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Udio now says it will briefly allow subscribers to download their existing songs following widespread backlash to drastic changes made to the platform following the AI firm’s licensing settlement with Universal Music Group (UMG).
The move comes in response to growing outrage — and even threats of legal action — from users after Udio struck the UMG deal, under which the AI company immediately barred its paying subscribers from downloading their own songs, even those they had created long before the UMG deal.
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In the statement posted late Thursday (Oct. 30) to Reddit, Udio said it would provide a 48-hour window starting Monday (Nov. 3) for all users to download their existing songs. Any songs downloaded during that time will be covered by the prior terms of service that existed before the UMG settlement.
“Not going to mince words: we hate the fact we cannot offer downloads right now,” Udio CEO Andrew Sanchez wrote in that post. “We know the pain it causes to you, and we are sorry that we have had to do so.”
In the Reddit post, Sanchez also tried to explain the reasons for the original change, saying that Udio is a “small company operating in an incredibly complex and evolving space” that had chosen to partner directly with artists and songwriters. “In order to facilitate that partnership, we had to disable downloads,” he said.
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If the download ban is a requirement of the legal settlement with UMG, how can Udio now reverse course and allow users to download their songs? Sanchez said Udio had “worked with our partners to help make this possible.” A spokesman for UMG did not return a request for comment.
Any existing songs that are downloaded during next week’s window will be owned by the users who made them. Under Udio’s terms of service, the company grants all users of the platform — paid subscribers or free users — any ownership rights to their songs, including express permission to use them for commercial purposes. The company does require users of the company’s free tier to include attribution that the song was made with Udio.
The deal between UMG and Udio, announced Wednesday (Oct. 29), will end UMG’s allegations that Udio broke the law by training its AI models on vast troves of copyrighted songs. Under the agreement, Udio will pay a “compensatory” settlement, and the two will partner on a new subscription AI service that pays fees to UMG and its artists, and allows artists to opt in to different aspects of the new service.
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The revamped Udio will be quite a bit different from the current service — a “walled garden” where fans can stream their creations but cannot take them elsewhere. While the new version won’t launch until next year, the firm immediately disabled all downloading on Wednesday, a move that drew predictable backlash from its users, particularly on the company’s Reddit sub.
“This feels like an absolute betrayal,” wrote one Reddit user. “I’ve spent hundreds of $$$ and countless hours building tracks with this tool,” wrote another. “No one warned us that one day, we wouldn’t even be able to access our own music. You can’t just pull the plug and call that a ‘transition.’”
Some Udio subscribers even floated the idea of legal action: “What you have committed is fraud. Just so you understand,” wrote one user. “You may not feel any legal ramifications immediately, but not everyone who used your platform is without resources.”
The window for downloads will kick off on Monday, but it’s unclear exactly when. Udio said in the post that it would “provide the exact starting time and end time” on Friday (Oct. 31), but had yet to do so by Friday afternoon. An Udio spokesperson did not offer more details when reached by Billboard for comment.
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Universal Music Group and Udio have settled their legal battle by striking a deal for a fully-licensed artificial intelligence music platform. But the broader litigation involving rival AI firm Suno and both Sony Music and Warner Music is still very much pending.
The deal, announced Wednesday, will end UMG’s allegations that Udio broke the law by training its AI models on vast troves of copyrighted songs. Under the agreement, Udio will pay a “compensatory” settlement and the two will partner on a new subscription AI service that pays fees to UMG and its artists, and allows artists to opt in to different aspects of the new service.
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But that agreement will not resolve the entire legal battle, in which all three majors teamed up last year to sue both Udio and Suno — the other leading AI music firm — for allegedly “trampling the rights of copyright owners” by infringing music on an “unimaginable scale.”
For now, Sony and Warner will continue to litigate their case against Udio, but a settlement like the one struck by UMG obviously creates a framework for them to reach a similar deal. The revamped Udio 2.0 will not be an exclusive UMG partner, according to sources close to the situation — meaning it’s able to strike similar catalog licensing deals with Sony and Warner, as well as any other parties.
