Photo illustration: Vulture, Photos: Suno, Udio
The three biggest record label groups are uniting in the fight against AI. Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group are suing AI startups Suno and Udio for copyright infringement. The labels, backed by the Recording Industry Association of Japan, claim the companies are engaging in “willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale” by copying their music to train AI. Both Suno and Udio use AI to generate songs from users' text prompts. Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said his AI model does not “memorize and play existing content repeatedly.” Udio said in a blog post that “we are confident in our technology.”
The record companies are seeking both an injunction to stop the companies from training their music, as well as damages for the songs they have trained. The lawsuit argues that by ignoring copyright, Suno and Udio “threaten permanent and irreparable harm to recording artists, record companies and the music industry, inevitably reducing the quality of new music available to consumers and diluting our shared culture.” Here's what you need to know.
The targets of the label's lawsuits are the two giants of AI music production. Both models allow users to generate songs based on prompts, such as “jazz songs about New York,” as Udio suggests in its guide. The models can create songs in a variety of genres using lyrics written by the user or generated by the AI. Suno was released in December 2023 in partnership with Microsoft and announced $125 million in 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 with Metro Boomin's beat during Kendrick Lamar and Drake's feud, was created with Udio.
In a very similar lawsuit, record companies claim Suno and Udio infringed their copyrights by training AI models on the record companies' libraries, which represent the vast majority of recorded pop music. “The process involved ripping together decades' worth of copies of some of the world's most popular sound recordings, and then copying those copies.” [to] “Suno and Udio generate output that mimics the quality of authentic human voice recordings,” the lawyers allege. The complaint alleges that when Suno and Udio were trained and tested on the labels' libraries, it was “clear” that both services were able to mimic copyrighted recordings. Specifically, the lawyers allege that when given the proper prompts, Udio was able to mimic artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, ABBA, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, and that Suno generated songs that mimicked the tags of Jason Derulo and producer CashMoneyAP.
According to the lawsuit, both Suno and Udio have asserted “fair use” of copyrighted music in previous correspondence, and other AI companies such as OpenAI have also asserted it in their AI training. The fair use doctrine generally allows for the use of copyrighted material without permission for academic, journalistic or parodic purposes. But the lawyers argue that Suno and Udio's training doesn't fall under that doctrine because it is “imitative machine-generated music, not human creativity or expression,” and that Suno and Udio needed permission for the use it was making.
Snow and Udio have not disclosed what music their AI model was trained on. Antonio Rodriguez, an early Snow investor, said: Rolling Stone In March, Suno announced that it had not licensed the music it used in its workouts, acknowledging some legal risk. “To be honest, if they'd been signed to a label when this company started, I probably wouldn't have invested in them,” Rodriguez said. “I think they needed to make this product without constraints,” Udio co-founder David Ding said. Billboard The company said in May that its AI was trained on “publicly available data sourced from the internet,” adding that it was “good music.”
A Udio representative pointed Vulture to a blog post titled “AI and the Future of Music,” which did not directly mention the lawsuit. “Just as a student listens to music and studies sheet music, our models have 'listened' to and learned from a vast number of recorded music,” Udio said. The company said the “musical ideas” that its AI models learn from are “not owned by anyone,” so the models are focused on creating “new” music. “We have no interest in reproducing the content of our training set. In fact, we have implemented and continue to refine state-of-the-art filters to ensure our models do not reproduce copyrighted works or the voices of artists,” Udio continued. The company went on to compare AI in music to other once-controversial music-making tools, such as synthesizers, drum machines, and other electronic devices. “We are confident in our technology and believe generative AI will become mainstream in modern society,” Udio said.
In a statement, Snow CEO Mikey Schulman insisted that Snow doesn't allow users to copy music, but didn't deny that the company's AI models were trained on the label's music. “Our technology is transformative — it's designed to generate entirely new output, rather than memorize and repeat existing content,” Schulman said. Billboard“That's why we don't allow user prompts that reference specific artists,” he added. He went on to say that Suno has “tried to explain” its position to the labels, but accused them of avoiding “good faith discussions.” “Suno is built for new music, new uses and new musicians,” he continued. “We value originality.” An RIAA spokesperson responded, “Suno continues to avoid basic questions about what sound recordings it has illegally copied.”
The lawsuit makes three specific demands. First, it asks Suno and Udio to recognize the AI models they trained on their music libraries. Second, it seeks an injunction to stop that training. And finally, it seeks damages of up to $150,000 per song, which could quickly add up to nine figures or more. The lawsuit claims that the damages are commensurate with the companies' “massive and continuing infringement.”
These lawsuits are the largest action against AI-generated music to date. The fact that the three major labels are working together on the lawsuits is a particularly vocal and noteworthy show of force. Last year, Universal Music Group sued another AI music company, Anthropic PBC, for copyright infringement in a lawsuit that specifically focused on lyrics. But these lawsuits are larger and more far-reaching, and could have a major impact on AI and the music business. They come in response to widespread concerns across the industry after UMG made AI-generated music an issue in its negotiations with TikTok and a group of musicians spoke out against AI-generated music. Organizations such as the Recording Academy, Music Workers Alliance, National Music Publishers Association, American Federation of Independent Musicians, and even SAG-AFTRA have issued statements in support of the lawsuits.
RIAA Chairman and CEO Mitch Glazer made it clear in a statement that the fight is specifically against unauthorized AI. “The music community is embracing AI, and we're already partnering with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools that put human creativity at the center, with artists and songwriters in the driver's seat,” he said. “But we can't succeed unless developers are willing to work with us. Unauthorized services like Suno and Udio claim it's 'fair' to copy an artist's lifetime work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or compensation, undermining the promise of truly transformative AI for all of us.”
This post has been updated.
