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Major Labels in Licensing Talks With A.I. Companies Suno & Udio Amid Blockbuster Lawsuit

The major record labels are in music licensing talks with AI companies Suno and Udio amid a lawsuit Universal, Sony and Warner filed against them.

A year after the labels filed billion-dollar copyright cases against Udio and Suno, all three majors are discussing deals in which they would collect fees and receive equity in return for allowing the startups to use music to train their AI models, according to sources with knowledge of the talks. If Suno and Udio do grant equity to the majors in an eventual settlement, it will call to mind the deals struck by Spotify in the late 2000s, in which the upstart technology company gave the music industry a partial ownership stake in return for business-critical content. “Making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries,” the office wrote in the report.

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