Suno
In case you missed it: Suno has picked up another lawsuit against it.
Before you read any further, go to this link and listen to one or two of the songs to which GEMA licenses rights and compare them to the songs created by the generative music AI software Suno. (You may not know the songs, but you’ll get the idea either way.) They are among the works over which GEMA, the German PRO, is suing Suno. And while those examples are selected to make a point, based on significant testing of AI prompts, the similarities are remarkable.
Suno has never said whether it trained its AI software on copyrighted works, but the obvious similarities seem to suggest that it did. (Suno did not respond to a request for comment.) What are the odds that artificial intelligence would independently come up with “Mambo No. 5,” as opposed to No. 4 or No. 6, plus refer to little bits of “Monica in my life” and “Erica by my side?”
“We were surprised how obvious it was,” GEMA CEO Tobias Holzmüller tells Billboard, referring to the music Suno generated. “So we’re using the output as evidence that the original works were elements of the training data set.” That’s only part of the case: GEMA is also suing over the similarities between the AI-created songs and the originals. (While songs created entirely by AI cannot be copyrighted, they can infringe on existing works.) “If a person would claim to have written these [songs that Suno output], he would immediately be sued, and that’s what’s happening here.”
Trending on Billboard
Although the RIAA is also suing Suno, as well as Udio, this is the biggest case that involves compositions, as opposed to recordings — and it could set a precedent for the European Union. (U.S. PROs would not have the same standing to sue, since they hold different rights.) It will proceed differently from the RIAA case, which involves higher damages, and of course different laws, so Holzmüller explained the case to Billboard — as well as how it could unfold and what’s at stake. “We just want our members to be compensated,” Holzmüller says, “and we want to make sure that what comes out of the model is not blatantly plagiarizing works they have written.”
When did you start thinking about bringing a case like this?
We got the idea the moment that services like Suno and Udio hit the market and we saw how easy it was to generate music and how similar some of it sounds. Then it took us about six months to prepare the case and gather the evidence.
Your legal complaint is not yet public, so can you explain what you are suing over?
The case is based on two kinds of copyright infringement. Obviously, one is the training of the AI model on the material that our members write and the processing operations when generating output. There are a ton of legal questions about that, but I think we will be able to demonstrate without any reasonable doubt that if the output songs are so similar [to original songs] it’s unlikely that the model has not been trained on them. The other side is the output. Those songs are so close to preexisting songs, that it would constitute copyright infringement.
What’s the most important legal issue on the input side?
The text and data-mining exception in the Directive [on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, from 2019]. There is some controversy over whether this exception was intended to allow the training of AI models. Assuming that it was, it allows rights holders to opt out, and we opted out our entire membership. There could also be time and territoriality issues [in terms of where and when the original works were copied].
How does this work in terms of rights and jurisdiction?
On the basis of our membership agreement, we hold rights for reproduction and communication to the public, and in particular for use for AI purposes. As far as jurisdiction, if the infringement takes place in a given territory, you can sue there — you just have to serve the complaint in the country where the infringing company is domiciled. As a U.S. company, if you’re violating copyright in the EU, you are subject to EU jurisdiction.
In the U.S., these cases can come with statutory damages, which can run to $150,000 per work infringed in cases of willful infringement. Is there an amount you’re asking for in this complaint?
We want to stake out the principle and stop this type of infringement. There could be statutory damages, but the level has to be calculated, and there are different standards to do that, at a later stage [in the case].
Our longterm goal is to establish a system where AI companies that train their models on our members’ works seek a license from us and our members can participate in the revenues that they create. We published a licensing model earlier this year and we have had conversations with other services in the market that we want to license, but as long as there are unlicensed services, it’s hard for them to compete. This is about creating a level playing field
How have other rightsholders reacted to this case?
Nothing but support, and a lot of questions about how we did it. Especially in the indie community, there’s a sense that we can only discuss sustainable licenses if we stand up against unauthorized use.
The AI-created works you posted online as examples are extremely similar to well-known songs to which you hold rights. But I assume those didn’t come up automatically. How much did you have to experiment with different prompts to get those results?
We tried different songs, and we tried the same songs a few times and it turned out that for some songs it was a similar outcome every time and for other songs the difference in output was much greater.
These results are much more similar to the original works than what the RIAA found for its lawsuits against Suno and Udio, and I assume the lawyers on those cases worked very hard. Do you think the algorithms work differently in Germany or for German compositions?
I don’t know. We were surprised ourselves. Only a person who can explain how the model works would be able to answer that.
Tell me a bit about the model license you mentioned.
We think a sustainable license has two pillars. Rightsholders should be compensated for the use of their works in training and building a model. And when an AI creates output that competes with input [original works], a license needs to ensure that original rightsholders receive a fair share of whatever value is generated.
But how would you go about attributing the revenue from AI-created works to creators? It’s hard to tell how much an AI relies on any given work when it creates a new one.
