Suno
The three major music companies — Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group — are in talks with AI music companies Suno and Udio to license their works as training data, despite suing the two startups for infringement “on an almost unimaginable scale” last summer. Now, executives in the “ethical” or “responsible” AI music space are voicing displeasure that the alleged infringers could potentially benefit from their actions.
Several of those ethical AI companies said they were led to believe they would be rewarded by the record labels for going through the tough process of licensing music from the beginning, in what one AI music company founder previously told Billboard would be “a carrot and stick approach to AI,” penalizing those who raced ahead and trained models without permission or compensation.
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“That’s all out the window,” that founder says now. “I was talking to another founder that does ethical AI voice models, and he told me, ‘F–k it. I don’t care anymore. Why does it matter to be ethical if we just get left behind?’”
Ed Newton-Rex, founder of non-profit Fairly Trained, which certifies ethically-trained AI models, adds: “If I were running a startup that had tried to do the right thing — respecting creators’ rights — and investors had rejected me because I wasn’t exploiting copyrighted work like so many others, and then this happened? I’d definitely be pissed off.”
Tracy Chan, CEO of AI music company Splash, told Billboard via email that she stands by her decision to license music from the start. “At Splash, being ethically trained wasn’t a debate — it was obvious,” she says. “We’re musicians and technologists. We believe AI should amplify creativity, not exploit it. We don’t need to scrape the world’s music to make that happen.”
It remains unclear how far along these licensing talks are between the major music companies and Suno and Udio, and if deals will even come to fruition to avert the blockbuster lawsuits. It’s common in costly and lengthy litigation like this for the two sides to discuss what it would look like to settle the dispute outside of court. Plus, licensing is what the majors have wanted from AI companies all along — does it matter how they come to it?
Multiple executives expressed fear that if the majors ditch the lawsuit and go for deals, they will set a bad precedent for the entire business. “Basically, if they do this deal, I think it would send a message to big tech that if you want to disrupt the music industry, you can do whatever you want and then ask for forgiveness later,” says Anthony Demekhin, CEO/co-founder of Tuney.
This, however, is not the first time the music business has considered a partnership with tech companies that were once their enemy. YouTube, for example, initially launched without properly licensing all of the music on its platform first. In his 2024 New Years’ address to staff, Lucian Grainge, CEO/chairman of UMG, alluded to this, and how he would do it differently this time with his so-called “responsible AI” initiative. “In the past, new and often disruptive technology was simply released into the world, leaving the music community to develop the model by which artists would be fairly compensated and their rights protected,” he wrote, adding that “in a sharp break with the past,” UMG had formed a partnership with YouTube to “give artists a seat at the table” to shape the company’s AI products, and that the company would also collaborate “with several [other] platforms on numerous opportunities and approaches” in the AI space.
Another part of Grainge’s “responsible AI” initiative was “to lobby for ‘guardrails,’ that is public policies setting basic rules for AI.” Mike Pelczynski, co-founder of ethical AI voice company Voice-Swap, also worries that if these deals go through, they could weaken the music industry’s messaging to Capitol Hill, where bills like the NO FAKES Act are still in flux. “All the messaging we had before, all the hard-lining about responsible AI from the beginning, it’s gone,” he says. “Now, if policy makers look at [the music business] they might say, ‘Wait, what side should we take? Where do you stand?’”
If talks about licenses for Suno and Udio move forward, determining exactly how that license works, and how artists will be paid, will be complex. To date, almost all “ethical” AI companies are licensing their musical training data from production libraries, which offer simple, one-stop licenses for songs. Alex Bestall, CEO of music production house and AI company Rightsify, says that the structure of those deals are typically “flat-fee blanket licenses for a fixed term, often one to three years or in some cases perpetuity… all data licensing [music or otherwise] is pretty standardized at this point.”
It’s unclear if the deals the majors have discussed with Suno and Udio will follow this framework, but if they did, the question then comes — how do the majors divide up those fees for their artists and writers? The Wall Street Journal reported that “the [music] companies want the startups to develop fingerprinting and attribution technology — similar to YouTube’s content ID — to track when and how a song is used.” In that scenario, the money received would be given to signees based on usage.
