Krys Vega
The Krys Vega Journal · Opinion

The Suno Lawsuits: Who Really Owns Music? — Outrageous Truths About the Music Industry

The labels? The artists? Or, at last, the people who want to listen?

· Krys Vega · Opinion

An illustrated music industry scene with a performer, AI imagery, record labels and a contract.

The question is not whether Suno made mistakes. It did.
The real question is whether Suno should be held accountable for those mistakes, or whether the lawsuits should become an excuse to lock the entire field of AI-powered music creation behind the major labels' permissions, catalogs, and business interests.
A detailed account of the lawsuits appears at the end of this article; first, I want to explain what I think about this entire controversy.

The public debate makes it sound as though a vulnerable artist stands on one side, facing an impersonal, all-consuming machine on the other.
Inside the courtroom, however, the main battle is between multibillion-dollar rights-owning corporations and a rapidly growing technology company.
The labels want to establish a precedent under which a commercial generative music model can learn from their catalogs only with their permission, and on financial terms they themselves dictate. I would draw particular attention to the word financial.
Warner's settlement offered a glimpse of where this could lead: what is called “industrial-scale infringement” before a deal is signed can become “responsible, artist-friendly innovation” once the right agreement is in place.
That makes one thing clear to me: this dispute is not simply a matter of moral outrage on behalf of artists. Control over catalogs, the licensing market, and future revenues from artificial intelligence are at the heart of it.

Meanwhile, one person has all but disappeared from the story — the person without whom no artist, label, streaming platform, or Suno could exist: the listener.
And hardly anyone talks about another new participant either: someone who has heard the music they longed for inside their head all their life, but never had a band, a studio, a multimillion-dollar budget, or connections to a record label. Now, for the first time, they can actually bring it into existence. I am both that listener and that creator, and I want to explain what all of this looks like from our side.

The One Person Nobody Talks About: The Listener

The lawsuits involve endless discussion of rights holders' markets, the value of catalogs, training licenses, and incentives to create. There is much less discussion of why music exists in the first place.
Music is not created so that it can lie dormant as a file in a corporate catalog.
The listener is not some incidental end user at the far end of the music business. The listener is the reason the entire system exists.

Yet listeners are now implicitly expected to accept less choice, slower releases, or even music they enjoy less, all for the sake of preserving the established business order.
As though they had a moral duty to prefer a song made in a more expensive, more traditional way over one that gives them greater pleasure.
Someone who loves an artist is not going to erase that artist from their life simply because AI can make beautiful music too.
For someone who loves Michael Jackson, the notes alone are not what matter. His voice, movement, personality, history, sensitivity, vulnerability, achievements, and the memories associated with him are all part of that love.
A new technology cannot erase any of it.
What may change dramatically, however, is how long a weak song can be kept alive through a famous name, relentless radio promotion, playlist placement, and advertising budgets alone.
AI does not make great artists obsolete. What it threatens far more is the mediocrity that access, marketing, and industry connections have managed to keep afloat.

Michael Jackson and Sony

Michael Jackson made some extraordinarily serious accusations during his conflict with Sony. He spoke about how the stories of great artists so often end the same way: they work relentlessly, only to end up broken and burned out because multinational corporations exploit them. He accused the record industry of deceiving and robbing its performers. And Michael Jackson was hardly an unknown newcomer with no bargaining power; even as one of the most successful entertainers in history, he felt that a corporate system wielded far too much power over his art, his catalog, the promotion of his work, and his financial interests.

Major labels are not neutral moral institutions that have always stood exclusively for artistic freedom. They are businesses, with catalogs to protect, shareholders to satisfy, and negotiating strategies of their own. In conversations with fans and colleagues, Michael Jackson repeatedly emphasized that record companies built their wealth and power on artists' talent, yet so often exploited the very people who made them successful. He believed that corporations put commercial interests ahead of artistic freedom, promoting some performers while obstructing others, and even trying to repackage works their creators considered finished. He himself opposed new remixes of Thriller, because to him a work was finished when its creator said it was finished, and no industry's commercial interests should override that artistic decision. He firmly believed that the music industry's real value was created by artists, not by the corporations behind them. As he put it: “Good art never dies.”

