Universal Music Group‘s Chairman & CEO Sir Lucian Grainge just became the first music industry leader to take the stage at NVIDIA’s GTC conference – described by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang as the “Super Bowl of AI”.
Grainge sat down with NVIDIA’s General Manager and VP of Media & Entertainment, Richard Kerris, for a fireside chat entitled ‘AI and the Future of Music’ at the San Jose conference on Tuesday (March 17).
GTC is considered one of the most prestigious gatherings in the global technology calendar, drawing tens of thousands of developers, researchers, and executives from across the AI and computing industries.
It was the first time in the conference’s history that a music executive had been invited to participate – a milestone that underlines how seriously the world’s most valuable company (NVIDIA has a market cap of approximately $4.4 trillion) is now taking the music industry as a partner in its AI ambitions.
The appearance follows UMG’s strategic AI partnership with NVIDIA, announced in January, which spans music discovery, fan engagement, and an artist incubator designed as what the companies called “a direct antidote to generic, ‘AI slop’ outputs”.
That partnership is built around NVIDIA’s Music Flamingo model – an AI system trained on approximately 2 million songs that can analyze everything from chord progressions and instrumentation to lyrics and cultural context.
Grainge’s GTC appearance offered the most detailed public insight yet into how he sees that partnership – and the broader AI-music relationship – playing out.
Here are five things MBW learned from the conversation…
1. A first for the world’s most valuable company – and Grainge made the most of it
This was NVIDIA’s first-ever invitation to a music industry executive at GTC, and Grainge used the platform to position UMG as a company that has always been first to lean into technological change.
He drew a direct line from his early days as a punk-era talent scout to his current AI strategy: “When I started, it was whether it was Punk or New Romantic or Hard Rock or Hip-Hop… It was always about the next new movement, the next genre, and the next style. And it is exactly the same now. It is in my DNA, in terms of what the next move is.”
“Every single piece of technology that has come along has ended up in growth and joy and partnership.”
“I love change. I love disruption. I like it in my company. I like it in my personal life. It is the same with technology. We have always done everything that we can to lean into everything.”
He was asked about UMG being first to strike deals with Facebook, and cast the Nokia ‘Comes with Music’ deal in the mid-2000s – a clunky flip phone that let users download up to 3,000 songs – as a pivotal moment. “That was the equivalent of the Wright brothers and the first aircraft of what would become music in the cloud and an all-you-can-eat consumption model,” he said.
“I could just see that we had to anticipate a change in behavior, that we needed to start to look at consumers for lifetime behavior and lifetime value, as opposed to just transactional.”
His message was clear: UMG has seen these inflection points before, and it intends to lead through this one too. “Every single piece of technology that has come along has ended up in growth and joy and partnership,” he said.
2. UMG’s artist-centric approach to AI’s ‘power of possibility’
Grainge acknowledged the fear and uncertainty around AI in the creative community – but argued it echoes every previous wave of music technology, from digital recording to drum machines to sampling.
“There’s been so much technology… CD, vinyl… UGC. When you look back at sampling, when you look back at the Fairlight, you look back at drum machines,” he said. “I remember being for the first time in the studio, and the drums were played on a keyboard. Get your head around that, at the time!”
“In terms of music creation, synthesizers were going to be the end of musicians. It was going to be the end of orchestras. Well, guess what? Music started to be created with those machines.”
“I can’t have an artist’s work be mimicked into something that is completely offensive to them. You and I wouldn’t want that for each other, and it’s my job to make sure that we don’t have that for artists.”
But he was clear that AI is different in one crucial respect: “The difference that I see with AI is that it’s also going to alter both creativity, creation, and distribution. So that’s the huge difference. It’s going to be how we actually discover it, interact with it, create playlists, move it around, cut it up, enjoy it.”
And he was unequivocal about where UMG draws the line: “An artist has the right for their voice and for their lyrics to be their work and shouldn’t be used on someone else’s music. The guardrails are about artistic expression, respect, monetization.”
“I can’t have an artist’s work be mimicked into something that is completely offensive to them. You and I wouldn’t want that for each other, and it’s my job to make sure that we don’t have that for artists.”
