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Country musician Tift Merritt’s most popular song on Spotify, “Traveling Alone,” is a ballad with lyrics that evoke solitude and the open road. Prompted by Reuters to create an “Americana song in the style of Tift Merritt,” AI music site Udio immediately created “Holy Land,” a ballad about “driving down an old country road” while “watching the fields and the sky sway and turn.” Merritt, a Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter, told Reuters that the “parody” created by Udio is not on any of my albums. “It’s a great testament to the extent to which this technology is not transformative at all,” Merritt said. “It’s stealing.” Merritt, a longtime artists’ rights advocate, isn’t the only musician to sound the alarm. In April, she joined Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Stevie Wonder and dozens of other artists in an open letter warning that music generated by AI trained on their recordings could “destroy creativity” and marginalize human artists. Major record companies are also concerned. Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music sued Udio and another music AI company called Suno in June, marking the music industry’s entry into the high-stakes copyright battles over AI-generated content that are just beginning to make their way into the courts. “Absorbing a lot of creative labor to imitate it is not creative,” said Merritt, an independent musician whose first record label is now owned by UMG, but who says she has no financial relationship with the company. “It’s stealing to compete and displace us.”
Asked to comment for this article, Suno and Udio pointed to past public statements defending their technology. They filed a preliminary response in court Thursday, denying any copyright infringement and arguing that the lawsuits are an effort to silence smaller competitors. They compared the record companies’ protests to past industry concerns about synthesizers, drum machines and other innovations that replaced human musicians. Uncharted territory The companies, which have attracted venture capital, say they prohibit users from creating songs that clearly mimic top artists. But the new lawsuit alleges that Suno and Udio can be prompted to reproduce elements of songs by Mariah Carey, James Brown and others and to imitate the voices of singers including ABBA and Bruce Springsteen, suggesting they are misusing the record companies’ catalogs of copyrighted recordings to train their systems. Mitch Glazier, chief executive of the RIAA music industry trade group, said the lawsuits “document the shameless copying of massive numbers of recordings in order to flood the market with cheap knockoffs and siphon listening and revenue away from real human artists and songwriters.” “AI holds great promise — but only if it’s built on a reasonable, responsible, licensed foundation,” Glazier said.
Warner Music referred Reuters to the Recording Industry Association of America when asked for comment. Sony and Universal Music Group did not respond.
The record companies’ claims echo allegations made by novelists, news outlets, music publishers and others in high-profile copyright lawsuits against chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, which use generative AI to create text. Those lawsuits are still pending and in their early stages. Both sets of cases are raising new questions for the courts, including whether the law should make exceptions for AI that uses copyrighted material to create something new. The record companies’ cases, which could take years to resolve, also raise unique issues related to their subject matter: music. The interplay of melody, harmony, rhythm and other elements can make it more difficult to determine whether parts of a copyrighted song are infringed than in works like the written word, said Brian McBrearty, a musicologist who specializes in copyright analysis. “There’s more to music than just the flow of words,” McBrearty said. “It has a tone, it has a rhythm, it has a harmonic background. It’s a richer combination of different elements, which makes it less simplistic.” Some claims in AI copyright cases may hinge on comparisons between an AI system’s output and the material allegedly misused to train it, requiring the kind of analysis that challenges judges and juries in music cases. In a 2018 ruling called a “dangerous precedent” by a dissenting judge, Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams lost a lawsuit brought by Marvin Gaye’s estate over the similarities between their hit “Blurred Lines” and Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” But artists including Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran have since fended off similar complaints about their own songs.
Suno and Udio argue in very similar court filings that their work does not infringe copyright, and say U.S. copyright law protects recordings that “imitate or simulate” other recorded music. Julie Albert, an intellectual property partner at the New York law firm Baker Botts, is tracking the new cases. “It’s always been a messy world for music copyright,” he says. Even without this complexity, Albert says the rapidly evolving AI technology is bringing new uncertainty to every level of copyright law. Whose fair use? The complexities of music may ultimately matter less if, as many expect, the AI cases come down to the “fair use” defense against infringement claims — another area of U.S. copyright law fraught with unresolved questions. Fair use promotes free speech by allowing unauthorized uses of copyrighted works in certain circumstances, with courts typically focusing on whether the new use alters the original work. Defendants in AI copyright cases argue that their products make fair use of human creativity, and any court ruling to the contrary would be disastrous for the potentially trillion-dollar AI industry.
Suno and Udio said in their response to the record companies’ lawsuit Thursday that their use of existing recordings to help people create new songs “is classic ‘fair use.’ ” Legal experts say fair use could determine whether a case wins or loses, but no court has yet ruled on the issue in the AI context. Albert said it might be harder for music-generating AI companies to prove fair use than for chatbot makers, which can summarize and synthesize texts that courts might be more likely to deem transformative. Imagine, she said, a student using AI to generate a report on the American Civil War that incorporates text from a novel about the subject, rather than someone asking an AI to create new music based on existing music. The student example “certainly feels like the purpose is different from logging into a music-generating tool and saying, ‘Hey, I want to make a song that sounds like a Top 10 artist,’ ” Albert said. “The purpose is very similar to what the artist originally intended.” Last year’s Supreme Court ruling on fair use could have a huge impact on music cases because it focused on whether a new use has the same commercial purpose as the original work. That argument is a key part of Suno and Udio’s complaint, which alleges the companies use the labels’ music “for the ultimate purpose of poaching listeners, fans and potential licensees of the recordings they have copied.” Merritt said she’s concerned that tech companies might try to replace artists like her with artificial intelligence. She said the economics are simple if musicians’ songs can be taken for free and used to imitate them. “Robots and AI don’t get paid royalties,” she said.
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