Udio has ample incentive to do so. Past experience has shown that music licensing for tech platforms is something of a zero-sum proposition; it often doesn’t work for users if you have glaring gaps in your catalog of songs. Spotify wouldn’t be nearly as ubiquitous if it were missing catalogs by Taylor Swift, Drake or The Beatles, while TikTok’s standoff with UMG last year ended up impacting non-UMG recording artists like Beyoncé and Adele due to rights being owned by different companies.
In striking the deal, Udio has also effectively put its cards on the table: it wants to be the music industry’s AI good guy. Though not legally impossible, it’s hard to argue in court that you don’t need training licenses and artist consent while touting the benefits of both in press releases. Udio has also already made concrete changes to its platform, including controversially disabling downloads for its existing subscribers — a further sign that it’s no longer looking to fight it out.
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It’s worth noting that the settlement makes for odd bedfellows in any ongoing litigation. The same team of lawyers that repped UMG in its claims against Udio — now settled with a first-of-its-kind partnership — is also representing competitors Sony and Warner as they continue to sue that company. Ditto for Suno, which is defended by the same team of attorneys as Udio, which just agreed to sign a licensing deal that’s antithetical to Suno’s core argument that no such deals are needed.
But such situations are par for the course for cases like these, where industry rivals team up for a legal case, and each company on both sides almost certainly signed agreements waiving any legal right to argue that their lawyers have a conflict of interest.
The case against Suno, on the other hand, looks more likely to keep going. All three majors are still suing that company, and Suno has long been seen in industry circles as more the more combative of the two. One can’t imagine that Suno’s will to fight will be reduced by the Udio deal; if anything, it has a clearer runway to AI music dominance now that its largest text-to-audio rival has effectively left the space to cultivate its own walled-off garden.
The Suno lawsuit remains at the earliest stage, where a defendant will file a motion to dismiss a case, which is typically the first big ruling in a civil litigation. If both sides decide to fight it out, the case and resulting appeals could go on for years into the future. But the key battle lines of the litigation are already clear.
The multi-million-dollar question is whether training AI platforms like Suno on millions of unlicensed copyrighted songs counts as “fair use,” a legal doctrine that allows for the reuse of protected works in certain circumstances. That issue is also at the heart of dozens of other lawsuits filed against booming AI firms by book authors, news outlets, movie studios, comedians and visual artists — meaning it might really be more of a trillion-dollar question.
Can Suno prevail on that point, making Udio look silly for settling so early? The proverbial jury is very much still out.
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One federal judge, ruling on a major case against Anthropic, sided resoundingly with AI firms, saying that unlicensed training was clearly a fair use because it was no different than a human writer taking inspiration from copyrighted books they had read. But another judge ruled that such training would be illegal “in many circumstances” and that AI firms expected to generate “trillions” in profits “will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders.”
A separate, emerging flashpoint in the case is whether Suno broke the law by “stream-ripping” its training songs from YouTube. That’s a key issue in the wake of a court ruling this summer that said AI training on copyrighted works itself is fair use, but that using illegally-obtained works to do so could lead to billions in damages for AI firms.
In the wake of this week’s Udio settlement, the record labels likely see that deal as setting a helpful precedent: “See, AI companies do need licenses to train their models — Udio just took one.” And in that same vein, when it comes to that all-important courtroom battle over fair use, those same music companies likely view this week’s Udio deal as potential legal ammo.
A key factor in the fair-use analysis is whether exploiting a copyrighted work for free caused market harm — whether it hurt the ability of the original author to monetize their own creative output. A major licensing deal with a direct competitor would seem to be a very obvious market that would be harmed by the conduct of Suno, which says it can build its AI models without such deals.
