Three major music companies filed a lawsuit against AI music companies Suno and Udio on Monday, alleging widespread infringement of copyrighted sound recordings “on an almost unimaginable scale.” The lawsuits, led by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), come four days after Billboard first reported news that the labels were seriously considering legal action against the two startups.
Filed by plaintiffs that include Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, the lawsuits allege that Suno and Udio illegally copied the labels' sound recordings to train their AI models to generate music that could ” saturate the market with machine-generated content.” which will directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out genuine sound recordings in which [the services were] built”.
“Building and operating [these services] requires initially copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to “train” a software “model” to generate results,” explain the lawyers for the major record labels. “For [these services]this process involved copying decades of the world's most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies [to] generate outputs that mimic the qualities of genuine human sound recordings.” “Since the day it launched, Udio has ignored the rights of copyright owners in the music industry as part of a mad dash to to become the dominant AI music generation service,” the lawsuit against Udio reads. Copyright”.
The suit seeks both an injunction to prohibit the companies from continuing to train on the copyrighted songs, as well as compensation for infringements that have already occurred. Neither Suno nor Udio immediately returned requests for comment Monday.
Suno and Udio have quickly become two of the most advanced and important players in the emerging field of AI generative music. While many competitors only create instruments, lyrics or vocals, Suno and Udio can generate them at the click of a button with shocking accuracy. Udio has already produced what could be considered the first AI-generated hit song with Drake's song “BBL Drizzy,” which was generated on the platform by comedian King Willonius and popularized by a Metro Boomin remix. Suno has also seen early success since launching in December 2023, raising $125 million in funding from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
Both companies declined to comment on whether or not the unlicensed copyrights were part of their datasets. In a previous interview with Billboard, Udio co-founder David Ding simply said that the company was formed out of “good music.” However, in a series of articles for Music Business Worldwide, the founder of the non-profit music safety organization Fairly Trained, Ed Newton-Rex, found that he was able to generate music from Suno and Udio that “has a striking resemblance to copyrighted music. This is true through melody, chords, style, and lyrics,” he wrote.
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