An AI creator who goes by the name DanceMax RoboMusic says he has used Udio every day for more than two years.
“I started using Udio because I wanted to hear my poetry turned into music that actually sounds good,” he told Zinstrel — “not this high frequency saturated, tin-can-sounding garbage.”
DanceMax is unimpressed by the other leading AI song creation platforms on the market, but he’s genuinely a fan of the Udio product. The current Udio product.
“I want to use the best product available, no matter what,” he said.
Over the past two years, he has made about 60 original songs with the platform and a much larger body of work he calls lyric covers — new words sung in the manner of artists he loves. He says he can’t post most of them to the official Discord or subreddit, because sharing them would break Udio’s terms of service.
He bought a domain and put the music online anyway. These days, he listens to Udio tracks in the car and while gaming. He makes his own cover art, and says it’s almost as fun as making the songs.
DanceMax’s allegiance to Udio might seem surprising, given Udio’s trajectory over the last year — or lack thereof.
Eleven months ago, Universal Music Group settled its copyright suit against Udio, Warner Music Group followed, and the download button disappeared for everyone. The exodus was loud and well covered.
But what hasn’t been covered is the remnant who stuck around.
There is still a Udio subreddit — 4,700 weekly visitors, 96 contributions a week — and a Discord server where people post songs almost daily. But there is barely a community inside them.
DanceMax says he’s not in contact with any other Udio creators.
“I think most of the active user base has gone silent,” he said. “But the community is secondary. It’s not important to me. I want to make music, period.”
The remnant is full of creatively satisfied individuals, mostly working alone, each with a private reason for still being there.
Nobody’s home, except Adam
They are alone in part because the company stopped speaking.
The last thing Udio posted on X was the announcement of the UMG partnership itself, on Oct. 29, 2025. Instagram posts stopped nine days later. The TikTok account — 1,747 followers, bio still reading “Make your music” — now returns an appropriately worded error that encapsulates the state of Udio in Q3 2026: “Something went wrong. Sorry about that! Please try again later.”
Udio’s marketing ended on announcement day. Support slowed to a trickle.
The subreddit lists seven Udio staff accounts among its moderators, but most of them haven’t ever posted on Reddit, according to their profiles, and a couple haven’t posted in a year or two.
Across a year of Discord and Reddit logs, only one of them speaks: Adam Lasnik — an Operations Lead posting as UdioAdam — who has answered questions nearly every day since the deal — weekends included — down to individual billing emergencies.
In September, Lasnik pushed back gently on the idea that nobody was home: “eh, man, we’re still here, nearly every day, including weekends. By we, meaning me (Operations dude), and the bunch of pretty darn cool volunteer Community Leaders.”
Asked by Zinstrel for his read on the people who remain, Lasnik responded quickly: “Beyond pointing you to our earlier blog posts and encouraging you to read more recent interviews by Andrew [CEO Andrew V. Sanchez]... that’s about all I can offer, sorry!”
For the people still using Udio, one employee has effectively become the company — the guy escalating technical complaints and banning haters. And he hasn’t been permitted to say much beyond that.
That is the sounding board the remnant has had for the past year.
Why the holdouts hold out
Some people have been declaring Udio dead for the better part of a year — and then not leaving.
Last December, after downloads vanished and we wrote our “Udio After The Deal” piece, Discord user Rips Runny (Neon Rabbit) delivered the eulogy: “It’s over, Johnny. It’s over. The air is out of the balloon.” Redditor Jamm-Rek agreed: “Put the fries in the bag guys. It’s over.”
Both users are still there as of September 2026.
In this community, declaring it dead and actually leaving are separate acts, and most people only perform the first. That’s probably because the eulogy is still ongoing.
Part of what they’re eulogizing is seeing their beloved platform turn into a ghost town, where the only construction in a year has been patching bugs — a game of whack-a-mole. Songs temporarily vanished from libraries in November 2025; the same thing happened with folders in August 2026. Udio’s currently tackling a problem with generations sometimes taking hours to complete. There have also been login loops, models silently switching mid-extension, and a mobile toggle that flips custom lyrics to auto without telling you.
Moderation errors have been the most persistent mole. KenDibble, the Discord’s most meticulous bug reporter, found that a track tagged “west coast hip hop” returned a “tags must not contain offensive language” message. Redditor twompsixxinit got stuck with an endlessly looping generation. He concluded that “a subscription fee is more of a ransom payment just to see if any of the remaining prisoners survived the server room fire.”
