Here are the 30,000 songs Sony is suing Udio’s AI music generator over
The Verge Emma Roth
Sony Music just filed a new lawsuit against AI music maker Udio over more than 30,000 songs, from Elvis to Beyoncé to Harry Styles. Universal and Warner already settled with Udio and now work with it, but Sony's doubling down on the fight.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Emma Roth — read the original for the full story.
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Sony Music Entertainment is not done with Udio. The label filed a fresh lawsuit in a New York court on Monday, this time targeting more than 30,000 songs it says the AI music generator trained on without permission, everything from Elvis Presley's Hound Dog to Beyoncé's Say My Name to Harry Styles' As It Was. And Sony is blunt about it: the filing calls this list "only a small portion" of what it believes Udio actually copied.
The backstory matters here. Sony joined Universal Music Group and Warner Records in 2024 to sue both Udio and rival AI outfit Suno over alleged copyright infringement. That original case covered 333 works. But once discovery opened Udio's training data to scrutiny, Sony says it used audio fingerprinting to identify tens of thousands more tracks it believes were fed into the models. Sony tried to add those songs to the existing lawsuit, and a judge said no, keeping the case capped at its original scope.
So instead of expanding the old fight, Sony started a new one. The complaint leans on an admission Sony attributes to Udio, that its models were built by showing the system "a vast amount of different kinds of sound recordings," including material pulled from YouTube. Sony wants a court order blocking further infringement, plus statutory damages that can run up to $150,000 per work, a number that, multiplied across 30,000 songs, gets enormous fast.
What makes this messier is that Sony is now going it alone. Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group have already settled with Udio and are reportedly partnering with the company as the wider industry starts making peace with generative AI rather than fighting it in court. Sony's decision to keep litigating, and to say it could expand the song list even further, puts it out of step with its two biggest rivals at exactly the moment the rest of the business seems to be normalizing deals with AI music makers instead of suing them.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Sony picking a fight while Universal and Warner cut deals says everything about where the music industry actually stands on AI: not united, just negotiating from different leverage points. Calling 30,000 songs "a small portion" of the alleged infringement is either a genuine warning shot or a very expensive bluff, and either way it's going to make Udio's settlement math with Sony a lot harder than whatever Universal and Warner agreed to.
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