Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Suno, Udio
The recording industry’s three major label groups are uniting in their fight against artificial intelligence. Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group are suing Suno and Udio, two AI start-ups, for copyright infringement. The labels, aided by the Recording Industry Association of America, claim the firms have engaged in “willful copyright infringement at an almost unimaginable scale” by copying their music to train AI on it. Both Suno and Udio use AI to generate songs from users’ text prompts. Neither company has responded to the lawsuits yet, and both have previously been tight-lipped on how they trained their AI models. The labels are seeking both an injunction to stop the companies from training on their music and damages for the songs they have trained on. The lawsuits argue that by flouting copyright, Suno and Udio “threaten enduring and irreparable harm to recording artists, record labels, and the music industry, inevitably reducing the quality of new music available to consumers and diminishing our shared culture.” Here’s what to know.
The subject of the labels’ lawsuits are two of the biggest names in AI music creation. Both models allow users to generate songs based on prompts, like “a jazz song about New York,” as Udio suggests in its guide. The models can make songs in a number of genres, either using lyrics written by the user or generated by AI. Suno was released in December 2023 with a Microsoft partnership, and recently announced a $125 million round of funding in May. Udio was released on April 10 and counts musicians will.i.am, Common, and Tay Keith among its investors. “BBL Drizzy,” the viral song that Metro Boomin flipped into a beat during Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s beef, was created with Udio.
In very similar lawsuits, the labels allege that Suno and Udio infringed on their copyright by training AI models on the labels’ libraries, which constitute a large chunk of all recorded pop music. “This process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies [to] generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings,” the lawyers claim. The lawsuits say “it is obvious” that Suno and Udio trained on the labels’ libraries and that when tested, both services were able to imitate copyrighted recordings. Specifically, lawyers allege Udio could imitate artists including Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, ABBA, and Lin-Manuel Miranda when given the right prompts, while Suno generated songs imitating the tags for Jason Derulo and producer CashMoneyAP.
Per the lawsuits, both Suno and Udio claimed “fair use” of the copyrighted music in previous correspondence — which other AI companies like OpenAI have also claimed in their AI training. The doctrine of fair use generally allows copyrighted material to be used without permission for academic, journalistic, and parody purposes. But the lawyers argue Suno and Udio’s training does not fall under that doctrine because it is “imitative machine-generated music — not human creativity or expression,” and thus, it’s use that Suno and Udio needed permission for.
Suno and Udio have never specified what music their AI models trained on. Antonio Rodriguez, an early Suno investor, told Rolling Stone in March that Suno did not have licenses for the music it trained on, admitting a degree of legal risk. “Honestly, if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it,” Rodriguez said. “I think that they needed to make this product without the constraints.” Udio’s co-founder, David Ding, told Billboard in May that his company’s AI trained “on publicly available data that we obtained from the internet,” adding it was “good music.”
The lawsuits make three specific requests. First, they are asking Suno and Udio to admit their AI models trained on their libraries of music. Second, they want injunctions to stop that alleged training. And last, they are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per song — which could quickly add up to nine figures or more. The lawsuits argue the damages match the companies’ “massive and ongoing infringement.”
These lawsuits are the biggest action taken yet against AI-generated music. It’s an especially loud and notable show of power for all three major labels to be working together on the lawsuits. Last year, Universal Music Group sued Anthropic PBC, another AI music company, for copyright infringement in a case that specifically focused on lyrics. But these lawsuits are bigger and broader and could have major implications for AI and the music business. They follow a concern that’s been percolating across the industry after UMG made AI-generated music a sticking point in their TikTok negotiations and a group of musicians spoke out against AI-generated music. Groups including the Recording Academy, the Music Workers Alliance, the National Association of Music Publishers, the American Association of Independent Music, and even SAG-AFTRA have all made statements supporting the lawsuits.
RIAA’s chairman and CEO, Mitch Glazier, made clear in a statement that this fight is specifically against unauthorized AI. “The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge,” he said. “But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”