There’s a bitter edge to many comments in the communities, and yet the rooms are not only full of complaints.
What fills many of them, day to day, is craft.
Redditor il37 asked whether mastering fixes Udio’s problems or just makes them louder. On Discord, Relocator hunted the perfect metalcore "BLEGH" (the guttural bark that signals a breakdown) through every spelling he could think of. Redditor KillMode_1313 turned a bug into a body of work. When the lyrics toggle flipped and produced pure gibberish, he decided the model had invented something like a language and released the results as “Na’vi Gangster Rap Metal.”
And many of Udio’s current users have shrugged off the platform’s ban on downloads.
“I still download all my songs, as I’m sure most serious Udio users do,” DanceMax said. “There are workarounds.”
He isn’t bluffing. A small ecosystem of unsanctioned extraction tools has grown up around the ban, and it works. The willingness to work around Udio’s intentional and unintentional restrictions points to a common thread: they still think the product is worth the trouble.
“Even after almost two years of no updates to the model it still blows all the competition out of the water,” DanceMax said. “Udio is, and always has been, King.”
What they lost, and what they fear
There’s a certain sense of pained nostalgia that hovers over the Udio communities, even among the diehards.
A July post from redditor KingCPAinAspic, titled “Happy Friday and F UMG,” ran two sentences: “Just listening to some of my old tracks and missing the originality that generating AI music with Udio gave me. How dare UMG take that away from us.”
It drew 42 upvotes, a landslide in a subreddit averaging 96 posts and comments a week.
Comments from fall 2025 show that although the RIAA lawsuit was concerning, the community was blindsided by the UMG deal and its near-immediate changes.
But what they lost was never really just the download button. It was the standing they once had to call the work theirs.
The terms Udio revised on Nov. 12, 2025, assign ownership of all output to the company “and/or its licensors,” regardless of subscription tier.
Redditor Remarkable_Cry_642 has been an FL Studio engineer since 2007 and was writing lyrics in Setswana over amapiano and Afro house. He put it as a question nobody has answered: “How in the f— does UMG or WMG end up owning the rights to what I built from my own mind?”
The practical losses stack on top. JERICHO DREAD, who scores horror soundscapes for the tabletop games he runs, can’t edit Udio tracks into the ambient beds his sessions need, so he’s stopped paying. Gamahea has floated the one proposal that keeps resurfacing: let people buy their songs outright.
Those are the losses the community can already count. What they fear next has a name.
Starstruck, Udio’s long-delayed licensed platform, is expected to be a mobile-first app where users cover and remix opt-in artist catalogs, with everything staying inside its “walled garden.”
The remnant has known the name for months, and many read the feature list as a demotion — a toy for fans, built on the wreckage of a tool for makers.
Redditor NextLoquat714 put the objection in a line: “I want to make my OWN music.”
There’s no release date on the books, no roadmap, and no indication of when anything’s going to change — or what, exactly, is going to change. Until then, the remnant has a two-year-old model nobody is updating, a company that stopped speaking the day of the deal, and each other — barely.
The former No. 2 AI music platform, once full of promise, is now stuck in a kind of purgatory.
DanceMax has reached a quieter conclusion. Nothing has been taken from him yet. Something will be.
“I know every day I’m working on borrowed time, because any day it could be gone,” he said. “So I get as much use out of it as possible, until either functionality changes, or the model gets nerfed once the new ‘Starstruck’ system comes online.”
So he keeps making covers, and posting them where almost nobody will find them.
“I’m not holding my breath, but I don’t care,” he said. “I do this for me.”
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Great piece and a sad and cautionary tale.
I don't see Udio surviving long as a tool for a small set of people playing in single player mode without ownership of their tracks, without ways to share their music.
If UMG is paying attention, it's worth noticing what's not in here- nothing anyone here talked about was about replacing the traditional music industry. Nothing about flooding Spotify, nothing about selling records or stadiums, nothing about making money. The die-hards do it because nothing is as expressive, for them, as Udio's 2-year-old models still are.
Building walled gardens where people remix opted-in artists' existing works into cover versions is maybe interesting to some. And yay for the 'artists will get paid' story.
But it's missing the underlying need of creating something of your own -- and then being able to share it.
It's assuming a story where there's a small set of 'professional artists' that create the raw material for fans to engage with and change a little...
Meanwhile, if you look at what the millions of AI creators actually do and come back for every week, it's original, personal expression. That's the real power of AI, letting anyone make whatever they want.
Express yourself, don't repress yourself. It's human nature.