THE BIG STORY: Is the music industry’s billion-dollar legal battle over artificial intelligence suddenly going to be over before it starts? I wouldn’t count on it just yet.
News broke this weekend that Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony Music were each in talks to license their songs to Suno and Udio for use in training AI models to spit out new songs – less than a year after the music companies filed blockbuster copyright cases accusing the AI startups of stealing music on an “unimaginable scale.”
Both sides have framed those cases as an existential fight over the future of music. The labels says Suno and Udio are “trampling” the rights of real musicians in an effort to replace them; the startups argue back that the music giants are abusing intellectual property to crush a new techn