Attribution is one of the big questions. My personal view is that we may never be able to attribute the output to specific works that have been input, so distribution can only be done by proxy or by funding ways to allow the next generation of songwriters to develop in those genres. And we think PROs should be part of the picture when we talk about licensing solutions.
What’s the next step in this case procedurally?
It will take some time until the complaint is served [to Suno in the U.S.], and then the defendant will appoint an attorney in Munich, the parties will exchange briefs, and there will be an oral hearing late this year or early next year. Potentially, once there is a decision in the regional court, it could go [to the higher court, roughly equivalent to a U.S. appellate court]. It could even go to the highest civil court or, if matters of European rights are concerned, even to the European Court of Justice [in Luxembourg].
That sounds like it’s going to take a while. Are you concerned that the legal process moves so much slower than technology?
I wish we had a quicker process to clarify these legal issues, but that shouldn’t stop us. It would be very unfortunate if this race for AI would trigger a race to the bottom in terms of protection of content for training.
BERLIN — In June, the three major labels sued the generative AI music companies Udio and Suno for training their software on copyrighted music without a license. Now, GEMA, the German PRO, is also taking legal action against Suno, in a case filed today (Jan. 21) in the Munich Regional Court.
In an announcement, GEMA said that it documented that the Suno system outputs content that “largely corresponds to world-famous works whose authors GEMA represents,” including “Forever Young” by Alphaville, “Mambo No. 5” by Lou Bega and “Daddy Cool” by Milli Vanilli creator Frank Farian, among others.
“AI providers such as Suno Inc. use our members’ works without their consent and profit financially from them,” said GEMA CEO Tobias Holzmüller in the announcement. “GEMA is endeavoring to find solutions in partnership with the AI companies. But this will not work without adhering to the necessary basic rules of fair cooperation and, above all, it will not work without the acquisition of licenses.”
Trending on Billboard
This case is very different from the litigation Suno faces in the U.S., which is spearheaded by the RIAA and involves recorded music owned by the major labels. Assuming that Suno has indeed trained its software on copyrighted recordings, as seems likely, that case will involve a determination of whether this would qualify as “fair use” – the legal doctrine that allows the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in some situations, including quotation and criticism. That can be notoriously complicated and it involves both specific facts and case law. It can also involve a great deal of money, since statutory damages for willful copyright infringement can reach $150,000 per work.
GEMA’s case involves the copyrights to songs, which it represents as a PRO, rather than those of recordings. The relevant legislation would be the European Union’s AI and Copyright directives, which allow copyright owners to “opt out” of having their works scanned in order to train AI software, and require “fair remuneration” if they are used. This is one of the first big cases involving this issue in Europe, as well as the first against a big generative music company. Any damages would almost certainly be more modest than they would in the U.S., but the case could establish whether AI companies need to license copyrighted works for software training purposes. Whatever the result, it is easy to imagine it being appealed to higher courts in Germany.
In November, GEMA also sued OpenAI for using lyrics of songs to which GEMA has rights in order to train its AI software. That case, also filed with the Munich Regional Court, only involves lyrics.
In its announcement, GEMA said Suno “outputs content that obviously infringes copyrights.” However, the issue in this case is not this output, but rather the music Suno has scanned during the process of training its software. If Suno has indeed scanned music for training purposes, it would presumably be infringing the rights in the songs as well as the recordings. Although a U.S. court could determine that this is fair use, that doctrine is a feature of Anglo-American law – the UK and British Commonwealth countries have “fair dealing,” which is similar but more limited – European laws are more strict. The EU Copyright Directive lays out “exceptions and limitations” to copyright, but it also provides authors and rightsholders the ability to opt-out of having their work scanned – or, as is more likely, to opt out until a license agreement is reached.
“The lawsuit against Suno Inc. is part of an overall concept of measures taken by GEMA,” said GEMA general counsel Kai Welp in the announcement of the case, “at the end of which there will be fair treatment of authors and their remuneration.”
In the future, every technology company will have a celebrity advisor.
The latest is Timbaland, who is working with the generative AI company Suno on “day-to-day product development and strategic creative direction,” according to a late-October announcement. Timbaland is a hip-hop and R&B icon — a star songwriter, an innovative producer and a compelling performer. (His performance at the June Songwriters Hall of Fame gala was stunning.) As much of a genius as Timbaland is, however, it seems reasonable to wonder where he’s going to find the time for software development.
It also seems reasonable to wonder whether Suno hired him for more than his vision. As Suno faces controversy and litigation from rightsholders arguing that AI companies need to license the music they use to train their software, Timbaland may be there to make a case that this doesn’t matter that much. (Neither Suno nor a representative for Timbaland would comment on the nature of Timbaland’s deal.) In other words, Timbaland is there to do for Suno what Limp Bizkit and Chuck D tried to do for Napster — position the company with users but against the majority of creators and rightsholders.
