--- title: "Sony Music Files a Second Suit Against the AI Music Maker Udio" description: "Sony Music has sued the AI music generator Udio again, this time over 30,117 recordings a judge had barred it from adding to an earlier case. The allegations are unproven, but they turn on the question that hangs over the whole AI industry: whether training on copyrighted work needs a licence." category: "Technology" category_url: https://newsparlor.com/category/technology author: "Hannah Brooks" published: 2026-07-21T07:33:19.000Z updated: 2026-07-21T07:33:19.000Z canonical: https://newsparlor.com/article/sony-music-files-a-second-suit-against-the-ai-music-maker-udio tags: ["artificial-intelligence", "copyright", "music", "udio"] --- # Sony Music Files a Second Suit Against the AI Music Maker Udio Sony Music has sued the AI music generator Udio again, this time over 30,117 recordings a judge had barred it from adding to an earlier case. The allegations are unproven, but they turn on the question that hangs over the whole AI industry: whether training on copyrighted work needs a licence. Sony Music Entertainment, together with nine affiliated labels including Arista and LaFace, [filed a new lawsuit against the AI music generator Udio on July 20](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/sony-music-files-new-lawsuit-against-ai-platform-udio-asserting-over-30000-sound-recordings-a-judge-barred-it-from-adding-to-its-original-case/) in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, according to the trade outlet Music Business Worldwide. Everything that follows is an allegation in an active civil case. None of it has been tested at trial, and Udio contests it. ## Why there are now two cases The unusual feature here is that this is Sony's second suit against the same company, and the reason is procedural. Sony first sued Udio in June 2024, as part of coordinated litigation by the recording industry. This year it tried to expand that original case to add a large batch of further recordings. On June 29 the court declined to let it, ruling in effect that the additions did not have to be made within the existing lawsuit. Rather than drop them, Sony has filed them as a separate action. The new complaint concerns 30,117 sound recordings that Sony says Udio used without permission. So the two cases now run in parallel: the original, and this larger follow-on. ## What Udio has said Udio is an AI system that generates music from text prompts. The central factual question is what it was trained on. On this, there is something more than allegation. According to Music Business Worldwide, Udio has admitted obtaining audio from YouTube for training, using a tool called YT-DLP to "stream rip" recordings. Stream ripping means capturing audio from a streaming service that is meant to be played but not downloaded. Udio's defence is not that it did not use the music, but that doing so is lawful. It argues that training an AI model on copyrighted recordings is fair use, the US copyright doctrine that permits certain uses without a licence. ## Why this is the question for the whole industry The Sony case matters beyond music because the argument at its centre is the one every generative-AI company is having. These systems are built by training on enormous quantities of existing human work, text, images, audio, most of it copyrighted. The companies argue this is transformative and therefore fair use. Rights holders argue it is large-scale copying that requires payment. Which of them is right is genuinely unsettled: the fair-use defence, as applied to AI training, has not yet been decided by the courts, and until it is, every case of this kind is contesting the same open question. That is why a dispute over a specific list of 30,117 recordings is more significant than the number suggests. A clear ruling on whether Udio's training was fair use would be read straight across to text and image models, because the legal principle is the same. The music industry is, in effect, one of the venues where the rule for all of AI is being fought out. ## The industry is not united in litigation One detail complicates any tidy framing of labels-versus-AI, and it is worth stating. Universal Music Group and Warner Music, the other two major labels, have settled with Udio rather than continue to fight it. Sony is the one still litigating. That split is informative. Settling implies a commercial accommodation, some arrangement under which the AI company licenses or pays for what it uses; continuing to litigate implies a bet that the courts will rule training unlawful and hand rights holders a stronger position from which to negotiate. The majors have taken different views of which is the better outcome, which is itself a sign that nobody yet knows how this resolves. For now, the verifiable facts are narrow: a new suit, a specific number of recordings, an admission about YouTube, and a fair-use defence that no court has yet ruled on. The rest is being decided, slowly, in a federal courtroom in New York. ## Sources - [Sony Music files new lawsuit against AI platform Udio, asserting over 30,000 sound recordings](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/sony-music-files-new-lawsuit-against-ai-platform-udio-asserting-over-30000-sound-recordings-a-judge-barred-it-from-adding-to-its-original-case/)