AI Music Digest

Jason Isbell, David Lowery of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, blues musician Guy Forsyth and saxophonist Eduardo Calle filed a proposed class action against Suno in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts on Monday, August 31. Music Business Worldwide, which obtained and reviewed the 84-page complaint, reports that it contains no copyright claims whatsoever. That is the story: every other major action against Suno — Universal and Sony’s case, Round Hill’s, Jamendo’s, the earlier indie class actions — has been argued on copyright. This one is argued on identity.

The complaint’s theory is that Suno built a product in which a musician’s name functions as a retrieval key, so that entering an artist’s name produces output shaped by that artist’s voice and style, and that this converts a performer’s commercial identity into a product feature without consent. Alongside state right-of-publicity claims, the plaintiffs bring biometric privacy claims under Illinois’s BIPA statute, alleging Suno captured and stored singers’ “voiceprints” — measurements including pitch contours and breath dynamics. Per MBW’s reading of the filing, the plaintiffs seek damages under state law, disgorgement of Suno’s profits, punitive damages where available, and an injunction barring Suno from commercially exploiting musicians’ voices, names and identifying attributes without consent; the complaint pleads class damages above $5 million. MBW quotes the complaint directly: “A musician’s identity is their property, but Suno took it without consent. This lawsuit is how these musicians resist.”

Suno’s position, as reported by CelebrityAccess, is that the company exists to help people make original music and that it maintains protections designed to block prompts naming specific artists or copyrighted songs. MBW reports that the plaintiffs anticipate that defence in the complaint and dispute it, arguing the filters can be circumvented.

Why It Matters: Right-of-publicity and biometric law do not depend on what a model was trained on, only on what the product does with a name and a voice. That sidesteps the fair use fight entirely.

Gerencia 360 Music, a Burbank-based Regional Mexican and Latin label and publisher, sued Suno Inc. along with Bright Data Ltd. and Bright Data Inc. in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Monday, August 31, case number 3:26-cv-09248. Music Business Worldwide, which reviewed the complaint, reports four counts seeking roughly $165 million in total: direct copyright infringement covering 444 registered works at $66.6 million, contributory infringement by Bright Data at another $66.6 million, and two DMCA claims covering 1,174 works at $2.935 million and $29.35 million. Richard S. Busch of Adams & Reese — who won the Blurred Lines case for Marvin Gaye’s family — is counsel.

The allegation against Bright Data is the part worth watching. Gerencia 360 claims the Israeli data firm supplied the proxy services and scraping tools that let Suno pull audio and lyrics from licensed platforms including YouTube, Deezer and Genius, and that doing so meant circumventing authentication gates, paywalls, rate limiting, CAPTCHA challenges and robots.txt restrictions. This is the second time in a month that Busch has named Bright Data alongside Suno on a contributory infringement theory: MBW reported on August 18 that Round Hill Music’s complaint made materially the same allegation, seeking $75 million from Bright Data on that count alone. MBW quotes Gerencia 360’s filing: “There is simply nothing fair about a company using theft to build for purely commercial purposes a multi-billion dollar business while those from which they steal receive nothing.”

The catalogue matters too. MBW reports the complaint argues that without infringing Gerencia’s Spanish-language works, Suno would not have been positioned to capture a meaningful share of the Spanish-language AI market — a market-specific damages theory rather than a general one.

Why It Matters: If contributory claims against scraping vendors survive a motion to dismiss, the exposure spreads to the infrastructure layer, where the suppliers have no licensing deals to fall back on and no catalogue to trade.

Udio filed its answer to Sony Music’s second lawsuit on August 27 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, and Music Business Worldwide, which obtained the filing, reports that the company is holding its line on fair use while making an unusually aggressive argument about what the works are worth. Sony’s second suit asserts 30,117 sound recordings — the ones a judge barred it from adding to its original case — and seeks up to $150,000 per recording in statutory damages, which would put maximum exposure north of $4.5 billion.

Udio’s answer proposes $200 per work instead. Across the asserted catalogue that comes to roughly $6 million. On liability, MBW reports Udio argues that any copying of copyrightable expression was “quintessential fair use,” describing its training as a back-end technological process invisible to the public that produces a new product. Separately, Udio denies it trained on the specific 30,117 recordings Sony identified, saying it “lacks knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief” about the results of the Audible Magic analysis Sony used to build the list.

Sony remains the only major label still litigating against Udio, having neither settled nor licensed; Universal settled in October 2025 and Warner in November 2025.

Why It Matters: The $200 figure is a bet that a court will treat these as non-willful infringements of works with little independent market value. It also signals Udio does not expect to settle on Sony’s terms.