Will RIAA’s lawsuit against Udio and Suno really be the win we’re hoping for?

AI and music had their first David and Goliath moment this week when RIAA issued a dramatic and scathing lawsuit against generative AI music platforms Suno and Udio.

In the lawsuit, the RIAA claims Suno and Udio are perpetuating copyright infringement “at an almost unimaginable scale”, alleging that both platforms are trained unlawfully on the catalogues of Universal, Warner and Sony. So blatant was this infringement, according to the RIAA, that the lawsuit outlines multiple cases when the notes, melodies and structure are almost identical to existing works, including music from the likes of Green Day, ABBA and Mariah Carey.

READ MORE: Splice CEO’s message for AI sceptics? “Trust the artists”

The 34-page lawsuit has been widely celebrated within the music industry and the broader field of creative arts. Why? Because wholesale ‘scraping’ of data by AI companies without permission or remuneration is a genuine threat — not just to the majors but to working independent artists, all of whom could be undermined if their catalogues are used to fuel models that churn out derivatives at speed and scale.

Uncontrolled and unregulated generative AI poses an existential threat to the music industry as we know it; that might sound hyperbolic but it’s not. These lawsuits could set the tone for how music and AI co-exist going forward and Suno and Udio — whose investors curiously include artists such as 3LAU, Common and will.i.am — will either be sued into oblivion or forced to clean up their act.

A familiar situation

But will the strong-arming become a grudging handshake? It’s not a stretch to assume that licensing deals — and a bit of equity thrown in — are a possible outcome of this lawsuit. Elsewhere in AI, The New York Times’s case against Sam Altman’s OpenAI is likely to conclude the same way – in fact, OpenAI has already signed similar deals with the FT and with News Corp. Few want to air their dirty laundry in court, including the plaintiff, and the stern language used in RIAA’s lawsuit feels more about obtaining leverage in negotiations than expecting Suno and Udio to fork up the roughly $1.5 trillion and $1.36 trillion it would cost them, respectively, to pay the damages due.

So how might they work? A blanket license for carte blanche access to train models on the back catalogues of some of the greatest artists of all time? Another micro-penny payment system if your artist’s name is mentioned in a prompt? A huge annual fee pocketed by the label and thrown on the pile, never to trickle down to the artists whose work makes up their vaults? These aren’t just whimsical hypotheticals — decisions made now could radically alter the upcoming decades of music industry economics.

Streaming has gutted the middle class of artists, shifting rewards to those who own catalogues at scale — micro-pennies mean little to those with three albums, but can mean a lot to labels with 30,000. AI, too, relies on scale: the more quality data you hoard, the more valuable your asset for licensees. Once again, this leaves independent artists sidelined with little voice or influence over the emerging tech that can define their future. And if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

The long-term effect of decisions made at the dawn of streaming isn’t just affecting independent musicians, though; it’s coming back round to the majors themselves. As Billboard’s Elias Leight pointed out last year: “It’s common to hear grumbles about young acts who have hundreds of millions of plays of a single but can’t fill a small room for a live performance.” By opening the floodgates, streaming removed the bridge between artist and listener, and music’s value (as a commodity, at least) has plummeted to next to zero. Those decisions were made against the backdrop of piracy’s genuine threat — and here we are again.

Getting money upfront and a slice of the pie will likely be appealing, but the mistakes of the streaming era must be at the forefront if and when these licensing negotiations begin.

Move fast, break things, get paid

The tech industry has a long and tedious reputation as a disruptor, a badge it wears with honour. In an interview with MusicTech, Grammy-nominated producer, composer and developer BT said: “Our large label music partners told us a story about a CEO that came to see them [and] they [were] clearly in violation of training on IP-protected works just to speed-run a product to market. They asked how they trained and he said, ‘We would rather ask for forgiveness than permission’… This kind of thinking and irresponsibility could destroy music.”

The ‘move fast and break things’ narrative might feel irresponsible, yet it’s exactly the approach that led Suno to raise $125m to date. In fact, one investor audaciously claims that if deals with the labels were in place, they “probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think that they needed to make this product without the constraints.” Viewing fundamental IP rights as constraints gives you a sneak peek into a worryingly common mindset in tech, but the music industry keeps falling for the Shiny New Thing.

If companies who steal, blitzscale and ask for forgiveness later are constantly rewarded, where’s the incentive to do things the right way from the start? ‘Ethical AI’ has become its own buzzword, with innovative companies rightly pushing for transparency in training data, traditional rights attribution and new technical solutions to allow AI and music to scale together fairly. But as Tatiana Cirisano wrote in MIDIA last month, if “one music-tech startup seeks permission, it risks losing the race to another startup that asks for forgiveness.”

UMG, Sony and Warner have all issued their AI guidelines and creeds, from the Human Artistry Campaign, to government lobbying, opt-out letters and AI for Music initiatives. If labels enter negotiations with AI companies who infringe on an “almost unimaginable scale”, they could risk undermining their own necessary, crucial guidelines as AI finds its feet, and trust, among creatives and artists.

Maybe it won’t happen. Maybe the major labels will seek to make an example of Suno and Udio, the case will make it to court and a novelty-sized cheque will be handed over to the RIAA. If not, and a settlement is reached with licensing terms attached, getting it wrong risks causing significant damage to an already faltering industry. The mistakes of the streaming era are still in the rearview mirror — let’s hope the majors look back before they look forward.

Read more about AI in music technology.