Michael Jackson was far from the only one who felt this way.

  • Prince: He protested against his record label by writing “SLAVE” on his face; the company held the rights to his master recordings and restricted his artistic freedom, and he even gave up the name Prince in an attempt to escape his contract.
  • George Michael: He sued Sony because he regarded his record contract as a form of artistic slavery.
  • TLC: One of the world's most successful girl groups filed for bankruptcy despite selling 14 million records; contemporary estimates put the label's revenue at $140 million and its profit at $49 million, while the three members received a combined total of just $1.2 million.
  • Toni Braxton: Her record sales reportedly generated an estimated $188 million in revenue, yet her royalty entitlement amounted to less than 35 cents per album sold, and she ultimately filed for bankruptcy.
  • Backstreet Boys: After years of touring and success, the five singers received a combined total of just $300,000, while their manager's company reportedly took in around $10 million.
  • Taylor Swift: She had to re-record her earlier albums because the rights to the original master recordings belonged to other people.
  • Trent Reznor: He publicly encouraged fans to copy his music after discovering that his label was deliberately charging more for his album because it knew his devoted fans would be willing to pay.
  • Courtney Love: Using a hypothetical calculation, she demonstrated how a label could earn $11 million in revenue and $6.6 million in profit from one million album sales, while the band's $2 million in royalties would be entirely swallowed by recoupable expenses, leaving the artists with no further payment.
  • Jared Leto and Thirty Seconds to Mars: According to the band, they had not received a single cent from their label despite selling more than two million records; instead, they were told they owed $1.4 million, and the label went on to sue them for $30 million.

So much for the claim that the music industry is solely concerned with protecting artists.
From this perspective, it seems clear to me that the enormous lawsuits against Suno and Udio are driven not only by copyright concerns, but also by the major labels' fear of losing control over the market for AI-generated music — and the revenue it could produce.

It is particularly telling that Warner subsequently reached agreements with both platforms, while Universal struck a deal with Udio.
And here is the irony: the musicians' union has, in turn, sued the labels themselves, alleging that the musicians whose performances were involved were not paid what they were owed under the AI licensing agreements.

AI Is Not What Will Destroy the True Stars

If Michael Jackson were alive today, his name alone would still carry the same extraordinary value.
AI poses a threat to the record business — more precisely, to its profits.
Listeners can still choose the music they want to hear; their freedom to enjoy the artists they love has not disappeared. Nor does talent suddenly lose its value: people will continue to adore extraordinary performers, because the human presence behind great art is irreplaceable.
The real dividing line will not be between humans and machines, but between art that carries meaning and art that can easily be replaced.

Who Is Speaking for Artists Now?

It is worth considering the scale of the money involved. The global recorded music market generated $31.7 billion in revenue in 2025. In the same year, Universal Music Group reported €12.507 billion in revenue and €2.81 billion in adjusted EBITDA. In its fiscal year ending in March 2026, Sony's overall music segment generated ¥2.1201 trillion in revenue and ¥446.986 billion in operating income. Warner Music Group reported $6.707 billion in revenue for fiscal 2025. These figures cannot simply be added together or treated as identical measures — the companies' business segments differ — but they leave no doubt about the scale of their financial power.
It would be a mistake to assume that the interests of a major label and those of an artist are automatically the same.

According to an inquiry by the UK Parliament into music streaming, an artist under a traditional major-label deal often receives 12–30 percent of revenue, sometimes only after advances and other recoupable costs have been recovered. Contracts often assign rights for the entire term of copyright protection, potentially as long as seventy years. The inquiry also found that the benefits of streaming had flowed disproportionately to labels, while transparency around artist contracts and royalty accounting had long been a concern.
So when a multibillion-dollar rights-owning corporation says it is acting solely to protect the small creator, it is reasonable to ask: which creator, under what contract, receiving what share — and who ultimately controls the work?