It seems like ancient history now, but within a month after Metallica sued Napster in April 2000, Limp Bizkit and Chuck D stood with the company against the band, Dr. Dre (who sued a few weeks later) and most of the music business. Limp Bizkit played a few weeks of Napster-sponsored free shows, and Bizkit frontman Fred Durst said the company offered fans a great way to sample albums before buying them. Around the same time, Chuck D wrote a New York Times op-ed supporting Napster and announced that he was working with the company on a contest. The company’s subsequent bankruptcy filing contained a reference to a payment to Chuck D for “the cost of speaking engagements and support,” according to Joseph Menn’s excellent All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster.
Trending on Billboard
Then, and perhaps now, the idea was to position a startup backed by venture capitalists as being on the side of artists. Suno is “the best tool of the future,” Timbaland has said. “It allows you to get any idea in your imagination out of your head.” Suno has already positioned itself as a disruptor, arguing in its response to the major label lawsuit that “What the major record labels really don’t want is competition.” Maybe. But the lawsuit is over Suno’s alleged ingestion of copyrighted recordings in order to train its software.
This kind of maneuvering isn’t so unusual. For decades, Silicon Valley has introduced innovations with a predictable strategy: Ask forgiveness instead of permission, then take political issues directly to users. This strategy, as much as the technology involved, allowed Uber and Airbnb to grow so big that it can be hard to remember that they are basically high-tech ways to get around local taxi and hotel regulations. Uber and Airbnb are essentially in the business of regulatory arbitrage — they face less regulation than their legacy-company competitors, so they often come out ahead. And they were able to stay in business at least partly because they very quickly grew too big to fail. No politician wants to be known for making it harder to book a car or a hotel.
Suno and other generative AI platforms are less problematic, because they would compete more fairly with other tools to make music. The only question is whether the company should compensate rightsholders — including, presumably, Timbaland himself. The lawsuit against Suno will get complicated — one of these AI cases could end up going to the Supreme Court. But creators who want to be compensated for the use of their work aren’t against AI music tools any more than Metallica was against digital distribution — they want to get paid for the use of their work.
At least one creator will almost certainly make a lot of money from Suno: Timbaland. And although it might look bad for him to be on the other side of the issue from most musicians, this has been a reliable way to make money. One of the big winners of the Early Digital Music Age — the 1999 introduction of Napster to the 2011 U.S. launch of Spotify — was Alanis Morissette.
Yes, really.
When MP3.com sponsored one of her tours, in 1999, Morissette invested $217,355 into early-stage shares of the company, which — well, it was never entirely clear how it would actually make money, but that address was really hot at the time. She made more than a million dollars selling only some of the stock.
At the same time, it’s worth remembering how these moves look years later. From a 2024 perspective, it seems smart that Metallica and Dr. Dre sued Napster, because that company’s demise paved the way for licensed, commercial streaming services. Cracker frontman David Lowery and Taylor Swift can also say they were on the right side of history when it comes to creators’ rights. In retrospect, Limp Bizkit and Chuck D seem a bit naive. Years from now, Timbaland, as talented as he is, may seem the same.
Grammy-winning producer Timbaland has taken on a new role as a strategic advisor to Suno, an AI music company that can generate full songs at the click of a button.
News of the deal comes four months after the three major music companies collectively sued Suno (and competitor Udio) for alleged infringement of their copyrighted sound recordings “at an almost unimaginable scale.”
According to a press release from Suno, Timbaland has been a “top user” of the platform for months, and this announcement formalizes his involvement with Suno. The partnership will be kicked off with Timbaland previewing his latest single “Love Again” exclusively on Suno’s platform.
Then, Suno users will be able to participate in a remix contest, which will include feedback and judging from Timbaland himself and over $100,000 in prizes for winning remixes. Timbaland will also release the top two remixes of “Love Again” on streaming services, including Spotify, Apple Music and more.
Trending on Billboard
Additionally, as part of being a strategic advisor to Suno, Timbaland will assume an “active” role in the “day-to-day product development and strategic creative direction” of new generative AI tools, says the company in a press release.
Suno is one of the most advanced generative AI music companies on the market today. Using simple text prompts, users can generate voice, lyrics and instrumentals in seconds. On May 21, Suno announced that it had raised $125 million in funding across multiple funding rounds, including investments from including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Matrix and Founder Collective. Suno also said it had been working closely with a team of advisors, including 3LAU, Aaron Levie, Alexandr Wang, Amjad Masad, Andrej Karpathy, Aravind Srinivas, Brendan Iribe, Flosstradamus, Fred Ehrsam, Guillermo Rauch and Shane Mac.
Though many have marveled at its uncanny music-making capabilities, the music business establishment also feared that Suno might have been trained on copyrighted material without consent. (At the time, Suno declined to state what materials were in its training data, and whether or not it included copyrighted music).
