Sony Music Entertainment has opened a new copyright front against Udio, filing a lawsuit in New York that accuses the AI music generator of infringing more than 30,000 Sony-controlled songs.
The filing matters because it turns a dispute that had been narrowed by the court into a much larger case over the raw material used to build music-generation systems. Sony says the list includes tracks associated with Elvis Presley, Beyoncé and Harry Styles, including “Hound Dog,” “Say My Name” and “As It Was.” The broader list also includes songs from Johnny Cash and other artists, according to reporting by The Verge.
Sony’s complaint says the 30,000-plus works are only a fraction of what it believes Udio used without permission. That is an allegation, not a court finding. Udio has not been found liable on those claims in the new case.
How Sony says it found the songs
Sony, Universal Music Group and Warner Records sued Udio and rival AI music company Suno in 2024. In the Udio case, Sony says it later obtained access to training data through discovery, the court-supervised process where parties exchange evidence.
After that, Sony says it used audio fingerprinting to identify more recordings. Audio fingerprinting is the less mystical cousin of AI: it matches distinctive patterns in audio against known recordings, the same basic idea behind services that identify a song from a short clip. Sony says that process surfaced more than 30,000 additional works that Udio allegedly copied and fed into its generative models.
Sony first tried to add those recordings to the earlier lawsuit. A judge rejected that request, leaving the original case limited to 333 works, according to Music Business Worldwide. Sony has now made the larger catalog the basis of a separate complaint, and the company says it may expand the case further.
The fight over training data
The central claim is familiar by now: Sony alleges Udio built its system by ingesting copyrighted sound recordings without licenses. The complaint says Udio acknowledged that its models were built by exposing the software to a large collection of recordings, including material from YouTube.
That is the boring-but-critical part of generative AI music. These systems do not learn “music” in the abstract. They are trained on recorded audio, and rights holders are now using discovery, fingerprints and court filings to argue about whether those inputs were lawful.
The case also lands after Udio’s fights with other major labels softened. Universal Music Group has settled with Udio and is now working with the company. Warner Music Group has also settled with Udio and entered a partnership, according to The Verge.
Sony is taking the harder route for now. Its new lawsuit asks the court to deal with a much larger batch of allegedly copied recordings than the original case allowed. For Udio, that means the legal question is no longer confined to a few hundred examples. Sony is trying to put the training set itself on trial, one matched recording at a time.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
