The 10 Biggest AI Music Stories of 2024: Lawsuits, ELVIS Act, ‘BBL Drizzy’ & More

When Universal Music Group (UMG) chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge penned a letter to his artists and writers, saying that he would be allowing the company’s license with TikTok to expire — effectively pulling down UMG’s massive catalog from the app — he cited three main concerns: “Fair” compensation, safety and AI. 

It’s possible this allusion to AI might’ve had something to do with TikTok launching Ripple, its AI music model, in beta or perhaps, behind closed doors, TikTok wanted to use songs on the platform for training without paying rights holders. Unfortunately, we will never know exactly what Grainge’s concerns were because the spotlight was almost entirely placed on the issue of “fair” compensation as this licensing battle progressed. 

Tennessee passed the ELVIS Act in March 2023, offering updated and expanded protections for publicity rights in the state. This included the explicit protection of voices for the first time, alongside more traditional publicity rights protections like the rights to one’s name, image and likeness. Formally named the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act of 2024, the ELVIS act also addressed AI-specific concerns for the first time. 

The act was widely celebrated in the music business, but some legal experts warned that it might have been a “rushed” “overreaction.” “The ELVIS Act has a number of significant concerns that are raised, particularly with the broad sweep of liability and restrictions on speech,” Jennifer Rothman, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said at the time. 

The AI music madness kicked off when the anonymous TikTok user Ghostwriter used AI to deepfake Drake and The Weeknd’s voices on his song “Heart On My Sleeve,” (Drake’s label, UMG, replied to the virality of the song by condemning “infringing content created with generative AI,”) so it was particularly shocking to see Drake turn around and deepfake Tupac Shakur’s voice on “Taylor Made Freestyle,” one of his many diss tracks lobbed at Kendrick Lamar. This was the first time an A-list artist ever used a deepfaked voice of another artist…and it did not go over well. The Shakur estate immediately threatened to sue Drake over the track, sending the Canadian artist a cease and desist letter and saying it was a “blatant abuse” of Shakur’s legacy. Yikes. 

When we look back at the first few years of AI music, we will have to talk about the very unserious parody song “BBL Drizzy.” Created by comedian King Willonius, the song was made using Udio, a top AI music model that can compose lyrics, melody and instrumental in one click (Willonius wrote the lyrics, but everything else was created by AI). It started gaining traction when Willonius posted the song online, but it reached true virality when superstar producer Metro Boomin found the tune, remixed it into a beat and posted it on SoundCloud. 

Later, Drake wanted to claim the song for himself, apparently to assure everyone that he was in on the joke. He sampled the AI song in his feature with Sexyy Red, “U My Everything,” which appeared on Red’s May album In Sexyy We Trust. But it begged the question: How does one clear an AI-generated sample? 

As it turns out, no one had tried before. Donald Woodard, a partner at the Atlanta-based music law firm Carter Woodard and representative for Willonius, took on the challenge. Working off recent guidance from the U.S. Copyright Office, Woodard says that the master recording of “BBL Drizzy” is considered “public domain,” meaning anyone can use it royalty-free and that it’s not protected by copyright since Willonius created the master using AI. But because Willonius did write the lyrics to “BBL Drizzy,” copyright law says he should be credited and paid for the “U My Everything” sample on the publishing side — and he was, ultimately being granted a percentage of the publishing. “We are focused on the human portion that we can control,” Woodard told Billboard at the time. While it is unclear if the Copyright Office’s guidance around generative AI will change in the near future, for now, “BBL Drizzy” has set a precedent for how an AI sample clearance can be done. 

Launched in late December 2023, Suno came to dominate the AI music conversation in 2024. Spurred by a Rolling Stone profile of the company, Suno — along with its rival Udio — proved to be shockingly advanced. Unlike most other models that could generate short lo-fi instrumental clips, Suno could compose lyrics, voice, melody and instrumental in a few clicks. Investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Matrix, and Founder Collective flocked to the hot new model, and Suno was able to raise a whopping $125 million in funding over multiple rounds. 

Here’s the catch: Suno was training its model on copyrighted material, a big no-no in the eyes of the music industry. Still, some investors didn’t care. Suno Investor Antonio Rodriguez told Rolling Stone that Suno’s lack of licenses with music companies is “the risk we had to underwrite when we invested in the company, because we’re the fat wallet that will get sued right behind these guys… Honestly, if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think that they needed to make this product without the constraints.”

And then, it happened. In June, Billboard broke the news that the majors were talking about banding together for a possible lawsuit against Suno and Udio. Then, four days later, they actually did it. Warner Music Group, Sony Music and Universal Music Group sued Suno and Udio for the alleged copyright infringement of their recordings “at an almost unimaginable scale” and argued that the companies’ AI-generated creations could “saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [the services were] built.”

Between Randy Travis using an AI voice filter to help him perform his song “Where That Came From” after suffering a stroke, Brenda Lee and Universal Music Enterprises using an AI recreation of Lee’s teenage voice to sing “Rockin Around the Christmas Tree” in Spanish, and Jerry Garcia’s estate using his AI voice to narrate audiobooks and articles for Deadheads this year, it is clear that AI is becoming an essential part of catalog marketing. This allows artists who are older, disabled or deceased more options in using (or reviving) their voices — whether it’s being used for foreign language translations, re-recordings or brand partnerships. If this feels slightly creepy, that’s because maybe it is, but the world is a wild place.

A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators introduced the highly anticipated NO FAKES Act, which aims to protect artists and others from AI deepfakes and other non-consensual replicas of their voices, images and likenesses, on July 31. If passed, the legislation would create federal intellectual property protections for the so-called right of publicity for the first time, which restricts how someone’s name, image, likeness and voice can be used without consent. Currently, such rights are only protected at the state level, leading to a patchwork of different rules across the country. To date, the NO FAKES Act is still pending.

In August, Billboard ran a feature reporting that “despite AI hype, adoption remains slow.” That reality is still true as of December. According to a survey of music producers conducted by Tracklib, a company that supplies artists with pre-cleared samples, 75% of producers said they’re not using AI to make music. Among the 25% who were playing around with the technology, the most common use cases were to help with two highly technical and unsexy processes: stem separation (73.9%) and mastering (45.5%). Outside of the professional music maker set, there may be a few more signs of success, but regardless, one thing has become clear: The deluge of AI music startups launched over the last few years are still competing for just a small handful of AI music enthusiasts. 

In September, a North Carolina musician was indicted by federal prosecutors over allegations that he used an unnamed AI music company to help create “hundreds of thousands” of songs and then used those AI tracks to steal more than $10 million in fraudulent streaming royalty payments since 2017. In the indictment, Manhattan federal prosecutors charged the musician, Michael Smith, 52, with three counts of wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy — making it the first-ever federal case targeting streaming fraud. Later, Billboard reported a tie between Smith and Boomy CEO Alex Mitchell, who had been listed as a co-writer on at least hundreds of the 200,000 plus songs that were registered to Smith. In a statement to Billboard at the time, Mitchell said, “We were shocked by the details in the recently filed indictment of Michael Smith, which we are reviewing. Michael Smith consistently represented himself as legitimate.”

The outcome of the case could set a precedent for prosecuting streaming fraud, an increasing area of concern in the music business as the rate of music creation keeps increasing. Experts believe, however, that most streaming fraud activities take place internationally, making it harder to prosecute these offenders in the U.S.