Then, Billboard broke the news on June 20 that the major labels were weighing the idea of a lawsuit against Suno and Udio, alleging widespread copyright infringement of their sound recordings for the purposes of AI training. After the lawsuit was officially filed four days later, Suno and Udio then hired top law firm Latham & Watkins, and filed lengthy responses to fire back at the labels. Suno noted it was “no secret” that the company had ingested “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet” and that it was “fair use” to use these files.
“When I heard what Suno was doing, I was immediately curious,” says Timbaland of the partnership. “After witnessing the potential, I knew I had to be a part of it. By combining forces, we have a unique opportunity to make A.I. work for the artist community and not the other way around. We’re seizing that opportunity, and we’re going to open up the floodgates for generations of artists to flourish on this new frontier. I’m excited and grateful to Suno for this opportunity.”
“It’s an honor to work with a legend like Timbaland,” says Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno. “At Suno, we’re really excited about exploring new ways for fans to engage with their favorite artists. With Timbaland’s guidance, we’re helping musicians create music at the speed of their ideas—whether they’re just starting out or already selling out stadiums. We couldn’t be more excited for what’s ahead!”
AI music firms Suno and Udio are firing back with their first responses to sweeping lawsuits filed by the major record labels, arguing that they were free to use copyrighted songs to train their models and claiming the music industry is abusing intellectual property to crush competition.
In legal filings on Thursday, the two firms admitted to using proprietary materials to create their artificial intelligence, with Suno saying it was “no secret” that the company had ingested “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet.”
But both companies said that such use was clearly lawful under copyright’s fair use doctrine, which allows for the reuse of existing materials to create new works.
Trending on Billboard
“What Udio has done — use existing sound recordings as data to mine and analyze for the purpose of identifying patterns in the sounds of various musical styles, all to enable people to make their own new creations — is a quintessential ‘fair use,’” Udio wrote in its filing. “Plaintiffs’ contrary vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the law and its underlying values.”
The filings, lodged by the same law firm (Latham & Watkins) that reps both companies, go beyond the normal “answer” to a lawsuit — typically a sparse document that simply denies each claim. Instead, Suno and Udio went on offense, with extended introductions that attempt to frame the narrative of a looming legal battle that could take years to resolve.
In doing so, they took square aim at the major labels (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment) that filed the case in June — a group that they said “dominates the music industry” and is now abusing copyright law to maintain that power.
“What the major record labels really don’t want is competition,” Suno wrote in its filing. “Where Suno sees musicians, teachers and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share.”
Suno and Udio have quickly become two of the most important players in the emerging field of AI-generated music. Udio has already produced what could be considered an AI-generated hit with “BBL Drizzy,” a parody track popularized with a remix by super-producer Metro Boomin and later sampled by Drake himself. And as of May, Suno had raised a total of $125 million in funding to create what Rolling Stone called a “ChatGPT for music.”
In June, the major labels sued both companies, claiming they had infringed copyrighted music on an “unimaginable scale” to train their models. The lawsuits accused the two firms of “trampling the rights of copyright owners” as part of a “mad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service.”
The case followed similar lawsuits filed by book authors, visual artists, newspaper publishers and other creative industries, which collectively pose what could be a trillion-dollar legal question: Is it infringement to use vast troves of proprietary works to build an AI model that spits out new creations? Or is it just a form of legal fair use, transforming all those old works into something entirely new?
In Thursday’s response, Suno and Udio argued unequivocally that it was the latter. They likened their machines to a “human musician” who had played earlier songs to learn the “building blocks of music” — and then used what they had learned to create entirely new works in existing styles.
“Those genres and styles — the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music — are not something that anyone owns,” Suno wrote in its filing. “Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song.”
The lawsuit from the labels, Suno and Udio say, are thus an abuse of copyright law, aimed at claiming improper ownership over “entire genres of music.” They called the litigation an “attempt to misuse IP rights to shield incumbents from competition and reduce the universe of people who are equipped to create new expression.”
Both filings hint at how Suno and Udio will make their fair use arguments. The two companies say the cases will not really turn on the “inputs” — the millions of songs used to train the models — but rather on the “outputs,” or the new songs that are created. While the labels are claiming that the inputs were illegally copied, the AI firms say the music companies “explicitly disavow” that any output was a copycat.
“That concession will ultimately prove fatal to plaintiffs’ claims,” Suno wrote in its filing. “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.”
A spokeswoman and an attorney for the labels did not immediately return a request for comment.
The lawsuits filed by the major labels against the AI companies Suno and Udio could be the most important cases to the music business since the Supreme Court Grokster decision, as I explained in last week’s Follow the Money column. The outcomes are hard to predict, however, because the central issue will be “fair use,” a U.S. legal doctrine shaped by judicial decisions that involves famously — sometimes notoriously — nuanced determinations about art and appropriation. And although most creators focus more on issues around generative AI “outputs” — music they’ll have to compete with or songs that might sound similar to theirs — these cases involve the legality of copying music for the purposes of training AI.
