It’s a battle that could decide the future of popular music. The world’s three largest record labels are locked in a pair of lawsuits against artificial intelligence companies Suno and Udio, accusing them of copyright infringement.
Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group filed these lawsuits in the United States in June, and have argued Suno and Udio unlawfully used these labels’ work to produce AI-generated music.
What’s in the lawsuits?
Suno and Udio can create songs from text prompts. Sony, Universal, and Warner allege that these companies’ AI models were trained on their copyrighted recordings to do so, without permission.
“For Suno specifically, this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies into Suno’s AI model so it can generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings,” the suit against Suno says.
The labels are seeking damages of up to US$150,000 for each copyrighted recording Suno and Udio allegedly infringed upon. The suits argue Suno and Udio have copied from 662 and 1,670 of these labels’ songs, respectively.
“This is a whole industry stepping up, in effect, and looking at who is going to share financially from the benefits of AI,” said John Swinson, Professor of Law at the University of Queensland. “Will the creators who've been around for a while stand to benefit, or will they be cut out?”
In Suno’s response to the suit, the company said: “It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product.”
While the United States has proposed laws to combat AI deepfakes, no laws yet exist to address AI’s use of copyrighted material.
“There's been talk as to whether there should be some special laws dealing with AI and copyright, but nothing has progressed, partly because new laws take about two years, and in that period of time AI is changing,” Swinson said.
“Any time new technology comes in, it disrupts the law. Then you have to work out if you can apply existing law to the new technology, or do we need a whole new law?”
Motions for summary judgment are not due for these suits until 2025. The labels have requested a March 14 judgment date for Udio’s suit, while Udio has requested October 21.
These major record labels signed a statement against AI being unlawfully trained on their copyrighted work last month, alongside several trade organisations. “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted,” the statement says.
Azzet contacted Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music for comment. Sony declined to comment, while Universal and Warner did not respond before publication.
How do Suno and Udio work?
Suno and Udio have admitted to training their AI models on copyrighted material.
“We train our models on medium- and high-quality music we can find on the open internet,” Suno co-founder Mikey Shulman said in August. “Much of the open internet indeed contains copyrighted materials.”
“Just as students listen to music and study scores, our model has ‘listened’ to and learned from a large collection of recorded music,” according to Udio. However, the company said: “We are completely uninterested in reproducing content in our training set.”
Suno raised US$125 million in a funding round in May, shortly before the lawsuit. The company partnered with Microsoft in December, and Suno’s text-to-song capabilities are now part of Microsoft Copilot.
Udio is newer, having launched in April after raising US$10 million in seed funding. It was developed by former Google DeepMind researchers.
Record labels’ AI endeavours
These labels’ opposition to Suno and Udio do not imply a broader opposition to AI.
Sony Computer Science Laboratories launched an AI music model known as Diff-A-Riff in June. Diff-A-Riff can generate instrumental accompaniments to a musical performance, based on text prompts.
Last month, Universal announced a partnership with the AI music company Klay Vision. Klay Vision says it is creating an ethically-trained Large Music Model, and a product will launch in the coming months.
Universal’s partnership with Klay Vision is “advancing generative AI technology in ways that are both respectful of copyright and have the potential to profoundly impact human creativity” according to Michael Nash, Universal’s Executive Vice President.
Warner said in a July statement that the company “believes that machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies have creative potential for artists and songwriters. However, it is imperative that all uses and implementations of machine learning and AI technologies respect the rights of all those involved in the creation, marketing, promotion, and distribution of music.”