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 53, 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. “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…