Neither Suno nor Udio has said how they’re trained their AI programs, but both have essentially said that copying music in order to do so would qualify as fair use. Determining that could touch on the development of Google Books, the compatibility of the Android operating system, and even a Supreme Court case that involves Prince, Andy Warhol and Vanity Fair. It’s the kind of fair use case that once inspired a judge to call copyright “the metaphysics of the law.” So let’s get metaphysical!
Trending on Billboard
Fair use essentially provides exceptions to copyright, usually for the purpose of free expression, allowing for quotation (as in book or film reviews) and parody (to comment on art), among other things. (The iconic example in music is the Supreme Court case over 2 Live Crew’s parody of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman.”) These determinations involve a four-factor test that weighs “the purpose and character of the use”; “the nature of the copyrighted work”; how much and how important a part of the work is used; and the effect of the use upon the potential market value of the copyrighted work. Over the last decade or so, though, the concept of “transformative use,” derived from the first factor, expanded in a way that allowed the development of Google Books (the copying of books to create a database and excerpts) and the use of some Oracle API code in Google’s Android system — which could arguably be said to go beyond the origins of the concept.
Could copying music for the purposes of machine learning qualify as well?
In a paper on the topic, “Fair Use in the U.S. Redux: Reformed or Still Deformed,” the influential Columbia Law School professor Jane Ginsburg suggests that the influence of the transformative use argument might have reached its peak. (I am oversimplifying a very smart paper, and if you are interested in this topic, you should read it.)
The Supreme Court decision on the Google-Oracle case involved part of a computer program, far from the creative “core” of copyright, and music recordings would presumably be judged differently. The Supreme Court also made a very different decision last year in a case that pitted the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts against prominent rock photographer Lynn Goldsmith. The case involved an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Prince, based on a Goldsmith photograph that the magazine Vanity Fair had licensed for Warhol to use. Warhol used the photo for an entire series — which Goldsmith only found out about when the magazine used the silkscreen image again for a commemorative issue after Prince died.
On the surface, this seemed to cast the Supreme Court Justices as modern art critics, in a position to judge all appropriation art as infringing. But the case wasn’t about whether Warhol’s silkscreen inherently infringed Goldsmith’s copyright but about whether it infringed it for licensed use by a magazine, in a way where it could compete with the original photo. There was a limit to transformative use, after all. “The same copying,” the court decided, “may be fair when used for one purpose but not another.”
So it might constitute fair use for Google to copy entire books for the purpose of creating a searchable database about those books with excerpts from them, as it did for Google Books — but not necessarily for Suno or Udio to copy terabytes of recordings to spur the creation of new works to compete with them, especially if it results in similar works. In the first case, it’s hard to find real economic harm — there will never be much of a market for licensing book databases — but there’s already a nascent market for licensing music to train AI programs. And, unlike Google Books, the AI programs are designed to make music to compete with the recordings used to train them. Obviously, licensing music to train an AI program is what we might call a secondary use — but so is turning a book into a film, and no one doubts they need permission for that.
All of this might seem like I think the major labels will win their cases, but that’s a tough call — the truth is that I just don’t think they’ll lose. And there’s a lot of space between victory and defeat here. If one of these cases ends up going to the Supreme Court — and if one of these doesn’t, another case about AI training surely will within the next few years — the decision might be more limited than either side is looking for, since the court has tended to step lightly around technology issues.
It’s also possible that the decision could depend on whether the outputs that result from all of this training are similar enough to copyrighted works to qualify, or plausibly qualify, as infringing. Both label lawsuits are full of such examples, presumably because that could make a difference. These cases are about the legality of AI inputs, but a fair use determination on that issue could easily involve whether those inputs lead to infringing output.
In the end, Ginsburg suggests, “system designers may need to disable features that would allow users to create recognizable copies.” Except that — let’s face it — isn’t that really part of the fun? Sure, AI music creation might eventually grow to maturity as some kind of art form — it already has enormous practical value for songwriters — but for ordinary consumers it’s still hard to beat Frank Sinatra singing Lil Jon’s “Get Low.” Of course, that could put a significant burden on AI companies — with severe consequences for crossing a line that won’t always be obvious. It might be easier to just license the content they need. The next questions, which will be the subject of future columns, involve exactly what they need to license and how they might do that, since it won’t be easy to get all the rights they need — or in some cases even agree on who controls them.
For a little over a year, since the Fake Drake track bum rushed the music business, executives have been debating whether generative artificial intelligence is a threat or an opportunity. The answer is both — creators are already using AI tools and they already compete with AI music. But the future will be shaped by the lawsuits the major labels filed two weeks ago against Suno and Udio for copyright infringement for allegedly using the labels’ music to train their AI programs.
Like most debates about technology, this one will be resolved in real time — Internet start-ups tend to believe that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission. Although neither Suno nor Udio has said that it trained its program on major label music, the label lawsuits point out that both companies have said that using copyrighted works in this manner would be “fair use,” a defense for otherwise infringing conduct. They’re not admitting they did it — just defending themselves in case they did.
