Universal and Sony file second lawsuit against Suno over 60,202 recordings

Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment filed a second lawsuit against AI music company Suno on Friday, September 18, in federal court in Boston. The complaint alleges that Suno copied 60,202 of the labels' sound recordings without a licence and used them to build the models that power its generation service.

The central allegation concerns v6, launched on September 9. Suno says v6 was trained from scratch in partnership with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, on data that "doesn't include data from Universal or Sony". The labels claim v6 was built on the outputs and user preference data of earlier, unlicensed models, calling it "the fruit of the same poisoned tree".

The filing seeks statutory damages, up to $2,500 for each alleged circumvention of YouTube's anti-downloading technology, an injunction and a jury trial. At the $150,000 willful-infringement ceiling, 60,202 recordings would carry a theoretical maximum above $9 billion. Suno's stated defence in the first case, filed in June 2024, is that training on copyrighted recordings is fair use.