Timbaland's Stage Zero Uses Suno Personas to Create AI Artist TaTa

Grammy-winning producer Timbaland co-launched Stage Zero, an AI-focused entertainment company that plans a roster of AI-generated "artists", and in 2025 announced the first, TaTa, NPR reported in June 2025. The music for TaTa and later acts is made with Suno, an AI platform that turns text prompts into complete songs in under a minute. "Ultimately what Tim's here to do is to pioneer a new genre of music — A-pop, artificial pop," Stage Zero co-founder Rocky Mudaliar told Rolling Stone. TaTa's voice and sound come from Suno's Persona feature, which captures the voice and sound profile of one generated track so it can be reused on future tracks. The workflow starts with Timbaland uploading his own demos to Suno, which generates reworked versions in other musical styles; human-written lyrics are added afterwards. Timbaland has described the approach as producing "systems, stories, and stars from scratch". The project drew strong criticism. Longtime Jay-Z engineer Young Guru publicly urged Timbaland to reconsider, and days after the TaTa announcement a TikTok demo showed Timbaland feeding a beat by another producer, K Fresh Music, into Suno and producing a close imitation without the creator's permission. NPR's critique places the project amid wider disputes over generative music, including how platforms like Suno are trained on existing human-made recordings. At the time of the article, no Stage Zero music had been released.