What Does It Mean to Spend Decades Waiting for Music That Does Not Exist?

From the outside, it would be easy to dismiss this as simple consumer impatience: another artist will come along, another album will be released, another genre will emerge.
But my problem was never that too little music was being released. There has never been more music in the world.
My problem was that the music I longed for did not fully exist.
For decades, I searched for a sound that was deeply emotional yet intelligently constructed; electronic without being sterile; rooted in techno without being aggressive; psychedelic without the harshness of psytrance; spiritual without being religious; cosmic, yet organic.
I wanted music in which the kamancheh, santur, ney, bansuri, or sarangi were not just exotic ornaments laid over a generic backing track, but genuine voices in conversation with the other instruments. Music with a story: something that begins somewhere, gradually transforms, holds back its resolution, reaches a climax it has truly earned, and then, rather than simply stopping, finds its way home emotionally.

I found a few seconds of it here, an occasional passage there, in countless pieces of music.
A breathtaking instrumental entrance followed by an empty, repetitive loop. A floating atmosphere that never developed into a real melody; a powerful theme torn apart by a blaring drop; a single track on an album that moved me deeply, with nothing else like it to follow.
Waiting like that is not simply a matter of being bored with your playlists.

Music acts on the nervous system, memory, and identity. It can express something for which we have no words. When you know exactly what feeling you are searching for, but cannot find the sound that belongs to it for decades, it is like feeling homesick for a place you have never seen.
The traditional music industry did not necessarily fail to make this music out of malice. It simply made decisions for a mass market. Labels look for what can be financed, marketed, and made profitable with the smallest possible investment. My narrow, unusual musical world would have been too risky or too difficult to sell. Suno filled that gap: it finally made it possible for the music I had heard only inside myself to be heard in the world.
It did not take a beloved artist away from anyone; it opened the possibility for smaller audiences to discover the distinctive, deeply personal music they had long been searching for.

This is where the listener and the creator meet within me: I no longer have to wait for someone else to happen upon the music I have been searching for all my life; I can shape it myself, following precisely the emotional and musical story I want to tell.

Even the name reveals something uncomfortable: the music INDUSTRY. Art cannot be manufactured on an assembly line. I spend a long time working on a single piece, and inspiration does not arrive on demand; sometimes weeks pass before I can create again. Money, requests, and commissions cannot force that process to move faster, which is why genuine artistic creation cannot simply be turned into industrial production.

First comes the story and its emotional purpose; then I design the musical arc, the roles of the instruments, the rhythmic character, the return of the central motif, the successive waves of intensity, and the climax. In my instrumental music, I am not interested in hearing the same eight or sixteen bars repeated endlessly: the instruments need to respond to one another, the arrangement must keep evolving, and even silence has a role to play in making the eventual resolution feel like a genuine arrival.
For me, this musical world is where classical compositional thinking, ethereal world music, atmospheric ambient, and Sacred Organic Melodic Techno meet. It draws on myths, ancient cultures, cosmic imagery, loss, hope, forgiveness, and the longing to return home; that is why, for each song, I create not only sound, but also a story, lyrics, a visual world, a place within an album, and a deeper meaning.
Working with Suno is not a matter of pressing a button once: I often listen through dozens of versions, compare them against the idea I began with, regenerate or reshape passages, explore new directions, and reject everything that fails to carry the heart of the story. Only then do I edit, mix, and master the chosen material, before creating its cover art, video, and bilingual story.

Suno generates the sound, but it does not decide why that music needs to exist. It has not lived through the story, it has not spent decades searching for this sound, and it is not the one who recognizes, among dozens of versions, the single one that feels true. The work comes into being through the combination of the tool's capabilities and the creator's intention.
That is real value. Not because it was expensive to produce in the traditional way, but because of what it can give to another human being.

