Udio spent most of 2025 as a defendant. The same company that the RIAA's members sued for copyright infringement is now the company those same majors are licensing, and the product that turns the settlements into a business has a name: Starstruck. Details surfaced through a Water & Music report on a private webinar Udio co-hosted on 30 April 2026, then were laid out by Music Ally and Music Business Worldwide on 22 May.
The pitch is narrow on purpose. This is not a free-for-all text-to-song generator. It is a fan playground bolted to a specific roster of artists who have agreed to be there, with the economics wired so the people who own the songs get paid before anyone downloads anything. Which, it turns out, is the whole trick: nobody downloads anything at all.
What can a fan actually do inside Starstruck?
Four modes. Cover generates a song performed in the style of a different artist, the example floated was a Charli XCX-style take on a Taylor Swift track. Reimagine keeps the lyrics and rewrites the musical composition underneath them. Remix applies genre or style shifts to an existing recording. Create is the boldest: a user writes original lyrics and pairs them with a selected artist's voice, subject to guardrails on topic, language and style.
Every one of those outputs stays inside the box. Results cannot be exported, downloaded, or uploaded to streaming platforms. You make a thing, you listen to the thing in the app, and that is where the thing lives.
Why build a product fans cannot take home?
Because the export ban is the licence. A major will not hand its voices to an AI tool that spits out tracks which then sit next to the artist's real releases on Spotify and siphon off the same streams. Lock the output inside a walled garden and the catalogue is never cannibalised, the artist's market is never undercut, and the rightsholder keeps full control of what leaves the building, which is nothing.
That control runs all the way to ownership. The generated recording belongs to the rightsholder of the participating artist, the label, the publisher, or the artist through their distributor. The fan is not buying a creation. The fan is renting the right to create and to listen, inside Udio's environment, on Udio's terms.
The fan does not own what they make. They are paying for permission to make it, and permission to press play.
Does anyone actually earn more here?
This is the line worth holding Udio to. On the publishing side, Kobalt's Sam Bruderman said that given the overall structure of this deal, the songwriter is paid significantly more than they are in the traditional streaming construct. No percentages, no per-stream figure, no worked example. "Significantly more" than streaming is a famously low bar to clear, and a claim with no number attached is a claim you cannot bank.
The deal stack behind it is real, though. Universal Music Group settled its infringement suit and signed a licensing deal with Udio in October 2025. Warner Music Group followed in November 2025. Merlin, the independents' licensing body, signed in January 2026. Kobalt inked its agreement in April 2026, and later that month Believe confirmed its own deal. For underground and independent producers, Merlin and Believe are the names that matter most, because that is the machinery a lot of house catalogue actually flows through.