While there are a few startups working on music attribution technology right now, multiple experts tell Billboard they don’t think the tech is ready yet. “Attribution is nowhere,” says Newton-Rex, who also previously worked as vp of audio at Stability AI. “It’s not even close. There’s no system that I have seen that would do a decent job of accurately assigning attribution to what has inspired a given song.”
Even the possibility of deals between the parties has sparked a larger conversation about how to handle tech companies who ask for forgiveness — and not for permission — from the music business.
“If the two biggest offenders actually become the legal standard, it’s effectively like making Pirate Bay into Spotify,” says Demekhin. “I understand it from a business perspective because it’s the path of least resistance [to settle and get a license now]. But this could send a message to tech that could bite the industry on the next wave.”
Over the weekend, Bloomberg broke the news that the Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group are in talks with Suno and Udio to license their music to the artificial intelligence startups. If the deals go through, they could help settle the major music companies’ massive copyright infringement lawsuit against Suno and Udio, filed last summer.
Billboard confirmed that the deals in discussion would include fees and possible equity stakes in Suno and Udio in exchange for licensing the music — which the two AI firms have already been using without a license since they launched over a year ago.
That sounds like a potentially peaceful resolution to this clash over the value of copyrighted music in the AI age. But between artist buy-in, questions over how payments would work and sensitivities on all sides, the deals could be harder to pull off than they seem. Here’s why.
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You need everyone on board
Ask anyone who’s tried to license music before: it’s a tedious process. This is especially true when a song has multiple songwriters, all signed to different companies — which is to say, almost all of pop music today. Since any music that is used as training data for an AI model will employ both its master recording copyright and its underlying musical work copyright, Suno and Udio cannot stop at just licensing the majors’ shares of the music. They will also need agreements from independent labels and publishers, too, to use a comprehensive catalog.
And what about the artists and songwriters signed to these companies? Generative AI music is still controversial today, and it is foreseeable that a large number of creatives will not take too kindly to their labels and publishers licensing their works for AI training without their permission. One can imagine that the music companies, to avoid a revolt from signees, would allow talent to either opt-out of or opt-in to this license — but as soon as they do that, they will be left with a patchwork catalog to license to Suno and Udio. Even if a song has one recording artist and five songwriters attached to it, it only takes one of those people to say no to this deal to eliminate the track from the training pool.
Is the expiration date really the expiration date?
Licensing music to train AI models typically takes the form of a blanket license, granted by music companies, that lasts between one and three years, according to Alex Bestall, CEO of Rightsify, a production music library and AI company. Other times it will be done in perpetuity. Ed Newton-Rex, former vp of audio for Stability AI and founder of non-profit Fairly Trained, previously warned Billboard that companies that license on a temporal basis should look out for what happens when a deal term ends: “There’s no current way to just untrain a model, but you can add clauses to control what happens after the license is over,” he said.
Attribution technology seems great — but is still very new
Many experts feel that the best way to remunerate music companies and their artists and songwriters is to base any payouts on how often their work is used in producing the outputs of the AI model. This is known as “attribution” — and while there are companies, like Sureel AI and Musical AI, out there that specialize in this area, it’s still incredibly new. Multiple music industry sources tell Billboard they are not sure the current attribution models are quite ready yet, meaning any payment model based on that system may not be viable, at least in the near term.
Flat-fee licenses are most common, but leave a lot to be desired
Today, Bestall says that flat-fee blanket licenses are the most common form of AI licensing. Given the complexities of fractional licensing (i.e., needing all writers to agree) with mainstream music, the AI music companies that are currently licensing their training data are typically going to production libraries, since those tend to own or control their music 100%. It’s hard to know if this model will hold up with fractional licensing at the mainstream music companies — and how they’ll choose to divide up these fees to their artists.
