive sample and sound library, and in the 2020s, the company seems ready to tackle the wild west of generative AI. It first dabbled in non-generative AI with the launch of Create in 2023, a tool that playfully mixes and matches samples together to spark users’ creativity. More recently, it acquired Kits AI, a voice model company, and partnered with UMG to develop “commercial AI tools” and “AI-powered virtual instruments,” using generative AI technology.

Hook, an AI-powered remixing app, has made a name for itself, collaborating with the likes of The Weeknd, Joji, Metro Boomin, Lil Wayne and Empire of the Sun and forming licensing deals with Downtown and BMG. Created to solve the problem of unauthorized mash-ups and sped-up/slowed-down versions of songs on social media, a source close to the company says there are more licensing deals with music companies on the way to fill out its catalog of tracks, but for now, Hook already offers select songs from talents like Swae Lee, Soulja Boy, Jaden Smith, Killer Mike and Cash Cobain.

AI chipmaking giant Nvidia is new to the music world, but given its sheer size, it should not be underestimated. In January, the company announced a new partnership with UMG, saying that the collaboration will involve research and development, the companies said, with an emphasis on “advancing human music creation and rightsholder compensation,” including the identification of copyrighted works in AI uses. Much of that collaboration will center on NVIDIA’s Music Flamingo initiative, launched in November, which allows for in-depth analysis of music below the surface level, digging into elements such as harmony, musical structure, tempo, instrumentation, key, lyricism, musical theory, cultural and historical context and dynamics, among other metrics, including things like emotional resonance and chord progressions

Set to launch in the coming months, incoming AI music platform KLAY has already made a strong first impression. In November, KLAY announced that it had secured licensing deals with UMG, WMG and Sony for recorded music and publishing rights. Little is known about the new start-up, but it has been described as a subscription-based interactive streaming service where users can manipulate music, according to a source close to the firm. Could this start-up be the one to disrupt the streaming service status quo, or will it be a passing fad? It’s too soon to tell.

AI licensing and protection platform Vermillio became Sony Music’s first-ever AI investment in March 2025. According to a company announcement, the major music company led its $16 million series A funding round, alongside DNS Capital. It also collaborated with Vermillio on a creative project in 2023, which allowed fans of The Orb and David Gilmour to use Vermillio’s tech to create personalized remixes of the acts’ ambient album Metallic Spheres. 

Vermillio’s mission is to create an AI platform that securely licenses intellectual property (IP). One of its core products is TraceID, which provides protection and third-party attribution for artists. Through it, the company claims artists and rights holders can control their data and AI rights. Apart from its relationship to Sony, other entertainment giants are also putting their trust in Vermillio, including WME and Sony Pictures.