AI Startup Suno Says Music Industry Suit Aims to Stifle Competition

AI music startup Suno is pushing back against the world’s biggest record labels, saying in a court filing that a lawsuit they filed against the company aims to stifle competition.

In a filing Thursday in federal court in Massachusetts, Suno said that while the record labels argue the company infringed on their recorded music copyrights, the lawsuit actually reflects the industry’s opposition to competition — which Suno’s AI software represents by making it easy for anyone to make music.

“Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share,” the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company wrote in the filing, which also asked the court to enter judgment in Suno’s favor.

Suno’s response comes a month after the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a trade group for record labels, filed twin lawsuits against Suno and a competitor, Uncharted Labs Inc., the developer of a similar software product called Udio AI, on behalf of Universal Music Group NV, Warner Music Group Corp. and Sony Music Entertainment. The suits allege the companies unlawfully trained their AI models on massive amounts of copyrighted sound recordings, and the RIAA is seeking damages of as much as $150,000 “per work infringed,” which could amount to billions of dollars.

In a statement responding to Suno’s filing, the RIAA said there’s “nothing fair about stealing an artist’s life’s work” and “repackaging it” in a way that competes with the musicians who created it. “Their vision of the ‘future of music’ is apparently one in which fans will no longer enjoy music by their favorite artists because those artists can no longer earn a living,” the RIAA said in the statement.

In response to questions from Bloomberg News earlier this year, neither Suno nor Udio would say what, precisely, their AI systems are trained on, though both said they have used publicly available data from the internet. Suno said in its filing Thursday that its software was trained on “tens of millions of recordings,” which “presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the plaintiffs in this case.”

“Suno’s AI tool uses a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product,” the company said in the filing. “This is quintessential fair use.”

Suno and Udio are among a crop of startups that use generative AI to automate the music-making process. People can type in a short written prompt, like “an electro-pop song about strawberries,” and software from either company will spit out music in seconds, complete with lyrics. In order to build their AI systems, the companies must first train their software on enormous datasets, which can be made up of many millions of individual pieces of information. The tools have proven popular: Since Suno rolled out its software last year, more than 12 million people have made songs with it, the company has said.

The legal challenge from the music industry is just the latest example of technology colliding with creative industries as generative AI is increasingly used to churn out all kinds of content. Companies like Midjourney, OpenAI and Stability AI built their media-generating AI models with datasets that pull imagery from across the internet. While they argue that the practice is protected under the fair use doctrine of US copyright law, it has led to outrage and lawsuits.

In its lawsuit, the RIAA claimed authentic producer tags appear on some of the music coming out of Suno and Udio, and that people who use the services have generated sounds very similar to numerous artist-made songs, including the Temptations’ My Girl, Green Day’s American Idiot and Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You. They have also produced vocals that are indistinguishable from famous recording artists, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson, according to the RIAA.

In a blog post also released Thursday, Suno wrote that the filing of the suit was “somewhat surprising” since it came at a time when the company was in discussions with several RIAA-member record labels.

“We did so not because we had to, but because we believe that the music industry could help us lead this expansion of opportunity for everyone, rather than resisting it,” the company wrote.