The Sound of Litigation: Major Labels Take on AI Music Generators

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in the music industry has brought about a complex and contentious landscape where innovation intersects with intellectual property rights. Recently, two leading text-to-music AI tools, Suno and Udio, have found themselves at the center of this debate, facing lawsuits for copyright infringement filed by the three major record labels, and led by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The record labels allege that Suno and Udio used their recordings without a license to train Suno’s and Udio’s respective AI models. These claims bring to light broader issues regarding the ethical and legal implications of AI-generated content, the need for regulatory clarity, and the evolving relationship between technology and creativity.

Some music copyright cases highlight the complexity of music from a technical perspective and how difficult it can be to pinpoint infringement in music (see the highly-publicized cases against Ed Sheeran, Katy Perry, Led Zeppelin, George Harrison; see also Lewis Sorokin, “Out of Tune: Recomposing the Link Between Music and Copyright,” 14 Drexel L. Rev. 745 (2022)). In my personal opinion, this is not one of them.

Allegations

The underlying facts in the June 24, 2024, complaints by the RIAA, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group are simple: Suno and Udio are trained on massive amounts of unlicensed copyrighted works, which result in outputs that are substantially similar to those works. Conceptually, this is no different from the lawsuits filed by the New York Times against OpenAI, by Universal Music Publishing Group against Anthropic, by Getty Images against Stability AI, or several others.

The RIAA has pulled a few key examples of music outputs that bear a clear resemblance to the works of Jason Derulo, the Jackson 5, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and others. Most of the examples from Udio are no longer available, but the Suno examples still are available as of the date of this post.

For certain examples, it is extremely cut and dry. Give Udio the prompt “prompt “m a r i a h c a r e y, contemporary r&b, holiday, Grammy Award-winning American singer/songwriter, remarkable vocal range.”” and it returns a near-perfect copy of Mariah Carey’s inescapable 1994 Christmas song. (Side note, why hasn’t there been another hit Christmas song since then)?

For other examples, the line becomes blurred (pun intended). When Suno is prompted with “1950s rock and roll, jerry lee lewis, sun studio” and the lyrics to Jerry Lee Lewis’ 1957 “Great Balls of Fire,” the output opens with a guitar riff that is unmistakable to any fan of Back to the Future. Apparently, Marty McFly’s favorite song is also a favorite of Suno’s model, as the complaint cites “29 different outputs that contain the style of Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode.’”

In both instances, and the many others cited in the two lawsuits, it is clear that Suno and Udio both contain training data for which the copyright is owned by somebody else. In a March 2024 interview with Rolling Stone, one early investor in Suno stated: “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.” Those “constraints” that this investor feared were and are the very foundation of copyright law in the United States.

In an effort to mitigate this issue, in May 2024, Sony Music publicly expressed its intent to opt out of its music being used for training AI models. Of course, the proliferation of AI-generated music on TikTok was cited as one of Universal Music Group’s reasons to cut ties with the social media platform earlier this year, before eventually brokering an updated licensing deal.

With an ever-growing list of lawsuits alleging some version of the same issue around this technology, the need for legal clarity in the AI space is great. In the meantime, businesses of all sizes and across all industries are working on incorporating AI into their day-to-day operations at a faster pace than any new technology since cloud computing. To that end, it is imperative that they develop internal and external policies to govern their AI usage. Depending on the type of business, it may make sense to consider AI vendors who are transparent as to the source and copyright ownership of their training data. The business may want to work with those AI vendors that offer indemnification for any IP claims arising from the use of the AI vendor’s software. For a business building an AI model and collecting data, it may be expedient to use publicly available data, but these lawsuits show that it is extremely risky. Litigation costs alone are a business risk to a company getting off the ground.

Not All Bad

That said, AI is not all risk without any reward. Perhaps the best-known track to come from Udio is “BBL Drizzy,” the viral hit (barely more than a beat) which producer Metro Boomin released in May 2024, amidst Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s beef. As it turns out, Metro’s release was a remix of an earlier track which X user King Willonius had used Udio to generate using Willonius’ original lyrics. When Drake and Sexyy Red teamed up a few weeks later to release “U My Everything,” sampling “BBL Drizzy,” Drake’s and Willonius’ legal teams worked together to break new ground on how AI-generated samples should be cleared.

As a matter of policy, the United States Copyright Office has stated that AI-generated works are not eligible for copyright protection. That said, larger works of primarily human authorship which contain AI-generated elements, or where AI was a creative tool no different than any other technology aiding in a creative process, are eligible for protection. With regard to “BBL Drizzy,” Willonius wrote the lyrics himself and fed them into Udio. This means that those lyrics are protectable under copyright law, while the beat that Udio generated (and which Metro Boomin and Drake each sampled) is not.

According to Billboard, Willonius received a share of the publishing on “U My Everything” for his contributions as lyricist of “BBL Drizzy”; conversely, Metro’s attorneys made it clear that he was not interested in a share, nor was he entitled to one. Thanks to being an early adopter of new technology (and some luck going viral), King Willonius scored himself some points on a Drake track.

With Clarity, AI Creativity and Copyright Can Coexist

As the legal battles over AI-generated music unfold, they highlight the urgent need for clear guidelines and regulations to navigate the intersection of artificial intelligence and copyright law. While the courts’ decisions will shape the future of AI in the music industry, businesses must proactively develop policies to manage their AI usage responsibly. Transparency regarding the sources of training data and risks arising from potential intellectual property claims are crucial steps for companies leveraging AI technology. Despite the risks, AI holds significant potential, as evidenced by success stories like “BBL Drizzy,” where the interplay of human creativity with AI technology led to new, innovative musical expressions (albeit, expressions which are not eligible for protection under current United States Copyright Office policy). Ultimately, these challenges present an opportunity to redefine the boundaries of creativity and innovation in the digital era, ensuring that both human artistry and AI advancements can coexist and thrive.

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