AI Music Digest

2024’s aggressive copyright lawsuits gave way to 2025’s landmark settlements. Warner Music Group settled with both Suno and Udio, while Universal Music Group reached a deal with Udio. These agreements transform former adversaries into partners, with new licensed AI music platforms set to launch in 2026.

The deals establish opt-in licensing structures where artists and songwriters control whether their voices, names, and compositions can be used in AI-generated music. Suno will release a new model trained only on licensed material and retire its current unlicensed model. Udio pivots to a “walled garden” fan engagement platform where AI creations cannot leave the platform.

Why It Matters: By settling rather than going to trial, both sides avoided a court ruling on whether training AI on copyrighted music constitutes fair use. The industry chose negotiated coexistence over existential legal risk, setting the template for how AI music companies will operate going forward.

2025 marked the first year AI-generated music appeared on Billboard charts. Breaking Rust, a fully AI-generated country act, topped the Country Digital Song Sales chart with “Walk My Walk”—sparking outrage in Nashville, where authenticity is sacred. Real artists like Bryan Elijah Smith accused the AI project of copying their style and filed claims.

Beyond Breaking Rust, Hallwood Media signed the first known record deals with AI artists, including a reported multi-million dollar agreement with Xania Monet, an AI persona who creates gospel music. The Velvet Sundown, an AI-generated soft-rock “band,” racked up over a million Spotify listeners before being exposed as fake.

Why It Matters: AI acts competing directly with human artists on charts and playlists is no longer hypothetical—it happened repeatedly in 2025. The ease with which AI projects gained traction (and the difficulty listeners had distinguishing them from human artists) revealed vulnerabilities in how music is discovered and consumed.

Deezer emerged as the industry’s transparency leader, publishing striking data throughout the year. AI-generated uploads exploded from 10,000 tracks per day in January to 50,000 by November—now comprising 34% of all new music delivered to the platform. Yet these tracks account for just 0.5% of actual listening, and Deezer estimates up to 70% of AI streams are fraudulent bot activity designed to siphon royalties.

In response, Deezer launched the world’s first AI tagging system, labeling detected AI tracks and excluding them from editorial playlists and recommendations. YouTube took its own action in December, terminating AI-generated content channels with over a billion combined views—raising questions about whether AI music accounts could face similar enforcement.

Why It Matters: The data tells two stories: AI content is flooding platforms at unprecedented scale, but listeners aren’t actually choosing it. The fraud problem—bots inflating AI streams to steal royalties from human artists—may be the more urgent threat than creative competition.