TaTa, Timbaland’s Newest Protégé, Doesn‘t Exist

Timbaland is introducing the world to his newest protégé: an AI artist named TaTa.

The producer and his creative team, including Zayd Portillo and film producer Rocky Mudaliar, spoke with Rolling Stone about their new “AI entertainment company,” Stage Zero, this week and said their newest creation, TaTa, would soon release a single.

”Ultimately what Tim’s here to do is to pioneer a new genre of music—A-pop, artificial pop,” Mudaliar told the outlet.

The group says the new company will introduce a series of AI artists that will serve as the faces of music created with the AI music tool Suno, a company Timbaland is also connected tied to. The hope, they say, is to make the artists big enough to star in movies and TV shows.

Timbaland said TaTa’s “voice” is “amazing.”

“I always wanted to do what Quincy Jones did with Michael Jackson’s Thriller when he was [almost] 50. So my Thriller, to me, is this tool,“ Timbaland told Rolling Stone earlier this year about Suno. “God presented this tool to me. I probably made a thousand beats in three months, and a lot of them—not all—are bangers, and from every genre you can possibly think of.… I just did four K-pop songs this morning!”

The group says the backlash to AI tools will subside, but, as Mudaliar puts it, the technology is “not going anywhere.”

“We were thinking about the example of the influencer itself and how ridiculous that might’ve sounded 10 years ago, where we’re like, ‘Nah, there’s no way YouTubers can be bigger than actors.’ And now they’re the biggest stars in the world.”

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