AI music company GRAI has acquired Hangout, the social listening platform developed by the creators of Turntable.fm.
With the acquisition now closed, GRAI said it is committed to continuing and expanding the partnerships Hangout built with labels, publishers and collecting societies. The new product combines Hangout’s insights into social listening behavior with GRAI’s tech and consumer product offering.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Hangout was launched to improve the streaming experience for users by creating a virtual listening community with music discovery driven by human recommendation.
“GRAI is building that space, grounding the platform in Hangout's insights and using advanced technology to scale how people experience music together,” added the statement.
The future of streaming is social and co-creative
Andrei Avsievich
"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. "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,” said Joseph Perla, founder of Hangout. “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."
In August, GRAI became one of the first two companies to license the patents of Music IP Holdings, which cover the use of recorded music with AI, from authorisation to payment.
GRAI is launching publicly soon and has set up a waitlist. The start-up was founded in 2025 by the team behind Vochi, the AI video-editing app acquired by Pinterest, and has raised seed funding co-led by Khosla Ventures and Inovo VC.
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