But that argument has already been rejected in both of those earlier fair-use rulings. Even for the judge who said AI training would be illegal in most circumstances, that kind of argument would be “circular” — since essentially any copyright owner could argue that the specific thing they’re suing over is a lost market opportunity. That means the Udio deal might help the labels in the business world and the court of public opinion, but likely not in actual court. For now, time will tell.
For deeper reading, go check out the full lawsuits against Suno and Udio, and go read the responses from Suno and Udio. And stick with Billboard for updates as the cases move ahead.
AI music startup Udio is facing another copyright lawsuit — this time a proposed class action on behalf of independent artists who have been “left without a seat at the table” in the high-profile litigation filed by the major labels.
Weeks after news that Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony Music were in talks to potentially settle their billion-dollar lawsuit against Udio, a country singer named Tony Justice is filing his own case against the company in Manhattan federal court.
Seeking to represent “thousands” of other independent artists in a class action, Justice says the earlier lawsuit filed by the Big Three won’t adequately protect the interests of musicians who aren’t signed to a major label deal.
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“Independent artists, whose rights have been trampled the most, are the ones left without a seat at the table, unrepresented, and without a meaningful remedy,” attorneys for Justice write in the lawsuit, filed Monday (June 16). “Class members will never be able to claw back the intellectual property unlawfully copied by Udio and used to train its AI.”
A spokesperson for Udio did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday.
AI models like Udio are “trained” by ingesting millions of existing works, thus teaching them to spit out new ones. As AI tech has boomed in recent years, dozens of lawsuits have been filed in federal court over that training process, arguing that AI companies are violating copyrights on a massive scale.
AI firms argue back that such training is legal “fair use,” transforming all those old “inputs” into entirely new “outputs.” Whether that argument succeeds in court is a potentially trillion-dollar question — and one that has yet to be definitively answered by federal judges.
Universal, Warner and Sony sued both Udio and Suno, another AI music firm, last summer, claiming the tech startups had built their models by stealing music on an “unimaginable scale” and “trampling the rights of copyright owners.”
Those cases remain pending, but news broke earlier this month that all three music companies were in talks to potentially settle the litigation by striking licensing deals with the companies. In return for allowing Suno and Udio to train on the vast collections of songs, the proposed deals would see the majors collect fees and receive equity in the startups.
In Monday’s new case against Udio, Justice largely echoes the allegations made by the majors. He says the company has infringed copyrights by training its machines on his songs, including his “Last of the Cowboys,” which has racked up more than 8 million streams on Spotify.
But his case was filed as a proposed class action, meaning he wants to also represent other independent artists who have suffered similar alleged treatment by Udio. He says “thousands” of other artists could eventually be part of the case.
“These acts by Udio were abuse and exploitation of another’s intellectual property of the worst kind,” his lawyers write. “Rather than license copyrighted songs like every other tech-based business is required to do, Udio elected to simply steal the songs of independent artists, plaintiffs, and the class members to then generate AI-soundalike music at virtually no cost to Udio.”
The RIAA is throwing its support behind a blockbuster copyright lawsuit filed by Disney and Universal against artificial intelligence firm Midjourney, calling the case “a critical stand for human creativity.”
The lawsuit, filed earlier on Wednesday (June 11), claims Midjourney has stolen “countless” copyrighted works to train its AI image generator — and it marks the first foray of major Hollywood studios into a growing legal battle between AI firms and human artists.
Disney and Universal’s new case, which comes as major music companies litigate their own infringement suits against AI firms, “represents a critical stand for human creativity and responsible innovation,” RIAA chairman/CEO Mitch Glazier wrote in a statement.
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“There is a clear path forward through partnerships that both further AI innovation and foster human artistry,” Glazier says. “Unfortunately, some bad actors — like Midjourney — see only a zero-sum, winner-take-all game. These short-sighted AI companies are stealing human-created works to generate machine-created, virtually identical products for their own commercial gain. That is not only a violation of black letter copyright law but also manifestly unfair.”
