The AI lawsuit that's shaking the music world (Suno & Udio vs. the record labels)

Thing is they’re not doing this because they care about the artists. They’re just mad they didn’t do it first. There are already major labels using signed artists to train vocal models. They’d be happy to shovel generated content into our ears is THEY make it and profit from it. It’s not about ethics, or artist rights, at all.

But the major labels want to create their own AI music and profit from them. They’re not protecting artists. Spotify wants to create fictional artists for playlists and collect the profits.

Yeah, I'm sure those major labels are doing it to help the artists. I'm sure.

It’ll be interesting to watch how this plays out.

I can already see myself making grandma's birthday song in the darkweb.

People are also trained on listening to existing music and they also generate music the same way AI does. This is inevitable. These companies are in a state of urge because they are afraid to lose the monopoly they have in the music market. There is no way they can escape from what the future holds, though. They have to adjust, find new ways of earning money from the backs of the musicians or they will not exist in the future. How sad they are not willing to be a part of the future! They still want to direct the trends in the market and direct the people’s taste for music by their huge advantegous hands. But behold, this will change. This will change for the movies and so on too.

Elvis Presley was "trained" on black gospel music. Should his estate be sued for millions?

Suno & Udio are making it possible for anyone to make music but unless the person is putting in the work needed, the generated songs are going to suck. Everyone knows Suno & Udio are trained on copyrighted works, but are they simply recreating them or making new songs. The answer is that Suno & Udio are creating new songs based on their knowledge. Composers fear that AI-created songs will replace them so they want to slow the adoption of AI music to make money before they are replaced. The record labels want money & power, this hasn't ever changed.

look at the advancement in sound sample libraries to get a sense of what's coming. Sitting in music theory class in 1977 my instructor (with a PhD) said, "one day these synthesizers will replace musicians'" At that time it was only analog synths. I thought his statement was ludicrous.Look where we're heading. It's really the old story of Frankenstein, isn't it?

As a musician and writer, we must try not to be affected by music that we love in a way that it's to duplicative, and anyone that does write music knows it's hard not to do this. Why should A.I. algo's be any different? Now I'm going to go all rant... These labels have a major fight on their hands. Frankly, they have had it too good for too long, turning good wholesome roots into a teenage "poppy-mill" with roomfuls of writers and pre-teen sex object singers that can't even write their own name. It's about time these moguls poked their heads out of the money pile to have a look around. Competition is scary huh? Boo!

In the ongoing copyright lawsuits against UDIO and SUNO, we are witnessing a possible future where major music corporations could dominate the AI music scene. If these companies were to claim in the future that since they own the copyrights to the music used to train these AIs, they should also control the entire AI model, then we could see a significant shift in who controls this technology. If these corporations win, SUNO and UDIO will likely fall and be subject to buyouts, further concentrating power with these large corporations. They would then have exclusive rights to AI technologies capable of producing tracks that compete with top artists. This control could severely limit innovation, making it too expensive for new musicians and small businesses to access these tools. The result? A lack of diversity and creativity in music, with the entire AI music industry—or perhaps the entire music industry—falling under the control of a few large companies. We must recognize that allowing a few companies to use copyright laws to monopolize advanced technologies threatens artistic diversity and is against the public interest. Music should be a global treasure. We call on everyone, including policymakers, to focus on this issue to ensure that technological advancements are shared fairly, benefiting all, not just a select few.

The irony is that EVERY artist uses this input-output method. We all listen to 100s if not thousands of different artists and genres that inspire us to create our own original musical pieces. This is not that different.

The AI that UDIO and SUNO uses is based on Musicgen's related technology, which uses a multiband diffusion approach. Musicgen is a open source technology that can create music from prompts as well and it can use a melody from music you upload. I have two tunes where I took the melodies from "Hide and Seek" of Howard Jones and "Desert" by emilie simon (a french pop artist). Believe me, the technique is so well known among the AI world that its not going to matter a hell of beans if the music industry succeeds in stopping SUNO and UDIO, its just going to entice hackers and activists who want to eliminate the record companies cause of the evil behaviors they have exhibited in the past.

