Julian Parker, one of the senior researchers behind Stability AI‘s Stable Audio family of generative AI music models, has joined Spotify to work on the streaming company’s ‘artist-first AI’ initiative.
London-based Parker confirmed the move on LinkedIn on Friday (May 22), saying he had “recently joined” Spotify.
His announcement arrived less than 24 hours after Spotify and Universal Music Group unveiled landmark licensing agreements to let fans create AI-powered covers and remixes of songs from participating artists and songwriters – sold as a paid add-on to Spotify Premium.
Parker’s hire at Spotify was also confirmed two days after Stability AI launched Stable Audio 3.0 last Wednesday (May 20) – a family of four music generation models trained on fully licensed data, with output lengths of up to 6 minutes and 20 seconds.
Parker said he had timed his announcement around the public release of Stability AI‘s latest audio products.
“Now that Stable Audio 3 and SAME are released, I can announce that I recently joined Spotify to support their artist-first AI initiative, alongside Sebastian Ewert, Peter Sobot, Rachel Bittner and many many other fantastic researchers and engineers,” Parker wrote. “I’m super excited to work with such a phenomenal team.”
The three people Parker named are existing Spotify research staff:
- Sebastian Ewert is Director of Research at Spotify, with public responsibility for leading the research effort behind the platform’s artist-first AI work;
- Peter Sobot is a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in Spotify‘s Audio Intelligence Lab;
- Rachel Bittner is a Senior Research Scientist at the company.
Reflecting on his exit from Stability AI, Parker added: “It’s been a wonderful 2 and a bit years at Stability AI, and I’m super proud of the models we’ve released together – Stable Audio 2.0, Stable Audio Open, Stable Codec/TAAE, Stable Audio Open Small, Stable Audio 2.5 and finally SAME and Stable Audio 3.
“I’ll still be rooting for the team of course, and I have zero doubt that they’re going to continue doing even greater things.”
Before joining Stable Audio in 2024, Parker was a machine learning Research Scientist at TikTok.
Spotify unveiled its ‘artist-first AI’ initiative in October 2025, as part of a partnership with the world’s three major music companies – Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, and Warner Music Group – plus Merlin and Believe.
At the time, Spotify said its “gen AI research lab and product team” would be focused on developing technologies that “create breakthrough experiences for fans and artists”.
That push took its biggest commercial step yet on Thursday (May 21), when Spotify and UMG announced licensing agreements for an AI-powered fan covers and remixes tool, set to launch as a paid Premium add-on.
“Solving hard problems for music is what Spotify does, and fan-made covers and remixes are next,” said Alex Norström, Co-CEO of Spotify, on Thursday.
“What we’re building is grounded in consent, credit, and compensation for the artists and songwriters that take part.”
Stability AI itself has separate partnerships with two of the three major music companies. UMG entered into a strategic alliance with Stability AI in October 2025 to develop “next-generation professional music creation tools”.
Warner Music Group followed in November 2025 with its own deal with the AI company, to develop “responsible, artist-friendly AI tools”.
Parker thanked his now-former Stability AI colleagues – including Zach Evans, Jordi Pons, CJ Carr, Zack Zukowski, Josiah Taylor, and Matthew Rice – for making his time at the company “so fun and just generally amazing”.
Spotify ended Q1 2026 with 761 million monthly active users, including 293 million paying subscribers across 184 markets.Music Business Worldwide