Plus, Mike Pelczynski, founder of music tech advisory firm Forms and Shapes and former head of strategy for SoundCloud, wrote in a blog post that “flat-fee deals offer upfront payments but limit long-term remuneration. As AI scales beyond the revenue potential of these agreements, rights holders risk being locked into subpar compensation. Unlike past models, such as Facebook’s multi-year deals, AI platforms will evolve in months, not years, leaving IP holders behind. Flat fees, no matter how high, can’t match the exponential growth potential of generative AI.”
There’s still bad blood
The major music companies will likely have a hard time burying the hatchet with Suno and Udio, given how publicly the two companies have challenged them. Today, Suno and Udio are using major label music without any licenses, and that defiance must sting. Suno has also spoken out against the majors, saying in a court filing that “what the major record labels really don’t want is competition. 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.”
Given that context, there is a real reputational risk here for the labels, who also represent many stakeholders with many different opinions on the topic — not all of them positive. For this licensing maneuver to work, the majors need to be able to feel (or at least position themselves to look like) they came out on top in any negotiation, particularly to their artists and songwriters, and show that the deals are in everyone’s best interests. It’s a lot to pull off.
AI music company Suno has debuted a number of new features, allowing users to have more control over the creation and customization of their songs. The company has been known as a powerful generative tool that can make realistic songs at the click of the button with just a few simple prompts, but now, it is embracing more of a collaborative approach between the user and its AI technology.
Now, users can upload up to eight minutes of audio, whether its a hummed melody or a mostly-completed track, and then use Suno to remix it or expand it. Through their new Song Editor features, users can replace lyrics and reimagine sections of songs, as desired. Offering what it calls the “creative slider” users can rework a song into a new genre by using simple toggles that can up a song’s “weirdness” “style strength” or “audio strength.”
The company has also integrated a stem extraction tool to split a Suno-generated song into 12 clean stems, which can then be exported to a user’s preferred DAW.
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Suno CEO/founder Mikey Shulman says of the new features: “We envision Suno as a core part of musical creativity, for everyone from novices to Grammy winners. Our new tools offer powerful ways to explore new sonic ideas, remix, and iterate. Our upgraded editing suite gives artists more control than ever over their music.
We’re also working to better integrate Suno into the music production process. For example, Suno’s new stem extraction feature allows artists to more easily bring what they do with Suno into their favorite DAW, and vice versa. We’re excited to keep building tools like these to augment the creativity of musicians and expand access to serious music making.”
The announcement comes just a couple days after news broke that Suno, and its competitor Udio, are in talks with the major music companies — Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group — about licensing their copyrights for AI training. This may include the majors receiving some equity in the two AI music firms, as they have done in previous licensing agreements with new tech companies, like Spotify.
Last summer, Sony, Universal and Warner came together to sue Suno and Udio for copyright infringement of their sound recordings “at an almost unimaginable scale” to train their AI music models. If these licensing deals were to go through, it would likely lead to a settlement of the lawsuits.
Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony Music are in talks with Udio and Suno to license their music to the artificial intelligence startups, Billboard has confirmed, in deals that could help settle blockbuster lawsuits over AI music.
A year after the labels filed billion-dollar copyright cases against Udio and Suno, all three majors are discussing deals in which they would collect fees and receive equity in return for allowing the startups to use music to train their AI models, according to sources with knowledge of the talks. Bloomberg first reported the news on Sunday (June 1).
If reached, such deals would help settle the litigation and establish an influential precedent for how AI companies pay artists and music companies going forward, according to the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss the talks freely.
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Such an agreement would mark an abrupt end to a dispute that each side has framed as an existential clash over the future of music. The labels say the startups have stolen music on an “unimaginable scale” to build their models and are “trampling the rights of copyright owners”; Suno and Udio argue back that the music giants are abusing intellectual property to crush upstart competition from firms they see as a “threat to their market share.”
Settlement talks are a common and continuous feature of almost any litigation and do not necessarily indicate that any kind of deal is imminent. It’s unclear how advanced such negotiations are, or what exactly each side would be getting. And striking an actual deal will require sorting out many complex and novel issues relating to brand-new technologies and business models.
