The other two major labels made peace with Udio months ago. Sony did the opposite. On Monday it filed a fresh lawsuit in New York, Billboard reported, covering 30,117 recordings and leaving Udio facing a far bigger bill.
Turning peace into a weapon
The heart of the case is fair use, the defence Udio leans on to justify training on unlicensed songs. Courts weigh whether that use harms a market for the original work, and Sony has found a sharp answer.
Udio has since signed training licences with Universal, Warner, Kobalt, Merlin, Believe, and a US publishers’ group. That, Sony argues, proves a licensing market plainly exists. “A company that pays to license the very inputs at issue cannot credibly maintain that no market exists for those inputs,” the complaint reads.
In other words, the truce that looked like AI’s peace with the music business has become the labels’ weapon against the one holdout.
Why sue twice
The second suit is a workaround. Sony first tried to add the 30,000 songs to its original 2024 case. Last month, Judge Alvin Hellerstein refused, saying it would delay the trial, but noted Sony could file separately. So it did.
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The scale came from discovery. After gaining access to Udio’s training data, Sony says audio fingerprinting matched hundreds of thousands of its recordings. The 333 songs in the first suit were, it now says, a “minuscule” fraction.
The claims
The complaint runs to three counts: copying modern recordings, copying older pre-1972 ones, and stripping YouTube’s protections to rip audio in breach of anti-circumvention law. Udio has admitted pulling from YouTube, as its rival Suno did, while calling it fair use.
Sony wants the statutory maximum, $150,000 a track, and a jury. The list of songs reads like a hall of fame: Elvis, Beyoncé, Bob Dylan, Britney Spears, and Michael Jackson, as The Verge detailed.
The last holdout
Sony is careful to sound pro-licensing rather than anti-AI, pointing to its own deals with Spotify and the startup Klay. Its message is a demand: pay for the inputs.
The stakes run past music. Fair use for AI training is still untested, the pivotal question in dozens of copyright suits, from book publishers to film studios. The closest case, Anthropic’s book-piracy settlement, dodged it, and a parallel fight against Suno is even larger.
Whatever the Manhattan court decides about Sony’s market-harm theory will not stay in music. It feeds straight into how every AI company is expected to pay for the data it trains on.
