MBW Views is a series of editorials from some of the biggest names in the music industry who have something to say.
The following MBW editorial was written by Krystle Delgado, a prominent entertainment and IP attorney. Krystle Delgado is the owner of Delgado Entertainment Law PLLC and host of the popular Top Music Lawyers YouTube podcast with over 200,000 subscribers.
As an attorney, Mr. Delgado is leading a high-profile class action lawsuit against generative AI music platforms SUNO and UDIO.
In the following editorial, she weighs in on the walled gardens vs. open studios debate.
To Krystle…
The music industry continues to dance around the uncomfortable question of whether it’s okay for AI companies to use artists’ music without their permission. really terrible…or just an awkward step before everyone signs the contract and moves on.
The conversation went from “They illegally stole tens of millions of songs from the Internet” to “Hey, let’s all make money together.”
Well, at least when it comes to major labels.
The unfortunate truth is that the majority of these songs are by independent artists who are never asked for permission, offered compensation, or even included in today’s “Start Fresh” AI campaign.
Can independent artists truly obtain justice through unsolved cases? class action lawsuit The matchup between Suno and Udio remains to be seen.
But still here we are, and the conversation has officially shifted to how AI works. should We will continue to use it in the future. Some companies claim the solution is to do a “walled garden.” This may sound technical, but the idea is simple.
Think of it like a video game. You can log into the platform, create music within the system, experiment with sounds, and share tracks with other users, but you can’t take AI music out of the platform.
Warner, Universal, and Merlin all signed on to this structure through settlements with Woodio. The future goal is “properly licensed” AI models.
But this is where things get complicated.
I don’t know what it actually is other Music continues to be included in these license pools. Independent artists are certainly not consulted.
Warner, on the other hand, is the only major to make peace with Suno, who rejects the walled garden approach altogether. Warner seems to be allowing its catalog to exist both on the AI platform and wherever users want to share their AI songs (albeit with an “opt-in” condition for artists).
This raises some rather unpleasant questions.
Is this “Start Fresh” campaign really about protecting music?
Or is it about protecting the largest catalog while everyone else’s work remains part of unauthorized training data?
That’s because while the majors are negotiating contracts, the original problems persist. These companies built their platforms on massive piracy.
Now that we’ve seen what these deals actually look like on the back end, further concerns have also been raised about whether major label artists can actually say “no” to participating in AI training.
Implementing a licensing structure does not erase the original theft. And what’s remarkable is that there’s a new group caught in the middle of all this. AI user.
Most people using AI music tools reasonably assume that the legal risks are already known. But if you read the terms of service on many of these platforms, user They are the ones taking the risk.
When AI-generated tracks lead to copyright infringement claims, AI users often seek compensation from companies.
In other words, if someone gets sued because an AI song is too similar to a real artist, the blame could lie with the user, not the AI company. In one court filing, Udio even shockingly stated that AI users, not Udio, are legally responsible for allegedly infringing AI songs.
The current structure of the AI music ecosystem looks like this:
Artists may have had their music used to train AI without their permission. Users experimenting with AI tools may be exposed to legal liability if something goes wrong. And the AI companies that built the AI models for free from artists in the first place are securely protected in the middle.
AI music will never go away. That much is clear.
But the current debate over “walled gardens” is missing the real problem. Because very obvious questions are still up in the air before the industry decides what the future should be.
If the foundation of these AI companies is mass piracy and theft, can they really start over and pretend that part never happened?
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