Sean Parker Spreads the Gospel of AI Music

To the music industry, Sean Parker has been many things. As co-founder of Napster, he was first an “outlaw renegade,” as he himself puts it. After his time at Facebook, his next act was as an early Spotify investor—putting in money while at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund—and as a longtime Spotify board member. Parker today hungers to be the guy who gets recording artists and music producers hooked on artificial intelligence. And he hopes to do so through the quiet resurrection of Stability AI, the once red-hot startup that nearly cratered out of existence before he took control of it two years ago. As Parker tells it, bringing change to the music world isn’t for the faint of heart. “Generally, you find that people who are very passionate about music go into the music industry, get burned and then maybe never come back,” he said, breaking a long-held silence on his hopes and plans for Stability. “I’m probably one of a very few people who is enough of a masochist.”