Sony Music has filed a new lawsuit against AI music generator Udio, claiming it found more than 30,000 of its songs inside the company’s AI training data.
The record label says the 30,117 tracks named in the lawsuit are only a fraction of what it believes Udio copied without permission to build its music-generating AI, with a forensic review allegedly identifying “hundreds of thousands” of Sony-owned recordings in the training dataset.
According to the lawsuit, which was reported by Music Business Worldwide, the songs span artists including Beyoncé, Michael Jackson, Harry Styles, Mariah Carey, Elvis Presley, and many more.
Sony files second lawsuit against Udio #
Sony says it only uncovered the scale of the alleged copying after inspecting Udio’s source code and training data during discovery in an earlier lawsuit, when the company and its subsidiaries sued the music generator for “mass infringement of copyrighted sound recordings.”
The lawsuit also accuses Udio of obtaining many of those recordings by “stream ripping” music from YouTube using the tool YT-DLP, alleging it bypassed the platform’s protections to create permanent copies for AI training.
“The 30,117 sound recordings asserted in this action may more closely reflect the breadth of Udio’s infringement, in reality they remain only a small portion of Plaintiffs’ works that Udio infringed,” the lawsuit states.
The filing also claims Udio’s recent licensing deals with companies including Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group weaken its defense.
“Udio’s belated embrace of licensing only underscores the unlawfulness of its decision to copy Plaintiffs’ copyrighted sound recordings, without a license, in the first place,” Sony argues in the complaint.
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Udio has previously admitted its AI models were trained on “a vast amount of different kinds of sound recordings,” which “presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs,” but maintains that training AI on copyrighted music qualifies as fair use.
Sony is seeking damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed recording, along with an injunction to stop further copyright infringement.
Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly popular in music, as a Japanese AI metal band became real after the creator hired musicians, and an AI song recently hit number one on iTunes.