The Suno Music Licensing Case: AI-Generated Music is Not Generated by the Artists or Objections of a Music Platform

Platforms like TikTok and YouTube have also been caught in the crosshairs as AI-generated music has proliferated online. Taylor Swift’s music was removed from TikTok as the two companies failed to reach a licensing deal due to concerns about artificial intelligence. A new system of removing artificial intelligence-generated music content from video sharing website, YouTube was announced last fall. In May, Sony Music sent letters to hundreds of tech companies warning them of “unauthorized” use of copyrighted work.

In an email, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said the company’s technology is “transformative” and designed to generate ” completely new outputs, not to memorize and memorize previous content.” Shulman says Suno doesn’t allow user prompts based on specific artists.

“We would have been happy to explain this to the corporate record labels that filed this lawsuit (and in fact, we tried to do so), but instead of entertaining a good faith discussion, they’ve reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook. Suno is built for new music, new uses, and new musicians. We prize originality,” the statement reads.

Rolling Stone has a profile on Suno in March, and executives acknowledged the possibility of being sued. Antonio Rodriguez was an investor in Suno and told the magazine that he probably wouldn’t have invested in the company if they had deals with labels. I think they had to make this product without constraints.

AI companies have been secretive about what data is used to train their models. The New York Times claims that their works are included in training data, which is why they are being sued by OpenAI. Mira Murati has repeatedly dodged questions about whether Sora, the company’s machine learning video generator, was trained on the internet.

Udio vs. Berry: A Soundalike of Johnny B. Goode and Mariah Carey-like Production of All I Want for Christmas Is You

The lawsuit provides an example where the labels created a song very similar to Chuck Berry’s song “Johnny B. Goode” in Suno. One song almost exactly replicated the “Go, Johnny, go” chorus; the plaintiffs attached side-by-side transcriptions of the scores and argued that such overlap was only possible because Suno had trained on copyrighted work.

The Udio lawsuit offers similar examples, noting that the labels were able to generate a dozen outputs resembling Mariah Carey’s perennial hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” There is a side-by-side comparison of music and lyrics in the report, and Udio’s Soundalikes of Carey have already caught the attention of the public.