'Supergroup' of world’s biggest record labels sue AI music platforms
UMG, Sony and Warner claim AI companies stole “decades” worth of music to train models | Tracks of The Beatles, Stevie Wonder and Ed Sheeran allegedly used in data | Record labels say speed of machine-generated content threatens entire industry.
Major record companies have joined forces to take legal action against generative AI music services Suno and Udio, claiming that their “theft” of copyrighted songs threaten the entire music ecosystem.
On Monday, June 24, labels including UMG, Sony Music and Warner filed complaints against Suno and Udio in Massachusetts and New York respectively, alleging that the companies had trained their AI models on copyrighted recordings and asking for up to $150,000 in damages per work infringed.
Jonathan Coote, music and AI lawyer at Bray & Krais, noted that these are “the first major cases brought by the recorded music industry in relation to AI”.
Suno and Udio are generative AI models that produce music based on text prompts.
The record labels alleged that in order to enable this, the companies copied “decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings” and ingested them into the models so they could generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings.
They told the courts they had found melodic and stylistic similarities to well-known copyrighted sound recordings that betrayed that Suno and Udio had trained their models on them.
A sample of works allegedly copied to train Suno’s AI model included music by The Beatles, Stevie Wonder and Ed Sheeran.
The record labels said that the resulting synthetic musical outputs 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 service is built”.
Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said in a statement: “Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorise and regurgitate pre-existing content.”
Reliance on fair use
Paddy Gardiner, head of the disputes group at Simkins, said that it was unsurprising that the record labels had taken action as they had a long history of challenging the legitimacy of new platforms “as they emerge and seek to take advantage of and monetise their copyright works”.
The key battleground in the cases was “likely to be the extent to which AI services can legitimately rely on fair use principles as a defence,” he explained.
“If they fail, the damages payable under US law are likely to threaten their future existence—and embolden the labels to pursue other AI services.”
According to the suits, both Udio and Suno had already claimed that their use of the sound recordings was fair use, which the plaintiffs said was telling as fair use “only arises as a defence to an otherwise unauthorised use of a copyrighted work”.
Coote noted that the fair use defence would include considerations such as whether the use was “transformative”.
“This could potentially become a philosophical question about the creative role of AI encompassing its economic and social impact. The cases will likely be one of a number across the creative industries that are eventually decided by a Supreme Court decision,” he said.
“While many have been expecting this for some time, it will have an immediate impact, as investors in AI music tools will be even more concerned with ensuring that any training has been conducted legally.”
One of Suno’s investors had publicly recognised that the service “is likely to spawn litigation and that defending lawsuits from music labels is ‘the risk we had to underwrite when we invested in the company’”, UMG and the other labels told the Massachusetts court.
In 2023, Microsoft and Suno announced a new partnership under which Suno’s service would be integrated into Microsoft’s AI chatbot Copilot.
‘Overrunning the market’
Both services were generating huge volumes of material, according to the lawsuits, with Udio’s product making a reported 10 music files per second—or just over 6,000,000 files per week.
Suno had over 10 million users generating music files using its product, the plaintiffs told the court, and its latest funding round raised $125 million—valuing the company at around $500 million.
This potential to generate large amounts of files at speed risked “overrunning the market for human-made sound recordings” and threatening the entire music ecosystem and the numerous people it employs, the plaintiffs said.
They asked the courts for a declaration of wilful copyright infringement, injunctions against Suno and Udio, and damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work.
Hueston Hennigan is representing the plaintiffs in their complaint, with a team comprising Moez Kaba, Mariah Rivera, Alexander Perry and Robert Klieger, and of counsel Jonathan King from Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman.
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