Sony Music Entertainment filed a new lawsuit against Udio on Monday in a New York court, accusing the AI music generator of copying more than 30,000 of its recordings into training data, with damages sought at up to $150,000 per work. The catalog cited runs from Elvis Presley's Hound Dog to Beyoncé's Say My Name, Britney Spears, Johnny Cash, and Harry Styles' As It Was. At the statutory maximum, the exposure clears $4.5B before any expansion of the list.
Sony says the 30,000 songs represent "only a small portion of Plaintiffs' works that Udio infringed," and has signaled it may add more. The label identified the additional recordings using audio fingerprinting after gaining access to Udio's training data through discovery in the earlier case.
This is Sony's second swing at Udio. In 2024, Sony joined Universal Music Group and Warner Records in suing both Udio and rival AI music-maker Suno over unauthorized use of copyrighted recordings. Sony had asked the court to fold the newly identified 30,000 tracks into that action, but a judge rejected the motion, leaving the original case capped at 333 works.
Key facts
- 01Sony filed a New York suit on Monday accusing Udio of infringing more than 30,000 of its recordings.
- 02The label is seeking up to $150,000 per work, exposing Udio to potential damages exceeding $4.5B.
- 03A judge previously rejected Sony's motion to add the songs to the 2024 case, capping that action at 333 works.
- 04Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group have already settled with Udio and are now partnering with it.
- 05Sony identified the additional tracks via audio fingerprinting after gaining access to Udio's training data in discovery.
The new filing is the workaround. Rather than expanding the existing docket, Sony is running a parallel suit built on the fingerprinting evidence, with a much larger catalog and a much larger damages ceiling. The company is also asking the court to enjoin Udio from further use of its recordings.
Sony's complaint quotes Udio's own prior statements, alleging the company "admitted that its generative AI models were 'constructed by showing the program a vast amount of different kinds of sound recordings,'" with material sourced from platforms including YouTube. Discovery in the original case has previously indicated Udio pulled from YouTube, Genius, and Deezer.
The competitive picture around Udio has shifted sharply since the 2024 suits landed. Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group have both settled with Udio and are now commercial partners, part of a broader pivot in which the major labels are trying to license, rather than litigate, generative music into existence. Sony is now the lone holdout among the three majors still in active litigation against the company.
That leaves Udio negotiating with a plaintiff that has both a fingerprint-verified catalog list and a statutory damages framework that scales linearly with each additional work Sony identifies. Every song added to the filing raises the ceiling by $150,000. The 30,000 number is a floor, not a cap, and Sony has been explicit about that.
Udio has not yet responded publicly to the new filing. In the earlier consolidated case, the AI music companies argued that ingestion of copyrighted recordings for training purposes falls within fair use — a defense that remains unresolved across the broader wave of AI copyright litigation targeting model providers in music, text, and image. The doctrinal question of whether training constitutes infringement has not yet produced a definitive appellate ruling in the music context.
The counterweight is that settlements from UMG and Warner suggest the labels themselves see more upside in licensing frameworks than in prolonged litigation, provided the terms are right. Sony's aggressive posture may be positioning for a comparable deal rather than a courtroom endgame. Its willingness to expand the suit — and to keep expanding it — reads as leverage.
For the generative music sector, the immediate consequence is pricing pressure on any commercial deal Udio strikes going forward. A settlement that resolves a 30,000-song complaint will look materially different from one that resolves a 333-song complaint, and any figure Sony extracts will set the reference point for future negotiations with Suno and other model providers. The 2024 lawsuits framed the question of whether AI music companies could operate at all; this filing reframes it as how much they will pay to keep operating.
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