Sony sued Udio again over 30,000 songs, and turned its rivals’ AI deals into a weapon

Sony Music Entertainment filed a fresh copyright lawsuit against AI music startup Udio on Monday, covering 30,117 recordings and seeking up to $150,000 per track in statutory damages. The suit argues that Udio's fair-use defense is undermined by the fact that rival labels Universal, Warner, Kobalt, Merlin, and Believe have all signed licensing deals with Udio, proving a licensing market exists. The case, which also includes claims of anti-circumvention law violations for ripping audio from YouTube, could set a precedent for how AI companies must pay for training data.

The other two major labels made peace with Udio months ago. Sony did the opposite. On Monday it filed a fresh lawsuit in New York, Billboard https://www.billboard.com/pro/sony-new-ai-music-copyright-lawsuit-udio-why/ reported, covering 30,117 recordings and leaving Udio facing a far bigger bill. Turning peace into a weapon The heart of the case is fair use, the defence Udio leans on to justify training on unlicensed songs. Courts weigh whether that use harms a market for the original work, and Sony has found a sharp answer. Udio has since signed training licences with Universal, Warner, Kobalt, Merlin, Believe, and a US publishers’ group. That, Sony argues, proves a licensing market https://thenextweb.com/news/spotify-umg-ai-covers-licensing-deal plainly exists. “A company that pays to license the very inputs at issue cannot credibly maintain that no market exists for those inputs,” the complaint reads. In other words, the truce that looked like AI’s peace with the music business has become the labels’ weapon against the one holdout. Why sue twice The second suit is a workaround. Sony first tried to add the 30,000 songs to its original 2024 case. Last month, Judge Alvin Hellerstein refused https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2026/07/20/sony-music-udio-infringement-lawsuit-second/ , saying it would delay the trial, but noted Sony could file separately. So it did. The scale came from discovery. After gaining access to Udio’s training data, Sony says audio fingerprinting matched hundreds of thousands of its recordings. The 333 songs in the first suit were, it now says, a “minuscule” fraction. The claims The complaint runs to three counts: copying modern recordings, copying older pre-1972 ones, and stripping YouTube’s protections to rip audio in breach of anti-circumvention law. Udio has admitted pulling from YouTube, as its rival Suno https://thenextweb.com/news/suno-ai-music-hack-training-data did, while calling it fair use. Sony wants the statutory maximum, $150,000 a track, and a jury. The list of songs reads like a hall of fame: Elvis, Beyoncé, Bob Dylan, Britney Spears, and Michael Jackson, as The Verge https://www.theverge.com/tech/968375/sony-udio-lawsuit-songs-ai-copyright detailed. The last holdout Sony is careful to sound pro-licensing rather than anti-AI, pointing to its own deals with Spotify and the startup Klay. Its message is a demand: pay for the inputs. The stakes run past music. Fair use for AI training is still untested, the pivotal question in dozens of copyright suits https://thenextweb.com/news/google-gemini-publishers-copyright-lawsuit , from book publishers to film studios https://thenextweb.com/news/midjourney-studios-ai-disclosure-copyright . The closest case, Anthropic’s book-piracy settlement https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-1-5-billion-copyright-settlement-approved , dodged it, and a parallel fight against Suno is even larger. Whatever the Manhattan court decides about Sony’s market-harm theory will not stay in music. It feeds straight into how every AI company is expected to pay for the data it trains on. Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.