Trending on Billboard
Whether this qualifies as fair use is well over a million-dollar question, since statutory damages can reach $150,000 per work infringed. The stakes are even higher than that, though. If ingesting copyrighted works on a mass scale to train an AI is allowed under fair use, the music business could have a hard time limiting, controlling, or making money on this technology.
If it’s not, the labels will gain at least some control over these companies, and perhaps the entire nascent sector. There are other ways to limit AI, from legislation to likeness rights, but only copyright law has the kind of statutory damages that offer real leverage.
Although neither Suno nor Udio has issued a legal response, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman released a statement that said the labels had “reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook.” The obvious reference is Napster, since most people believe that in the late ‘90s the music business saw the future and decided to sue it.
That’s not exactly what happened. The major labels knew that the future was digital — they lobbied for the 1995 Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act, which ensured that streaming services had to pay to play recordings in the U.S., even though traditional radio stations don’t. They just didn’t want peer-to-peer services to distribute their content for nothing — or to have to negotiate with them while they were doing so. In July 2000, three months after the major labels sued Napster, leading executives sat down with the company to try to figure out a deal, but they couldn’t agree; the labels negotiated as though Napster needed a license and Napster negotiated as though it didn’t. In the end, after a decade of lawsuits and lost business, creators and rightsholders established their right to be paid for online distribution and the music sector began recovering.
And here we are again: History isn’t repeating itself, but it seems to be rhyming. If the labels negotiated with Suno and Udio now, how much would those companies be willing to pay for rights they may or may not need? It’s easy to make fun of either side, but it’s hard to know how much to charge for rights, or pay for them, before you even know if you need them.
These lawsuits aren’t about whether creators and rightsholders should embrace or avoid AI — it’s coming, for good and ill. The question, in modern terminology, is whether the embrace will be consensual, and under what terms. Most creators and rightsholders want to do business with AI companies, as long as that actually means business — negotiating deals in something that resembles a free market.
What they’re afraid of is having technology companies build empires on their work without paying to use it — especially to create a product that creates music that will compete with them. That depends on the outcome of these lawsuits. Because if you don’t have the right to say no, you can’t really get to a fair yes.
A couple of weeks ago, at a culture conference organized by the German recorded music trade organization, I heard German Justice Minister Marco Buschmann put this as well as anyone I’ve ever heard. “The moment people have the opportunity to say ‘No’ and to enforce this ‘No,’ they gain a legal negotiating position,” he said in a speech. (Buschmann also makes electronic music, as it happens.) In the European Union, rightsholders can opt out of AI ingestion, which is far from ideal but better than nothing.
What happens in the U.S. — which often shapes the global media business — might hinge on the results of these lawsuits. There are two dozen copyright lawsuits about AI, but these look to be among the most important. Some of the others are mired in jurisdictional maneuvering, while others simply aren’t as strong: a lawsuit filed by The New York Times could involve a different fair use determination if the ingested articles are used as sources but not to generate new work. These cases are straightforward, but they won’t move fast: It’s easy to imagine the issue going to the Supreme Court.
Despite the high stakes — and what will almost certainly be a rap beef’s worth of sniping back and forth — determinations of fair use involve a considerable amount of nuance. Fair use makes it legal in some cases to excerpt or even use all of a copyrighted work without permission, usually for the purposes of commentary. (An iconic Supreme Court case involved 2 Live Crew’s parody of the Roy Orbison song “Oh, Pretty Woman.”) This is far from that, but Suno and Udio will presumably argue that their actions qualify as “transformative use” in the way the Google Books project did. Next week I’ll write about the arguments we can expect to hear, the decisions we could see, and what could happen while we wait for them.
On Monday (June 24), the three major music companies filed lawsuits against artificial intelligence (AI) music startups Suno and Udio, alleging the widespread infringement of copyrighted sound recordings “at an almost unimaginable scale.” Spearheaded by the RIAA, the two similar lawsuits arrived four days after Billboard first reported that the labels were seriously considering legal action against the two startups.
Filed by plaintiffs Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, the lawsuits allege that Suno and Udio have unlawfully copied the labels’ sound recordings to train their AI models to generate music that 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.”
Trending on Billboard
Hours later, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman responded to the lawsuit with a statement sent to Billboard. “Suno’s mission is to make it possible for everyone to make music,” he said. “Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content. That is why we don’t allow user prompts that reference specific artists. We would have been happy to explain this to the corporate record labels that filed this lawsuit (and in fact, we tried to do so), but instead of entertaining a good faith discussion, they’ve reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook. Suno is built for new music, new uses, and new musicians. We prize originality.”
