GRAI acquires Hangout FM to power the next generation of social music streaming

WARSAW, Poland, Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — GRAI, the AI music company, has acquired Hangout, the social music platform developed by the creators of Turntable.fm, to build a service where music finally moves between people. The acquisition has closed, and GRAI is committed to continuing and expanding the partnerships Hangout built with labels, publishers and collecting societies. The new product combines Hangout’s deep insights into social listening behavior with GRAI’s tech and consumer product vision.

Modern streaming made music discovery frictionless, yet entirely isolated: every song ever recorded, instantly, in your ears, alone. This created a paradox where people spend over 20 hours a week with music, while algorithmic loops steadily narrow infinite libraries into predictable bubbles.

Since its launch, Hangout has proved what Turntable.fm pioneered back in 2011: discovering music through a friend beats any algorithm, and a younger generation actively seeks to share, connect, and play with music together. GRAI is building that space, grounding the platform in Hangout’s insights and using advanced technology to scale how people experience music together.

“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. We wanted to recreate that feeling of sitting on a bedroom floor passing around records, turning music back into a collective experience,” said Joseph Perla, founder of Hangout. “Integrating our work into GRAI is how we keep that core belief in human connection moving forward.”

GRAI is building its service with the music industry rather than around it, so that every play and every change pays the artists and songwriters behind the song. 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 authorization to payment. GRAI is launching soon, and the waitlist is open at grai.fm.

About GRAI
GRAI is an AI music company building a social streaming service for music. It is a place for a younger generation, where music finally moves between people rather than plays for one. GRAI 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. Learn more at grai.fm.

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SOURCE GRAI Inc.