GRAI Buys Hangout to Build an AI-Powered Social Music Service

GRAI has acquired Hangout, giving the AI music company a social-listening service where people can gather, play songs and make tracks with AI. GRAI wants to build an AI-powered social streaming service from the combination. The deal is complete, but the service it envisions is still a plan.

What Hangout brings to the deal

Hangout lets someone open a listening room and play music for guests. Developed by the creators of Turntable.fm, it launched in November 2024 with a catalog of more than 100 million songs through licensing deals with the three major music companies and independent rights group Merlin. That gives GRAI an existing way for people to listen together, rather than only a proposal for one.

Music Ally reported that Hangout signed up 1.1 million users in its first few months. That is an early sign of interest in its visual rooms, where users can take turns DJing licensed music. It is not a current user count, and it does not measure demand for the AI-powered service GRAI now wants to build.

Where AI enters the room

Hangout added a feature in December 2025 that lets users prompt AI to generate tracks. So the deal does not mark the first appearance of AI in Hangout. The distinction is between an existing creation feature inside a listening service and GRAI’s larger ambition to make AI part of a social streaming service.

GRAI describes itself as an AI music company building a social streaming service. Its stated plan is to combine Hangout’s understanding of how people listen together with GRAI’s technology and consumer product vision. That explains the attraction of the acquisition: Hangout has already built rooms around shared music, while GRAI is pursuing a service that goes beyond pressing play.

Two ideas of participation

In Hangout’s listening rooms, participation can mean choosing what others hear. Its AI feature adds another possibility: making a track. GRAI co-founder and president Andrei Avsievich described his goal as streaming that is “social and co-creative.” The phrase connects the companies’ approaches, but it is a vision for the combined service, not a description of a newly released product.

Hangout founder Joseph Perla put the emphasis on human connection. In a statement about the deal, he said he built Hangout to recreate the feeling of friends passing records around. Integrating the company into GRAI, he said, is a way to carry that idea forward. His account suggests a useful test for whatever GRAI builds: whether making music together strengthens the gathering that Hangout was built around.

The plan still needs a product

The purchase price was not disclosed. More important for listeners, GRAI’s stated plan does not spell out how Hangout’s licensed catalog, listening rooms and AI track generation will fit into one service. Those are distinct pieces today: access to recorded songs, a place to share them and a tool for creating new music. Owning all three does not yet show what the combined experience will feel like.