Good Music Is Part Mathematics — and Part Psychology

Good music cannot be reduced to a single formula. Cultural memory, personal meaning, the identity of the performer, and the historical moment all contribute to it. But many of the mechanisms through which music moves us can be identified, described, and learned.
These include the balance between repetition and variation, tension and release, the timing of a motif's return, delayed harmonic resolution, rhythmic expectation, changes in timbre, the gradual build, a rise in register, stripping back the arrangement, and the moment of restraint just before the climax.

Mathematics is present even in the proportions of musical time: in 4/4 at 134 BPM, a quarter-note beat lasts approximately 0.45 seconds, while a sixteen-bar phrase lasts about 28.7 seconds. Over time, the listener's brain learns to recognize these recurring patterns, which is precisely why an unexpected accent, an extended phrase, or a resolution delayed by a few bars can be so exciting.
Intervals, too, are built on mathematical relationships: in just intonation, an octave has a frequency ratio of 2:1 and a perfect fifth a ratio of 3:2, while related proportions in rhythm can produce intricate, overlapping patterns of movement. These numbers do not make music beautiful on their own, but they help explain how the interplay between predictability and surprise can turn into emotional tension, and ultimately into release.

Neuroscience research shows that intensely pleasurable music can trigger dopamine release in the brain's reward system. Moreover, anticipation and fulfillment are not processed in quite the same way: activity in the caudate is especially associated with the period of anticipation, while the nucleus accumbens becomes more prominent during the musical peak. Other studies have shown that musical surprises and positive deviations from our expectations can give rise to what researchers call reward prediction errors.
In other words, the pleasure does not begin only when the big moment finally arrives. It begins when the brain senses that something is approaching.
A skilled composer makes a promise, delays it, partially fulfills it, takes it somewhere unexpected, and finally delivers the release at just the right moment.

This is what composers, producers, and performers draw upon, whether they have studied the theory or simply feel it instinctively.
It is what I draw upon, too, when I plan three successive waves of intensity, bring back a theme in a richer form, or deliberately strip the arrangement almost bare before the climax.
This knowledge cannot be erased from the world, and no record label can claim ownership of it. Dopamine, anticipation, contrast, rhythmic attraction, and release are not the property of Universal, Sony, or Warner.

The Painter Who Photographed the Paintings

Imagine a painter visiting another artist's exhibition. Until now, this painter has mostly painted sailboats; at the exhibition, however, they discover breathtaking paintings of airplanes.
They secretly photograph the works — just as Suno copied music, which is why it is being sued — even though photography is prohibited in the gallery, and then spend hours at home studying the images: how perspective works, how light and motion are conveyed, how metal surfaces reflect their surroundings, and how depth is created in the sky. In this story, the painter can be held accountable for breaking the photography rule.
But if they then paint their own airplanes, in their own compositions and landscapes, and ultimately create better paintings, should they have to pay the original artist for every new work? I do not think so.
Had they legally purchased the exhibition catalog or the painting itself, they could have acquired the same knowledge of painting in exactly the same way, and their artistic and financial position would be no different.
The other painter cannot own the airplane as a subject, the laws of perspective, the physics of light, or the discovery that a silver aircraft can look dramatic against a dark sky.
The moral distinction is clear: copying a source work and acquiring knowledge from studying it are not the same thing.
A U.S. federal judge, in litigation concerning Meta's AI training, expressly distinguished copyright-protected expression from style, which is not itself protected by copyright.
We can debate the copying of complete recordings, the sources used, and their impact on the market. But a genre, a mood, or an entire creative language cannot be fenced off as private property.

What Is Really at Stake in These Lawsuits?

Suno must be held accountable if it obtained recordings without permission or circumvented technical protections. Fair use cannot amount to a blanket exemption for every method of acquiring data.
But the labels must not be granted perpetual ownership over everything a model has ever learned from their music. They cannot own a genre, a style, an emotional arc, the psychology of tension and release, listeners' preferences, or every subsequent generation of models that has some indirect connection to an earlier system.

