The music industry has officially declared war on Suno and Udio, two of the most prominent AI music production companies. A group of music labels including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Group filed a lawsuit in US federal court on Monday morning alleging “massive” copyright infringement.
The plaintiffs seek damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work. The lawsuit against Suno was filed in Massachusetts, while the lawsuit against Udio’s parent company Uncharted Inc. filed in New York. Suno and Udio did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio, which believe it is ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for profit without consent or payment, have destroying the promise of truly innovative AI for all of us,” Recording Industry Association of America President and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a press release.
The companies have not publicly disclosed what training they have given their generators. Ed Newton-Rex, former AI director, is now at the helm Ethical AI nonprofit with fair trainingwrote extensively about his experiments with Suno And Udio; Newton-Rex discovered that he could create music that “bears a striking resemblance to copyrighted songs.” In the complaint, the music labels claim that they can independently push Suno to produce output that is consistent with the copyrighted works of artists from ABBA to Jason Derulo.
One example given in the lawsuit describes how labels created songs extremely similar to Chuck Berry’s 1958 rock hit “Johnny B. Goode” at Suno by using cues like “rock and roll 1950s, rhythm & blues, 12-bar blues, rockabilly, energetic south.” singer, guitarist,” along with snippets of the song’s lyrics. One song copies the chorus “Go, Johnny, go” almost exactly; The plaintiffs attached the transcripts side by side and argued that such duplication could only occur because Suno had received training in copyrighted works.
Udio’s lawsuit offers similar examples, noting that record labels could produce dozens of similar results to Mariah Carey’s perennial hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” It also offers a side-by-side comparison of the music and lyrics, noting that similar audio tracks of Mariah Carey created by Udio are available. has attracted public attention.
RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow said Suno and Udio were trying to conceal “the full scope of their violations.” According to the complaint against Suno, the AI company does not deny that it used copyrighted material in its training data as requested in pretrial correspondence, but instead says that the training data is “confidential business information”.
“Our technology is transformative,” said Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno. it is designed to generate completely new outputs, without memorizing and regurgitating pre-existing content. That’s why we don’t allow users to prompt references to specific artists.” “We would be happy to explain this to the record labels that filed this lawsuit (and in fact, we tried to do so), but instead of settling into a good faith discussion, they back to the old play directed by the lawyer.”
