{"id":8396,"date":"2025-11-01T22:43:29","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T22:43:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/udio-umg-ai-settlement-wont-end-lawsuits-what-happens-now\/"},"modified":"2025-11-01T22:43:29","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T22:43:29","slug":"udio-umg-ai-settlement-wont-end-lawsuits-what-happens-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/udio-umg-ai-settlement-wont-end-lawsuits-what-happens-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Udio-UMG AI Settlement Won’t End Lawsuits: What Happens Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tUniversal Music Group and Udio have settled their<\/em> legal battle by striking a deal for a fully-licensed artificial intelligence music platform. But the broader litigation involving rival AI firm Suno and both Sony Music and Warner Music is still very much pending.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe deal, announced Wednesday, will end UMG\u2019s allegations that Udio broke the law by training its AI models on vast troves of copyrighted songs. Under the agreement, Udio will pay a \u201ccompensatory\u201d settlement and the two will partner on a new subscription AI service that pays fees to UMG and its artists, and allows artists to opt in to different aspects of the new service.<\/p>\n

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\n\tBut that agreement will not<\/em> resolve the entire legal battle, in which all three majors teamed up last year to sue both Udio and Suno \u2014 the other leading AI music firm \u2014 for allegedly \u201ctrampling the rights of copyright owners\u201d by infringing music on an \u201cunimaginable scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor now, Sony and Warner will continue to litigate their case against Udio, but a settlement like the one struck by UMG obviously creates a framework for them to reach a similar deal. The revamped Udio 2.0 will not be an exclusive UMG partner, according to sources close to the situation \u2014 meaning it\u2019s able to strike similar catalog licensing deals with Sony and Warner, as well as any other parties.<\/p>\n

\n\tUdio has ample incentive to do so. Past experience has shown that music licensing for tech platforms is something of a zero-sum proposition; it often doesn\u2019t work for users if you have glaring gaps in your catalog of songs. Spotify wouldn\u2019t be nearly as ubiquitous if it were missing catalogs by Taylor Swift, Drake or The Beatles, while TikTok\u2019s standoff with UMG last year ended up impacting non-UMG recording artists like Beyonc\u00e9 and Adele due to rights being owned by different companies.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn striking the deal, Udio has also effectively put its cards on the table: it wants to be the music industry\u2019s AI good guy<\/em>. Though not legally impossible, it\u2019s hard to argue in court that you don\u2019t need training licenses and artist consent while touting the benefits of both in press releases. Udio has also already made concrete changes to its platform, including controversially disabling downloads for its existing subscribers \u2014 a further sign that it\u2019s no longer looking to fight it out.<\/p>\n

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\n\tIt\u2019s worth noting that the settlement makes for odd bedfellows in any ongoing litigation. The same team of lawyers that repped UMG in its claims against Udio \u2014 now settled with a first-of-its-kind partnership \u2014 is also representing competitors Sony and Warner as they continue to sue that company. Ditto for Suno, which is defended by the same team of attorneys as Udio, which just agreed to sign a licensing deal that\u2019s antithetical to Suno\u2019s core argument that no such deals are needed.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut such situations are par for the course for cases like these, where industry rivals team up for a legal case, and each company on both sides almost certainly signed agreements waiving any legal right to argue that their lawyers have a conflict of interest. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe case against Suno, on the other hand, looks more likely to keep going. All three majors are still suing that company, and Suno has long been seen in industry circles as more the more combative of the two. One can\u2019t imagine that Suno\u2019s will to fight will be reduced by the Udio deal; if anything, it has a clearer runway to AI music dominance now that its largest text-to-audio rival has effectively left the space to cultivate its own walled-off garden.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Suno lawsuit remains at the earliest stage, where a defendant will file a motion to dismiss a case, which is typically the first big ruling in a civil litigation. If both sides decide to fight it out, the case and resulting appeals could go on for years into the future. But the key battle lines of the litigation are already clear.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe multi-million-dollar question is whether training AI platforms like Suno on millions of unlicensed copyrighted songs counts as \u201cfair use,\u201d a legal doctrine that allows for the reuse of protected works in certain circumstances. That issue is also at the heart of dozens of other lawsuits filed against booming AI firms by book authors, news outlets, movie studios, comedians and visual artists \u2014 meaning it might really be more of a trillion<\/em>-dollar question.<\/p>\n

\n\tCan Suno prevail on that point, making Udio look silly for settling so early? The proverbial jury is very much still out. <\/p>\n

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\n\tOne federal judge, ruling on a major case against Anthropic, sided resoundingly with AI firms, saying that unlicensed training was clearly a fair use because it was no different than a human writer taking inspiration from copyrighted books they had read. But another judge ruled that such training would be illegal \u201cin many circumstances\u201d and that AI firms expected to generate \u201ctrillions\u201d in profits \u201cwill figure out a way to compensate copyright holders.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA separate, emerging flashpoint in the case is whether Suno broke the law by \u201cstream-ripping\u201d its training songs from YouTube. That\u2019s a key issue in the wake of a court ruling this summer that said AI training on copyrighted works itself is fair use, but that using illegally-obtained works to do so could lead to billions in damages for AI firms.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the wake of this week\u2019s Udio settlement, the record labels likely see that deal as setting a helpful precedent: \u201cSee, AI companies do need licenses to train their models \u2014 Udio just took one<\/em>.\u201d And in that same vein, when it comes to that all-important courtroom battle over fair use, those same music companies likely view this week\u2019s Udio deal as potential legal ammo.<\/p>\n

\n\tA key factor in the fair-use analysis is whether exploiting a copyrighted work for free caused market harm<\/em> \u2014 whether it hurt the ability of the original author to monetize their own creative output. A major licensing deal with a direct competitor would seem to be a very obvious market that would be harmed by the conduct of Suno, which says it can build its AI models without such deals.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut that argument has already been rejected in both of those earlier fair-use rulings. Even for the judge who said AI training would be illegal in most circumstances, that kind of argument would be \u201ccircular\u201d \u2014 since essentially any copyright owner could argue that the specific thing they\u2019re suing over is a lost market opportunity. That means the Udio deal might help the labels in the business world and the court of public opinion, but likely not in actual court. For now, time will tell.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor deeper reading, go check out the full lawsuits against Suno<\/a> and Udio<\/a>, and go read the responses from Suno<\/a> and Udio<\/a>. And stick with <\/em>Billboard for updates as the cases move ahead.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Universal Music Group and Udio have settled their legal battle by striking a deal for a fully-licensed artificial intelligence music platform. But the broader litigation involving rival AI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8397,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[317,399,6965,916],"class_list":["post-8396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-lawsuits","tag-settlement","tag-udioumg","tag-wont"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8396\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}