The listener is not standing at the end of the music industry. The listener is the reason it exists at all.

The Real Stakes of the Suno Lawsuits: Who Owns the Future of Music? — A Summary of the Litigation

On June 24, 2024, record companies affiliated with Universal, Sony, and Warner filed a lawsuit against Suno in the United States. They accused the company of copying their sound recordings without authorization and using those copies to train its music-generation models. The original complaint identified 560 recordings, but the labels indicated from the outset that they believed the actual number was many orders of magnitude greater.

By August 2024, Suno was no longer denying that its models had been trained on tens of millions of recordings, including copyrighted music owned by the major labels. The substance of its defense has remained largely the same: the system is not intended to deliver copies, but to learn statistical relationships within music in order to generate new works. CEO Mikey Shulman expressed the argument this way: “Learning is not infringing.” In other words, learning in itself does not constitute copyright infringement.

As the case proceeded, however, a more troubling detail emerged. According to court documents, Suno also downloaded audio from YouTube, using open-source tools including YT-DL and YT-DLP. The labels allege that doing so involved circumventing YouTube's technical measures designed to restrict downloads. In August 2026, the judge allowed the labels to add a claim under the DMCA for circumvention of technological protection measures. This was not a ruling that infringement had occurred: the court merely found the allegation sufficiently plausible to be examined on its merits.

Meanwhile, Warner reached an agreement with Suno in November 2025. A former litigation adversary became a licensing partner, and Warner-affiliated companies permanently withdrew their claims. That agreement helped give rise to the v6 model family introduced in September 2026, which Suno developed with the participation of Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe. According to the company, v6 was built on new foundations, using licensed content, user-created works, community selections, and preference signals, while the older models would gradually be phased out.

That did not stop Universal and Sony. On September 18, 2026, they filed a second lawsuit, this time identifying 60,202 sound recordings. The theoretical upper limit of statutory copyright damages alone exceeds $9 billion, with additional amounts potentially sought for the alleged circumvention of technical protections. That figure is not a realistic prediction of a future judgment; it represents the maximum permitted by law and an exceptionally powerful source of negotiating pressure.

A central new allegation in the second lawsuit is what the labels describe as model laundering. Universal and Sony argue that it makes little difference whether v6 was trained on a new dataset if it also relied on outputs from earlier models, choices made by their users, or technical knowledge carried over from the old systems. In their view, the value of their catalogs became embedded in the capabilities those models learned, making the new model another instance of the “fruit of the poisonous tree.”

This is a profoundly important demand. If a court accepted it, the rights holders' control would not end with the particular recordings at issue. In principle, it could extend to models trained on those recordings, their outputs, listeners' feedback on those outputs, and successive model generations trained on that feedback. Increasingly abstract musical knowledge derived from an original copy could then be treated as “tainted” for generations.

Suno disputes this. It says that not all of its models were trained on the same recordings, and that v6 was developed using licensed material, community creations, preference signals, and its own research. The company has acknowledged that it did not delete every earlier training recording, explaining this in part by noting that the labels had instructed it to preserve evidence and training data ahead of litigation. On October 30, 2026, Suno asked for the second case to be stayed until the fundamental fair-use issue is resolved in the first.

Reservoir Media also brought a separate lawsuit in October 2026 concerning 1,050 musical works. It seeks not only damages but the destruction of alleged copies, including copies contained in training datasets, internal repositories, and — as the complaint puts it — potentially even within the model's weights. The case is still at a very early stage; the allegations have not been established as facts.

As of November 1, 2026, therefore, there is no final U.S. judgment finding that Suno's entire training process was unlawful, nor one finding that it was fully protected by fair use. This central question remains unresolved.