AI models like Midjourney are “trained” by ingesting millions of earlier works, teaching the machine to spit out new ones. Amid the meteoric rise of the new technology, dozens of lawsuits have been filed in federal court over that process, arguing that AI companies are violating copyrights on a massive scale.
AI firms argue such training is legal “fair use,” transforming all those old “inputs” into entirely new “outputs.” Whether that argument succeeds in court is a potentially trillion-dollar question — and one that has yet to be definitively answered by federal judges.
Disney and Universal’s new lawsuit against Midjourney is the latest such case — and immediately one of the most high-profile. The 110-page lawsuit claims the startup “helped itself” to vast amounts of copyrighted content, allowing its users to create images that “blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters.”
“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” the companies wrote in their complaint, lodged in Los Angeles federal court on Wednesday morning.
The case echoes arguments made by Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony Music, which filed their own massive lawsuit against the AI music firms Udio and Suno last summer. In that case, the music giants say the tech startups have stolen music on an “unimaginable scale” to build models that are “trampling the rights of copyright owners.”
Music publishers have filed their own case, accusing Anthropic of infringing copyrighted song lyrics with its Claude model. Numerous other artists and creative industries — from newspapers to photographers to visual artists to software coders — have launched similar cases.
Disney and Universal’s complaint makes the same basic argument — that using copyrighted works to train AI is illegal — but does so by citing some of the most iconic movie and TV characters in history. Disney cites Darth Vader from Star Wars, Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story and Homer Simpson from The Simpsons; Universal mentions Shrek, the Minions, Kung Fu Panda and others.
“Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing,” lawyers for the studios write. “Midjourney’s conduct misappropriates Disney’s and Universal’s intellectual property and threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television, and other creative arts.”
THE BIG STORY: Is the music industry’s billion-dollar legal battle over artificial intelligence suddenly going to be over before it starts? I wouldn’t count on it just yet.
News broke this weekend that Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony Music were each in talks to license their songs to Suno and Udio for use in training AI models to spit out new songs – less than a year after the music companies filed blockbuster copyright cases accusing the AI startups of stealing music on an “unimaginable scale.”
Both sides have framed those cases as an existential fight over the future of music. The labels says Suno and Udio are “trampling” the rights of real musicians in an effort to replace them; the startups argue back that the music giants are abusing intellectual property to crush a new technology that threatens their market share.
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Is an actual deal imminent? I’d lean toward no. Low-boil settlement talks are a common and continuous feature of almost any litigation, and it’s unclear exactly how far they’ve gotten here. The labels have long said they’re open to listening, but striking a final deal – rather than just discussing one in broad strokes – will require solving a long list of incredibly complex problems, as my colleague Kristin Robinson writes.
The choice confronting the music giants in these talks – to strike a deal or fight it out in court – is one facing all creative industries amid the rise of artificial intelligence. If you sell your content to AI firms, you earn short term profits…by empowering a technology that might destroy you in the long run. If you fight it out, you risk being left behind amid a technological revolution, all for what could be a losing cause.
For the music business, history makes that an especially grueling choice. Nobody wants a replay of the 2000s, when labels chose to fight an ascendant new technology in court rather than harness and exploit its potential for profit. Only when the majors opted to partner with streamers like Spotify – in equity stake deals eerily similar to those being discussed with Suno and Udio – did the industry begin the long climb to recovery.
But digital music merely represented a new distribution system, and one where the tech partners would ultimately always need to pay real musicians for their output. If the labels end these lawsuits by handing over their catalogs for AI training now, those new partners might one day no longer need them at all.
You’re reading The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between. To get the newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday, go subscribe here.
Other top stories this week…
LIZZO’S APPEAL – Lizzo’s lawyers launched an appeal aimed at ending a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by her former backup dancers, calling it an “attack” on her “First Amendment right to perform her music and advocate for body positivity.” Lizzo’s attorneys say her behavior toward the dancers was clearly part of her artistic approach — and thus shielded by constitutional protections for free speech.