Reps for all three majors declined to comment. Suno and Udio did not immediately return requests for comment. A rep for the RIAA, which helped coordinate the lawsuits, declined to comment.
If Suno and Udio do grant equity to the majors in an eventual settlement, it will call to mind the deals struck by Spotify in the late 2000s, in which the upstart technology company gave the music industry a partial ownership stake in return for business-critical content. Those deals turned out to be massively lucrative for the labels and helped Spotify grow into a streaming behemoth.
The cases against Udio and Suno are two of many lawsuits filed against AI firms by book authors, visual artists, newspaper publishers and other creative industries, who have argued AI companies are violating copyrights on a massive scale by using copyrighted works to train their models. AI firms argue that it’s legal fair use, transforming all those old works into “outputs” that are entirely new.
That trillion-dollar question remains unanswered in the courts, where many of the lawsuits, including those against Suno and Udio, are still in the earliest stages. But last month, the U.S. Copyright Office came out against the AI firms, releasing a report that said training was likely not fair use.
“Making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries,” the office wrote in the report.
Even with the legal landscape unsettled, some content companies have struck deals with AI firms. Just last week, the New York Times — which is actively litigating one of the copyright cases — struck a deal to license its editorial content to Amazon for AI training. Last fall, Microsoft signed a deal with HarperCollins to use the book publisher’s nonfiction works for AI model training.
Music companies have not struck any such sweeping deals, and instead have preferred more limited partnerships with tech companies for “ethical” AI tools. UMG signed a deal last summer with SoundLabs for an AI-powered voice tool for artists and another one in November with an AI music company called KLAY. Sony made an early-stage investment in March in a licensed AI platform called Vermillio.
Amazon has partnered with AI music company Suno for a new integration with its voice assistant Alexa, allowing users to generate AI songs on command using voice prompts. This is part of a much larger rollout of new features for a “next generation” Alexa, dubbed Alexa+, powered by AI technology.
“Using Alexa’s integration with Suno, you can turn simple, creative requests into complete songs, including vocals, lyrics, and instrumentation. Looking to delight your partner with a personalized song for their birthday based on their love of cats, or surprise your kid by creating a rap using their favorite cartoon characters? Alexa+ has you covered,” says an Amazon blog post, posted Wednesday (Feb. 26).
Other new Alexa+ features include new voice filters, image generation, smart home operation, Uber booking and more. It also includes an integration with Ticketmaster to “find you the best tickets to an upcoming basketball game or to the concert you’ve been dying to go to,” according to the blog post.
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Suno is known to be one of the most powerful AI music models on the market, able to generate realistic lyrics, vocals and instrumentals at the click of a button. However, the company has come under scrutiny by the music business establishment for its training practices. Spearheaded by the RIAA, Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music Group came together last summer to sue Suno and its rival Udio, accusing the AI music company of copyright infringement “on an almost unimaginable scale.” At the time, neither AI company had admitted to training on copyrighted material.
In a later filing, Suno admitted that “it is no secret that the tens of millions of recordings that Suno’s model was trained on presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case.” Its CEO, Mikey Shulman, added in a blog post that same day, “We see this as early but promising progress. Major record labels see this vision as a threat to their business. Each and every time there’s been innovation in music… the record labels have attempted to limit progress,” adding that Suno felt the lawsuit was “fundamentally flawed” and that “learning is not infringing.”
More recently, German collection society GEMA also took legal action against Suno in a case filed Jan. 21 in Munich Regional Court.
Still, a couple of music makers have sided with Suno. In October, Timbaland was announced as a strategic advisor for the AI music company, assisting in “creative direction” and “day-to-day product development.” Electronic artist and entrepreneur 3LAU has also been named as an advisor to the company.
News of Amazon’s deal with Suno comes just months after its streaming service, Amazon Music, was commended by the National Music Publishers’ Association for finding a way to add audiobooks to its “Unlimited” subscription tier in the U.S. without “decreas[ing] revenue for songwriters” — a contrast to Spotify, which decreased payments to U.S. publishers by about 40% when it added audiobooks to its premium tier.
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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.