AI music company GRAI closed an acquisition of the social music platform Hangout, which was developed by the creators of Turntable.fm. With the deal, GRAI plans to build an AI-powered social streaming service combining “Hangout’s deep insights into social listening behavior with GRAI’s tech and consumer product vision.”
Hangout allows users to start listening rooms and play music for their guests. It launched in November 2024 with a library of more than 100 million songs via licensing deals with the three majors and indie rights group Merlin.
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“I grew up backstage at an opera house where my grandfather sang, so music has always meant people to me,” said Andrei Avsievich, co-founder and president of GRAI, in a statement. “Joseph and his team built a product that showed how deeply people want to gather around music and do more with it than press play. We see it exactly the same way. The future of streaming is social and co-creative. It just needed two things: the demand and the technology. With today’s AI, it now has both.”
“I built Hangout to fix what’s broken in online spaces,” added Hangout founder Joseph Perla. “We wanted to recreate that feeling of sitting on a bedroom floor passing around records, turning music back into a collective experience. Integrating our work into GRAI is how we keep that core belief in human connection moving forward.”
GRAI was founded in 2025 by the team behind AI video-editing app Vochi, which was later acquired by Pinterest. — Chris Eggertsen
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