SHADY FACEBOOK MUSIC? – Eight Mile Style, a company that owns much of Eminem’s catalog, filed a copyright lawsuit against Meta over accusations that Facebook and Instagram made “Lose Yourself” and other iconic tracks available to billions of users without permission. The case claimed that the social media giant added Eminem’s songs to its music library without the necessary licenses, violating copyright law on a “massive” scale in the pursuit of “obscene monetary benefit.”
OFFENSE AS DEFENSE – Smokey Robinson filed a countersuit against four longtime housekeepers who recently accused him of rape, claiming the allegations were part of an “extortionate scheme” by the women and their attorneys. The Motown legend accused the women and their lawyers of defamation, invasion of privacy, civil conspiracy and even elder abuse over the “fabricated” allegations.
YOUNGBOY PARDONED – President Donald Trump granted a pardon to YoungBoy Never Broke Again, who was released from prison in April after pleading guilty last year to a single count of possession of firearms by a convicted felon. The rapper, who has faced legal trouble for years, thanked the president on social media: “This moment means a lot. It opens the door to a future I’ve worked hard for and I am fully prepared to step into this.”
TRAFFIC DEATH – Ex-Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer reached a plea deal with prosecutors to avoid prison time after striking and killing 47-year-old Israel Sanchez with his car in Los Angeles last year. Under the terms of the deal, the rocker pleaded no contest to misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter without gross negligence and was sentenced to one year of informal probation and 60 days of community labor.
SPOUSAL SUPPORT – Offset updated his divorce filings to demand that his estranged wife Cardi B pay him spousal support after their split is finalized. In an amended version of his answer to Cardi’s divorce petition, the Migos star added a request for an unspecified amount of alimony, but remains unchanged otherwise. The pair of superstars are one year into an increasingly acrimonious divorce case following six years of marriage.
BILLION WITH A B – The Justice Department urged the U.S. Supreme Court to tackle a billion-dollar lawsuit over music piracy filed by the major labels against Cox Communications, warning that a “sweeping” ruling could force internet providers to cut off service to many Americans. The case, in which the labels won a $1 billion verdict in 2019, saw a lower court hold Cox itself liable for widespread illegal downloading by its users.
FIVIO PLEA DEAL – Brooklyn rapper Fivio Foreign took a plea deal to end a criminal case stemming from allegations he pulled a gun on a New Jersey woman after she asked him to jump her car while pulled over. Under the terms of the deal, Fivio admitted to one count of third-degree terroristic threats in return for prosecutors dropping four other charges, including unlawful possession of a weapon and aggravated assault.
Tupac Shakur’s estate is threatening to sue Drake over a recent diss track against Kendrick Lamar that featured an AI-generated version of the late rapper’s voice, calling it a “a flagrant violation” of the law and a “blatant abuse” of his legacy.
In a Wednesday cease-and-desist letter obtained exclusively by Billboard, litigator Howard King told Drake (Aubrey Drake Graham) that he must confirm that he will pull down his “Taylor Made Freestyle” in less than 24 hours or the estate would “pursue all of its legal remedies” against him.
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“The Estate is deeply dismayed and disappointed by your unauthorized use of Tupac’s voice and personality,” King wrote in the letter. “Not only is the record a flagrant violation of Tupac’s publicity and the estate’s legal rights, it is also a blatant abuse of the legacy of one of the greatest hip-hop artists of all time. The Estate would never have given its approval for this use.”
Drake released “Taylor Made” on Friday, marking the latest chapter in a back-and-forth war of words between the Canadian rapper and Lamar. Beyond taking shots at both Kendrick and Taylor Swift, the track made headlines because of its prominent use of artificial intelligence technology to create fake verses from Tupac and Snoop Dogg – two West Coast legends idolized by the LA-based Lamar.
“Kendrick, we need ya, the West Coast savior/ Engraving your name in some hip-hop history,” the AI-generated Tupac raps in Drake’s song. “If you deal with this viciously/ You seem a little nervous about all the publicity.”