Ingesting works is what every artist/creator does. This is not copyright violation. Producing new works based on what was ingested over a lifetime is what every artist/creator does. This is not copyright infringement. Forcing/coercing an artist/creator to produce a work that is a forgery or copy of an existing work is illegal. This is what the record companies have done, using exact lyrics and artists' names when using the AI tools. They are the criminals here, not the AI tools.

Most of them clips you shown was from Udio... I use SunoAI and write my own lyrics, I love using it as I can hear my songs.. There is no way an Artist or a big record company is going to use my lyrics, I hope Suno wins🥰

The problem is that it does not really matter how the music was made. That is an old way of thinking. We are creating a new way of making music, and the old way stands in the way for progress.

These 3 major record labels are sueing these 2 A.I. companies to protect THEIR own greedy, fat bellies!  They are taking the copyright argument too far. Nobody is reproducing their work without their permission. Training something to sound like something is NOT an infringement of copyright.  They would need to change the law.  Furthermore; these 3 major labels are not sueing on behalf of artists.  For 17 years Universal, Warner and Sony have colluded and conspired with Spotify to con and SCAM artists out of BILLIONS of dollars!  They did this by conspiring with Spotify to pay artists fractions of cents per stream.  As long as these A.I. companies put some kind of warning or notice on the music saying "This Was Made Using An A.I. Artist", so that people are not misled, then I see nothing wrong here.  The A.I. services must also be priced reasonably, at a point that most can afford.  The REAL problem here is that Universal, Warner and Sony are investing in THEIR OWN A.I. tools and so they are trying DECAPITATE THEIR COMPETITION VIA THE COURTS!!!!

GREAT job with this breakdown of the issues David! Just stumbled upon your channel this morning. Do you do Sync licensing as well?

As a fellow musician, I understand your bias. However I think you're overlooking a dramatic difference between Suno and Udio. Udio showed up several months after Suno had completed training on several versions of their models, gradually and with intention homogenizing their output to NOT sound like any existing artist or song. I strongly suspect that their most recent model leans heavily upon licensed studio music. Meanwhile, Udio has not had the time to move beyond the sound of the music initially used for training. Udio is much more cavalier about the music they generate. I think that the music industry is going to have a very hard time proving (by generating songs) that Suno contains any specific song. I've tried hard to trick it. If you try inputting existing lyrics, they never sound like the original song, even with audio input, it doesn't happen. And, Suno makes a pretty strong effort to refuse copyrighted lyrics, too. It will be interesting. But, IMO, you're more likely to violate copyright with your DAW. This is relevant because the only way to even attempt to violate copyright, using Suno, is for the user to intentionally push the program to do so.

I had Udio generate music for me to go along with lyrics I provided with very little prompts otherwise. Out of nowhere, it lifted the main piano riff from Gary Jules' cover of "Mad World" note for note but in a different key. If it had merely shifted a few notes I may not have even realized where it got the sound from. This result surprised me, as I had assumed that the reason other people were getting copyrighted infringement results was due to their prompting, telling the AI to "sound" like something or by providing very similar lyrics. Basically guiding it and/or limiting in ways where it couldn't help but copy something. But there was nothing about my lyrics that matched the original song in words, theme or structure, and it only used the riff when generating the song for me, the melody for my lyrics was entirely different. I gave it pretty wide latitude to create something entirely new and yet it directly copied a significant and defining portion of another song. I've come to realize that generative AI is simply a very splintered plagiarizer. It takes tiny fragments of existing works and rearranges it or modifies it until it's largely unrecognizable. But if it lacks enough variety, the chunks come out bigger and CAN be recognized. It's just a very sophisticated imitation machine. It does not "create" anything, it simply mimics what it ingests. This differs dramatically from what a human does with the content we ingest. We "feel" something and are inspired to create something new from the emotions the music generated, or we understand what the artist was going trying to do and build on that idea and take it somewhere new. AI has no understanding at all of what it generates, it merely identifies patterns and reorganizes them in a way it predicts will be successful. It doesn't even know if what it generated is any good, it only predicts that the odds are good that it might be. I used to think "what's the big deal of AI learning from existing works, humans have to as well, AI just does it much faster." Now I understand that, no, generative AI is not really "learning" anything. You're just giving it more content and patterns to copy and/or imitate. Whereas a human runs the risk of plagiarizing if they're being careless or lazy, AI can ONLY plagiarize.