An RIAA spokesperson fired back at Shulman’s comment, saying: “Suno continues to dodge the basic question: what sound recordings have they illegally copied? In an apparent attempt to deceive working artists, rightsholders, and the media about its technology, Suno refuses to address the fact that its service has literally been caught on tape — as part of the evidence in this case — doing what Mr. Shulman says his company doesn’t do: memorizing and regurgitating the art made by humans. Winners of the streaming era worked cooperatively with artists and rightsholders to properly license music. The losers did exactly what Suno and Udio are doing now.”
Udio responded on Tuesday (June 25) with a lengthy statement posted to the company’s website. You can read it in full below.
In the past two years, AI has become a powerful tool for creative expression across many media – from text to images to film, and now music. At Udio, our mission is to empower artists of all kinds to create extraordinary music. In our young life as a company, we have sat in the studios of some of the world’s greatest musicians, workshopped lyrics with up-and-coming songwriters, and watched as millions of users created extraordinary new music, ranging from the funny to the profound.
We have heard from a talented musician who, after losing the ability to use his hands, is now making music again. Producers have sampled AI-generated tracks to create hit songs, like ‘BBL Drizzy’, and everyday music-lovers have used the technology to express the gamut of human emotions from love to sorrow to joy. Groundbreaking technologies entail change and uncertainty. Let us offer some insight into how our technology works.
Generative AI models, including our music model, learn from examples. Just as students listen to music and study scores, our model has “listened” to and learned from a large collection of recorded music.
The goal of model training is to develop an understanding of musical ideas — the basic building blocks of musical expression that are owned by no one. Our system is explicitly designed to create music reflecting new musical ideas. We are completely uninterested in reproducing content in our training set, and in fact, have implemented and continue to refine state-of-the-art filters to ensure our model does not reproduce copyrighted works or artists’ voices.
We stand behind our technology and believe that generative AI will become a mainstay of modern society.
Virtually every new technological development in music has initially been greeted with apprehension, but has ultimately proven to be a boon for artists, record companies, music publishers, technologists, and the public at large. Synthesizers, drum machines, digital recording technology, and the sound recording itself are all examples of once-controversial music creation tools that were feared in their early days. Yet each of these innovations ultimately expanded music as an art and as a business, leading to entirely new genres of music and billions of dollars in the pockets of artists, songwriters and the record labels and music publishers who profit from their creations.
We know that many musicians — especially the next generation — are eager to use AI in their creative workflows. In the near future, artists will compose music alongside their fans, amateur musicians will create entirely new musical genres, and talented creators — regardless of means — will be able to scale the heights of the music industry.
The future of music will see more creative expression than ever before. Let us use this watershed moment in technology to expand the circle of creators, empower artists, and celebrate human creativity.
The three major music companies filed lawsuits against AI music companies Suno and Udio on Monday, alleging the widespread infringement of copyrighted sound recordings “at an almost unimaginable scale.” The lawsuits, spearheaded by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), arrive four days after Billboard first reported the news the labels were seriously considering legal action against the two start-ups.
Filed by plaintiffs that include Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, the lawsuits allege that Suno and Udio have unlawfully copied the labels’ sound recordings to train their AI models to generate music that 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.”
“Building and operating [these services] requires at the outset copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to ‘train’ a software ‘model’ to generate outputs,” the lawyers for the major labels explain. “For [these services], this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies [to] generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings.”
Trending on Billboard
“Since the day it launched, Udio has flouted the rights of copyright owners in the music industry as part of a mad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service,” the lawsuit against Udio reads. “Neither Udio, nor any other generative AI company, can be allowed to advance toward this goal by trampling the rights of copyright owners.”
The lawsuit is seeking both an injunction to bar the companies from continuing to train on the copyrighted songs, as well as damages from the infringements that have already taken place. Neither Suno nor Udio immediately returned requests for comment on Monday.
Suno and Udio have quickly become two of the most advanced and important players in the emerging field of generative AI music. While many competitors only create instrumentals or lyrics or vocals, Suno and Udio can generate all three in the click of a button with shocking precision. Udio has already produced what could be considered the first AI-generated hit song with the Drake diss track “BBL Drizzy,” which was generated on the platform by comedian King Willonius and popularized by a Metro Boomin remix. Suno has also achieved early success since its December 2023 launch, raising $125 million in funding from investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
Both companies have declined to comment on whether or not unlicensed copyrights were part of their datasets. In a previous interview with Billboard, Udio co-founder David Ding said simply that the company trained on “good music.” However, in a series of articles for Music Business Worldwide, founder of AI music safety nonprofit Fairly Trained, Ed Newton-Rex, found that he was able to generate music from Suno and Udio that “bears a striking resemblance to copyrighted music. This is true across melody, chords, style and lyrics,” he wrote.
The complaints against the two companies also make the case that copyrighted material was used to train these models. Some of the circumstantial evidence cited in the lawsuits include generated songs by Suno and Udio that sound just like the voices of Bruce Springsteen, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael Jackson and ABBA; outputs that parrot the producer tags of Cash Money AP and Jason Derulo; and outputs that sound nearly identical to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around,” ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” The Temptations’ “My Girl,” Green Day’s “American Idiot,” and more.
