Alibaba put HappyShrimp 1.0, a model that turns one written prompt into a complete sung track, into public beta on August 17. On launch day it also named a music partner: Taihe Music Group, the Chinese label group behind Taihe Rye Music and Ocean Butterflies, which will work with it on artist co-creation. Neither side has said whether that arrangement licenses any recordings.
The tool writes melody, arrangement and lyrics and performs the vocal, or it can set a user's own lyrics or produce an instrumental. Alibaba lists genres from Chinese-style music and pop to jazz and classical, lets prompts steer instrumentation, vocal style and how a song builds, and says the model plans structure and harmony before generating audio. It comes from Alibaba Token Hub, the AI group set up in March under chief executive Eddie Wu, which earlier released the HappyHorse and HappyOyster models.
The launch pits one of the largest technology groups in the world against Suno and Udio, which both came to licensing only after the major labels sued them in 2024. At home it joins Kunlun Tech's Mureka generator, a ByteDance creation app and Tencent Music's own music-model work, which already lets users publish generated tracks to QQ Music.
Alibaba has tried the music business before: it bought the streaming service Xiami in 2013 and closed it in 2021. It now controls everything under the new model, from its own chips and cloud to its Qwen family of large models, and has an entertainment arm that recently launched an artist development label. China became the fourth-largest recorded music market in 2025, according to IFPI figures.
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