Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Music Recording, newest first.
YouTube Music began showing labels on tracks made with generative AI, sorting songs as Fully Gen AI, Partly Gen AI or No Gen AI using a mix of declarations from music partners and its own detection tools, with the labels also appearing in the main YouTube app. Deezer said it will add a setting before the end of the year that removes AI-generated tracks, albums and artists from search entirely. The two moves land as streaming services struggle with a flood of AI uploads.
DistroKid confirmed to The Verge that it has been quietly removing songs in response to claims from Universal Music Group, which sued the distributor in September accusing it of running an "AI-slop pipeline" that pushes AI-generated and infringing tracks onto streaming services as if they were real artist releases. Musicians say human-made work is being swept up with no warning. One lost six songs, including a Stevie Wonder cover he says was licensed and a track flagged for sampling a song released two years after his own. DistroKid, which handles a large share of new music uploaded to streaming services, has said it will defend the case vigorously.
Michael Smith of North Carolina was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to forfeit more than $8 million, after pleading guilty to the first US criminal case of AI-assisted streaming fraud. Over seven years he made hundreds of thousands of AI songs and ran thousands of fake accounts on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music to stream them. In one month of 2023 his tracks drew 80.9 million streams, against 9.3 million for Taylor Swift's whole catalog. Prosecutors say the payouts came out of the royalty pool shared with real artists.
Sony Music and Universal Music Group, the two major labels that have not licensed their catalogs to Suno, filed a new lawsuit on Thursday aimed at its v6 model. Suno says v6 was trained from the ground up on partner-licensed content and on creations and preference signals from its users. The labels argue that those user creations came from earlier Suno models trained on their recordings, and that v6 was also distilled from those older models. "Training a 'new' model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it," the complaint says. The case tests whether a clean retraining can wash out an earlier dataset, which matters to every lab that trains on its own models' outputs.
Suno shipped v6 in three variants and says it was built from the ground up on data that excludes what earlier models were trained on, licensed from Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe alongside user data. Older models will be retired, and an opt-in program is planned to let artists take a share of revenue when their work is remixed. That is a different posture from a watermark, which is what the company offered a month ago; it is also incomplete, because the suits from Sony and Universal are still running. The Verge's hands-on found genre control much improved and the advertised natural imperfections still missing, which is the honest limit of a model sold partly on sounding less machine-made.
The two publishers filed in the Northern District of California on August 28, naming co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as defendants alongside the company. The complaint covers tens of thousands of compositions and traces the lyrics to torrented book libraries, scraping of the licensed sites MusixMatch and LyricFind, and the Common Crawl and Books3 datasets. They seek up to $150,000 per work willfully infringed, and Anthropic says it disagrees and will defend itself. This is the fourth publishing suit against the company, and it follows the Bartz settlement of $1.5 billion, which held that training on books was fair use but pirating them was not.
Merlin, which represents independent labels and distributors across more than 70 countries and roughly 15 percent of the global recorded-music market, signed on to Spotify's forthcoming fan-made covers and remixing product. Member labels choose whether their artists take part, and the tool will launch as a paid add-on so participating artists earn from it. "Every creation drives listeners back to the original work," said Spotify senior vice president Charlie Hellman. Universal Music Group had already backed the product separately, which puts both the major-label and independent halves of the market inside a format that did not exist a year ago.
Streaming service Deezer said fully AI-generated songs have, for the first time, passed 50 percent of its daily uploads — roughly 90,000 tracks a day, up from 44 percent in April. The flood barely registers with listeners, accounting for just 1 to 3 percent of streams, up to 85 percent of which Deezer flags as fraudulent. The company is tagging AI tracks, cutting them from recommendations and playlists, and removing fraud-linked and long-unstreamed uploads. "We have reached a pivotal moment," CEO Alexis Lanternier said.
Leaked Suno source code from a breach shows the AI music startup scraped enormous volumes of copyrighted audio to train its models — including roughly 114,000 hours from YouTube Music plus thousands more from Deezer and Genius — routed through commercial proxies to bypass anti-bot defenses. The trove also exposed contact and partial payment data for hundreds of thousands of customers, who say they were never notified. The details could strengthen the copyright suits Universal and Sony have already brought against the company.
Starting July 15, the streaming service TIDAL will demonetize fully AI-generated tracks, tag them with an "AI" badge, and automatically remove songs that impersonate real artists. It is among the most aggressive label-and-demonetize stances yet, following Deezer — which says 44 percent of its daily uploads are now AI-generated. TIDAL framed the move as protecting "organic creativity" as synthetic music floods streaming platforms.
Suno raised a $400 million Series D led by Bond, more than doubling its valuation to $5.4 billion just seven months after its last round — a sign investors still see runaway demand for generative music. The raise lands while Universal Music Group, Sony, and Germany's rights society GEMA press copyright suits accusing Suno of training on tens of thousands of songs without permission; Warner settled and signed a license last year. Suno maintains its training is fair use.
Spotify and Universal Music Group announced a licensing deal Thursday that will let Premium subscribers create AI-generated covers and remixes of Universal artists' songs, with revenue shared back to participating artists. The deal is built on three principles — **"consent, credit, and compensation,"** per Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström — and is the music industry's most prominent AI-licensing framework to date, contrasting sharply with Suno and Udio, which are being sued by the major labels for training on their catalogs without permission. Neither launch date nor the list of participating artists has been announced.
Stability AI released Stable Audio 3.0, a four-model family for music generation, with the medium and large variants rendering compositions up to six minutes and twenty seconds. Three variants ship with open weights; the large model is API or self-hosted with a paid license required above one million dollars in revenue. The company emphasizes the training data is fully licensed through deals with Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group — a deliberate contrast with Suno and Udio, both of which face major-label copyright suits.