In a recent Rolling Stone profile of Suno, investor Antonio Rodriguez admitted that the start-up does not have licenses for whatever music it has trained on but added that it was not a concern to him. Knowing that labels and publishers could sue was just “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.”
Many AI companies argue that training is protected by copyright’s fair use doctrine — an important rule that allows people to reuse protected works without breaking the law. Though fair use has historically allowed for things like news reporting and parody, AI firms say it applies equally to the “intermediate” use of millions of works to build a machine that spits out entirely new creations.
Anticipating that defense from Suno and Udio, the lawyers for the major labels argue that “[Suno and Udio] cannot avoid liability for [their] willful copyright infringement by claiming fair use. The doctrine of fair use promotes human expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain, limited circumstances, but [the services] offe[r] imitative machine-generated music—not human creativity or expression.”
News of the complaints filed against Suno and Udio follow up a previous lawsuit that also concerned the use of copyrighted materials to train models without a license. Filed by UMG, Concord and ABKCO in October against Anthropic, a major AI company, that case focused more specifically on copied lyrics.
In a statement about the lawsuits, RIAA CEO and chairman Mitch Glazier says, “The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge. But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”
RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow adds, “These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale. Suno and Udio are attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and lawful footing. These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical, and lawful development of generative AI systems and to bring Suno’s and Udio’s blatant infringement to an end.”
The three major music companies are weighing a lawsuit against AI startups Suno and Udio for allegedly training on copyrighted sound recordings, according to multiple sources.
The potential lawsuit, which would include Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music, would target a pair of companies that have quickly become two of the most important players in the emerging field of generative AI music. While many of its competitors focus on generating either music or lyrics or vocals, Suno and Udio both allow users to generate all three in the click of a button. Two sources said the lawsuit could come as soon as next week. Reps for the three majors, as well as Suno and Udio, did not respond to requests for comment.
Music companies, including UMG, have already filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, another major AI firm, over the use of copyrighted materials to train models. But that case dealt only with lyrics, which in many ways are legally similar to written subject matter. The new suit would deal with music and sound itself.
Trending on Billboard
Just a few months from its launch, Udio has already produced what could be considered an AI-generated hit song with “BBL Drizzy,” a parody track created by comedian King Willonius and popularized via a remix by super producer Metro Boomin. Later, the song reached new heights when it was sampled in Sexyy Red and Drake‘s song “U My Everything,” becoming the first major example of sampling an AI-generated song.
Suno has also achieved early success since its launch in December 2023. In May, the company announced via a blog post that it had raised a total of $125 million in funding from a group of notable investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
Both companies, however, have drawn criticism from many members of the music business who believe that the models train on vast swathes of copyrighted material, including hit songs, without consent, compensation or credit to rights holders. Representatives for Suno and Udio have previously declined to comment on whether or not they train on protected copyrights, with Udio’s co-founders telling Billboard they simply train on “good music.”
In a recent Rolling Stone story about Suno, investor Antonio Rodriguez admitted that Suno does not have licenses for whatever music it has trained on, but he said that was not a concern to him, adding that this lack of such licenses 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.”
In a series of articles for Music Business Worldwide, founder of AI safety non-profit Fairly Trained, Ed Newton-Rex, found that he was able to generate music from Suno and Udio that “bears a striking resemblance to copyrighted music. This is true across melody, chords, style and lyrics,” he wrote. Both companies, however, bar users from prompting the models to copy artists’ styles by typing out sentiments like “a rock song in the style of Radiohead” or from using specific artists’ voices.
The case, if it is filed, would hinge on whether the use of unlicensed materials to train AI models amounts to copyright infringement — something of an existential question for the booming sector, since depriving AI models of new inputs could limit their abilities. Content owners in many sectors, including book authors, comedians and visual artists, have all filed similar lawsuits over training.
Many AI companies argue that such training is protected by copyright’s fair use doctrine — an important rule that allows people to reuse protected works without breaking the law. Though fair use has historically allowed for things like news reporting and parody, AI firms say it applies equally to the “intermediate” use of millions of works to build a machine that spits out entirely new creations. That argument will likely be the central question in any lawsuit over AI training.
Some AI companies have taken what is often called a more “ethical” approach to AI training by working directly with companies and rights holders to license their copyrights or form official partnerships instead.
So far, the majors have embraced partnering with AI companies in this way. Already, UMG and WMG have worked with YouTube for its AI voice experiment DreamTrack; Sony has partnered with Vermillio on a remix project for The Orb and David Gilmour; WMG has worked with Edith Piaf’s estate to recreate her voice using AI for an upcoming biopic; UMG launched an AI music incubator with YouTube Music; and most recently, UMG has teamed up with SoundLabs to let their artists create their own AI voice models for personal use in the studio.