Not long ago, Timbaland thought he was tapped out. Since the mid-Nineties, he’s repeatedly reinvented R&B, hip-hop, and pop, lacing classics by the likes of Aaliyah, Justin Timberlake, and Jay-Z with skittering beats, future-shock synths, and his outrageous ear for samples and hooks. At age 54, though, the producer worried he was aging out of innovation. “I thought it was over,” Timbaland says, sitting in the sun-splashed studio of his Miami mansion. “Music is a young sport. I am the best, right? One of the best producers ever. I can make the drums, but something about it don’t hit the same way in this generation.”
But then Timbaland met Baby Timbo. That’s his pet name for Suno, the powerful, controversial AI music generator currently facing a lawsuit from all of the record industry’s major labels over its admitted use of countless copyrighted songs in its training data. He is downright evangelical about its capabilities, and recently signed on as a creative consultant for the startup. “You can put out great songs in minutes,” he says. “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. 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!”
Those thousand beats and songs are just the ones Timbaland considers keepers — he selected them from more than 50,000 song generations on the app. ”It’s still my taste,” he says. “I don’t have to go play it. I can just know what I want to hear.”
When Suno launched at the end of 2023, it was purely a text-to-music app: You typed a description, wrote some lyrics or had the app create them for you, and a song popped out. While that approach remains, it’s since evolved to include more sophisticated options, and Timbaland uses one of them exclusively: a beta feature called “cover songs,” which allows you to upload beats or songs of your own creation, and then use Suno to generate infinite variations on them, in every imaginable genre. Timbo gives Baby Timbo tracks from his vast archive of unreleased beats and song ideas, or newer creations, and turns it loose to reinvent them.
Timbaland is one of the only big names in music to acknowledge using, let alone advocate, generative AI tools. He’s flying in the face of not only a massive lawsuit — which the industry also brought against a competitor, Udio — but also major backlash from the artistic community. In April 2024, more than 200 musicians, including Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, and Stevie Wonder, signed an open letter denouncing AI music. “Some of the biggest and most powerful companies are using AI to replace human artists, violating our rights, and eroding the value of our work,” they wrote, demanding that tech companies “cease the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.”
In February, more than 1,000 U.K. artists — including Kate Bush, Damon Albarn, and Annie Lennox — released a soundless “album,” Is This What We Want?, to protest proposed laws in their country that would allow AI companies to train on copyrighted material without artists’ consent. “The British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies,” they collectively declared, while Bush asked, “In the music of the future, will our voices go unheard?” In a sign of just how taboo these tools are, one of the only other prominent producers talking about using them lately is Kanye West, in between rants where he proudly proclaims himself a Nazi.
Timbaland is utterly unfazed by his peers’ opprobrium, and has no issue with Suno using millions of copyrighted songs to train its AI. “You’re talking about copyrights and this or that,” he says. “No, man, it’s theory. It’s learning what is played on Earth.… If it had no knowledge, how can it give you back the answer? So you got to give it knowledge. And that’s all it is. Knowledge of musicality.” He says musicians should work with AI companies to “figure out, like, how do we eat off of this? And that can be worked out.” (Indeed, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman has told Rolling Stone that he expects to eventually work out licensing deals with labels and artists.)
Timbaland also has little patience for the idea that AI tools may displace musical jobs for humans — he’s still using subcontracted producers and outside songwriters and lyricists, anyway. ”It’s going to elevate your job,” he says. “It ain’t going to just operate on its own. It might give you something that you ain’t never thought of, and it becomes the biggest record of your life. Are you gonna criticize it then?… I never want to remove humans from what they do. I just want to inspire them to do more.”
He compares resistance from artists to early suspicion of Auto-Tuned vocals in the 2000s. “It was a big thing, to the point Jay-Z made ‘Death of Auto-Tune,’” he says with a laugh. “Come on now. T-Pain was the only one to step in. Same way I’m doing with this. T-Pain stood out there by himself.”
Timbaland’s current creative partner, Zayd Portillo, a brainy, enthusiastic twentysomething, steps over to the iMac on a desk in the corner, and begins demonstrating their workflow. He plays a song idea Timbaland laid down in 2010 — a loping, click-clacking beat, a mumbled hook he sang himself with a vaguely East Asian cadence, and a faux-instrumental countermelody that’s actually his voice. They uploaded it into Suno, and using the cover-song function, generated variations, using prompts with simple genre descriptions. (Timbaland insists that I don’t publish his full actual wording — they may not be copyrighted, but the prompts are now property he’s trying to protect: “They’re the sauce!”). In the Suno-generated “covers,” AI transforms his hummed countermelody into guitar lines or lovely female voices, fleshing out the song in multiple genres, all with machine-generated vocalists singing vowel-sound non-lyrics that aren’t quite in English or any other language.
Portillo and an outside songwriter worked out some lyrics to one of those iterations, an R&B banger with buzzy bass. Then they ran the cover-song function again on that version, plugging the new lyrics into the interface — and they got what they consider to be a finished song, with a sultry female vocalist who happens to not exist. “The writers have all the power,” Portillo argues. They’re not opposed to the idea of simply releasing the AI version, but they also might send such a song to an artist and have them do their own take on the vocals. Timbaland says he’s already trying to get big-name artists to record some of these creations.
They demonstrate even wilder approaches. Timbaland took a still-unreleased song he made with Busta Rhymes and used the cover-song function to generate a modern reggae version, with a female voice toasting in a version of Rhymes’ flow, still using the rap legend’s lyrics. Timbaland sent it to Rhymes and suggested that he rerecord his own verses on this iteration, turning it into a duet with the AI. “ I played it for him on FaceTime, and he was freaking out,” Timbaland says.
So far, the undeniable capabilities of AI music generators have been reflected on the charts only via a counterreaction. Beyoncé said she embraced the organic sound of her Album of the Year-winning Cowboy Carter as a direct response to the technology: “The more I see the world evolving, the more I felt a deeper connection to purity. With artificial intelligence and digital filters and programming, I wanted to go back to real instruments, and I used very old ones.” The biggest song of the past few months, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ “Die With a Smile,” was recorded live in the studio with an actual band. “It’s no coincidence that alongside all this live instrumentation is the rise of AI,” that song’s producer, Andrew Watt, recently told me on an episode of the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast. “People are like, ‘OK, computers are getting so good that they can kind of do this other stuff. What’s the realest, rawest thing that it can’t do?’”
But Timbaland has little patience for that sentiment. “ If you listen and you feel good, how’s it losing humanity?” he asks, raising his voice in frustration. “Why are you beating yourself up on something that’s in your body, that you feel?”