His broader message to the creative community was one of reassurance: “As long as they’re respected, as long as there’s guardrails, as long as they’re not taken advantage of stylistically and creatively… they will see over this next period what the power of the possibility is, and how it’s going to change their relationship with their audience.”
3. Predictions on AI-driven fan experiences
Grainge offered a vivid glimpse into the kinds of ‘hyper-personalized’ products UMG is developing with its technology partners.
“I think that hyper-personalization is something that’s going to be a phenomenal opportunity,” he said. “We have 20 million assets between recorded music and music publishing rights. And we’ve got millions of minutes of audio-visual content.”
“Hyper-personalization is something that’s going to be a phenomenal opportunity.”
He described a future where music adapts in real time to a fan’s actions: “It can be an artist from 40 years ago, or it could be an artist that we signed this afternoon, where a fan is actually interacting with it and hyper-personalizing it within a computer game. So, when they’re driving, they make a turn on a racetrack, it syncopates to the chorus or the verse or the lyric, that means something to them.”
He also floated the idea of AI-generated documentaries exploring an artist’s influences, and stressed that the best products come from genuine need: “All great products come from things that we create, that we want to use.”
On the partnership model, he rejected zero-sum thinking: “If you look at any of our partnerships, the only thing that we are ever interested in is win, win. I like two and two to equal seven.”
“This is the most intriguing, optimistic, exciting time,” he added. “What the range is… what the funnel is over the next period… I have no idea how vast it can be.”
4. A glimpse into UMG’s archive project
Grainge revealed the sheer scale of archive material that UMG is sitting on – and why AI is key to unlocking it.
“We’ve got, I think, about 10 million assets of photographs, two-inch tapes, quarter-inch tapes. That’s on top of the 20 million copyrights that we have,” he said. And he was pointed about the quality: “This isn’t spa-garbage and spa-slop and stuff that’s just created. These are big brands. Big names in some markets.”
He positioned the archive project as a cultural duty: “This is what companies like ours need to be doing. I see it as almost a duty, to be honest. I care deeply about that power of possibility and what the future holds, and how we can actually work with the people that have created it, actually share it with more and more people and give it more context.”
Grainge shared an anecdote about telling a young artist that a song reminded him of 10cc’s I’m Not in Love – and the artist had never heard of the track. “I want the entire world to know that journey from 10cc,” he said, arguing that AI tools can connect the dots between eras for new generations of fans.
He also pointed to The Beatles’ Now and Then as proof of concept: “With the help of AI, it was effectively John’s original vocal. Paul then went in and played bass; Ringo played drums, and it was phenomenal.”
Grainge also highlighted the sheer volume of content being created today: “There’s not a 15-year-old that’s working today to create music that has not recorded everything that they’ve done on video on these [phones] for the last five years… The amount of content, in an always-on TikTok Meta world, that creative people are recording is in the multiplication of hundreds.”
Kerris picked up on the point: “This is an area where AI can help, because AI can understand it, and take all of those things and catalog them for you, or categorize them.”
A CNN series exploring UMG’s vaults, hosted by Fred Armisen, is already in production.
5. Grainge’s philosophy on leadership through disruption
Beyond the specific AI and archive announcements, the interview offered a revealing window into how Grainge thinks about leading a creative business through periods of uncertainty.
“Where people don’t know what the future can look like, they are obviously reticent,” he said. “We are quite sequential, and if it doesn’t happen overnight, it doesn’t bother me, because when the product is right, there is a positive inevitability to it.”
He framed leadership as being about track record and trust: “Have you got enough of a track record, from what you have dealt with and done in the past? Are people likely to follow you… when you have invested and taken risks and backed hunches?”
And he connected it back to the same instinct that drove him as a young A&R man: “My North Star is investment in people… in talent… in ideas… in music… in scenes… in genres, and now, obviously, for the last 15 or 18 years, into technology.”
He closed with a characteristically personal note: “As you get older, doing my job, you start to use your ears less. When I started, I used my ears. Now I listen with my nose.”
“With technology companies and our partnerships, it’s about backing each other to have the respect to help us with the leadership, the followership, and bringing an entire creative community along on everything that it is, what the possibilities are, and what we can do to create a future, in ways that we’ve never actually thought about before.”Music Business Worldwide