The U.S. Copyright Office has not offered a simple yes-or-no answer either. Its 2025 analysis concluded that some uses of works for training may qualify as fair use, while others may not. At one end of the spectrum is research use that does not substitute for the original works; at the other is the use of expressive works obtained from pirated sources to generate unlimited competing content. Suno's case is difficult precisely because it contains elements of both extremes.

What Do the Labels Want to Achieve?

  • A court ruling that copying sound recordings without permission and using them to train models constitutes infringement;
  • damages for past uses;
  • an injunction against further use of the recordings concerned;
  • a finding that technical access restrictions were circumvented;
  • and measures preventing Suno from carrying over the capabilities of older models merely by claiming to have created a new one.

But the business objective goes further. The labels want a precedent under which commercial generative music models may learn from their catalogs only with their permission, and on financial terms they set. Warner's agreement illustrated one possible outcome: what was described as “industrial-scale infringement” before a deal could become “responsible, artist-friendly innovation” after the right contract was signed.
This makes clear that the controversy is not solely about moral outrage and protecting artists. Control over catalogs, the market for licenses, and future revenue from artificial intelligence are every bit as important.

Sources

UMG, Sony and Warner v. Suno — Original Complaint, June 24, 2024

Mikey Shulman: The Future of Music — Suno, August 1, 2024

U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts — August 2026 Order Concerning YouTube Downloading Allegations

Warner Music Group and Suno — Partnership and Settlement of the Earlier Lawsuit

Suno: Introducing v6 — September 9, 2026

Universal and Sony — Second Complaint Against Suno, September 18, 2026

Suno — Response to the Second Complaint, October 20, 2026

Reservoir Media Management v. Suno — Summary of the Complaint and Relief Sought

Bartz v. Anthropic — Ruling Distinguishing AI Training from Pirated Copies

Salimpoor et al. — Dopamine Release During Musical Anticipation and Peak Pleasure

Gold et al. — Musical Reward Prediction Errors Engage the Nucleus Accumbens

Midler v. Ford Motor Company, 1988

Waits v. Frito-Lay, 1992

IFPI Global Music Report 2026 — Global Recorded Music Revenues in 2025

Universal Music Group — Full-Year 2025 Financial Results

Sony Group — Form 20-F Report for Fiscal 2025

Warner Music Group — Full-Year 2025 Financial Results

UK Parliament — Report on Revenue Sharing in Music Streaming

UK Parliament — Report on Recording Contracts for Performers

Transcript of Michael Jackson’s Anti-Sony Speech, June 15, 2002

CNN Transcript — Michael Jackson’s Allegations Against the Recording Industry, 2002

Los Angeles Times — Background to the Michael Jackson–Sony Dispute, July 9, 2002

U.S. Copyright Office — Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 3: Generative AI Training

Kadrey v. Meta — AI Training and the Distinction Between Copyrightable Expression and Unprotected Style

Sources for the Artists’ Stories

Prince — Warner Bros. Dispute, the “SLAVE” Inscription, and the Name Change

George Michael — Lawsuit Against Sony and His Description of the Contract as “Professional Slavery”

TLC — 14 Million Records, $140 Million in Label Revenue, $49 Million in Profit, and $1.2 Million to the Artists

Toni Braxton — $188 Million in Sales Revenue, Royalties of Less Than 35 Cents per Album, and Bankruptcy

Backstreet Boys — Lou Pearlman’s Contracts, $10 Million in Revenue, and $300,000 for the Group

Taylor Swift — Her Statement on Master Recording Ownership and Re-Recording Her Albums

Trent Reznor — An Overpriced Album and His Encouragement to Fans to Copy It

Courtney Love — Original Speech on Record Contracts, Including the $11 Million Revenue and $6.6 Million Profit Example

Jared Leto and Thirty Seconds to Mars — Two Million Records Sold, a $1.4 Million Debt, and a $30 Million Lawsuit

Musicians’ Union Lawsuit over AI Licensing

American Federation of Musicians — Union Lawsuit over AI Licensing Agreements

All writings