In Tuesday’s letter, Tupac’s estate warned Drake that the use of his voice clearly violated Tupac’s so-called publicity rights – the legal power to control how your image or likeness is used by others. And they took particular exception the use of his voice to take shots at Lamar.
“The unauthorized, equally dismaying use of Tupac’s voice against Kendrick Lamar, a good friend to the Estate who has given nothing but respect to Tupac and his legacy publicly and privately, compounds the insult,” King wrote.
A rep for Drake declined to comment on the demands of the Shakur estate.
It’s unclear if Snoop Dogg, whose voice was also featured on “Taylor Made,” is planning to raise similar legal objections to Drake’s track. On Saturday, he posted a video to social media in which he seemed to be learning of the song for the first time: “They did what? When? How? Are you sure?” A rep for Snoop Dogg did not return a request for comment.
The unauthorized use of voice cloning technology has become one of the music industry’s thorniest legal subjects, as AI-powered tools have made easier than ever to convincingly mimic real artists.
The issue exploded onto the scene last year, when an unknown artist named Ghostwriter released a track called “Heart On My Sleeve” that featured – ironically – fake verses from Drake’s voice. Since then, as voice-cloning has proliferated on the internet, industry groups, legal experts and lawmakers have wrangled over how best to crack down on it.
It’s not as simple as it might seem. Federal copyrights are difficult to directly apply, since cloned vocals usually feature new words and music that are distinct from existing copyrighted songs. The publicity rights cited by the estate are a better fit because they protect someone’s likeness itself, but they have historically been used to sue over advertisements, rather than over creative works like songs.
Faced with that legal uncertainty, the recording industry and top artists have pushed for new legislation to address the problem. Last month, Tennessee passed a statute called the ELVIS Act that aims to crack down on voice cloning by expanding the state’s publicity right laws beyond just advertisements. Lawmakers in Washington DC are also considering similar bills that would create new, broader publicity rights at a federal level.
In Wednesday’s letter, however, the estate said that California’s existing publicity right laws clearly outlaw something as blatant as Drake’s use of Tupac’s voice in “Taylor Made.” King argued that the song had caused “substantial economic and reputational harm” by creating the “false impression that the estate and Tupac promote or endorse the lyrics for the sound-alike.”
The estate also argued that the song was likely created using an AI model that violated the estate’s copyrights by “training” on existing recordings of Tupac’s music. The legality of using copyrighted “inputs” is another difficult legal issue that’s currently being tested in several closely-watched lawsuits against AI developers, including one filed by major music publishers.
“It is hard to believe that [Tupac’s record label]’s intellectual property was not scraped to create the fake Tupac AI on the Record,” King wrote, before demanding that Drake also provide “a detailed explanation for how the sound-alike was created and the persons or company that created it, including all recordings and other data ‘scraped’ or used.”
Wednesday’s letter also pointedly highlighted that Drake himself has made previous objections to the use of his own likeness by others. In addition to last year’s incident surrounding “Heart on My Sleeve” — which was quickly pulled down from the internet — King pointed to a lesser-known federal lawsuit in which Drake’s attorneys accused a website of using his image without authorization.
“The [“Taylor Made Freestyle”] has generated well more than one million streams at this point and has been widely reported in the general national press and popular entertainment websites and publications,” the estate wrote. “Without question, it is exponentially more serious and damaging than a picture of you with some other people on a low volume website.”
In its closing paragraphs, the letter demanded written confirmation by noon Pacific on Thursday that Drake’s representatives were “expeditiously taking all steps necessary to have it removed.”
“If you comply, the estate will consider whether an informal negotiation to resolve this matter makes sense,” King wrote. “If you do not comply, our client has authorized this firm to pursue all of its legal remedies including, but not limited to, an action for violation of … the estate’s copyright, publicity and personality rights and the resulting damages, injunctive relief, and punitive damages and attorneys’ fees.”
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