Common Music Group and Sony Music Leisure have sued Suno for a second time.
The joint grievance, filed on Friday (September 18) in Boston federal courtroom, accuses the AI music firm of copying 60,202 of the labels’ sound recordings, with no license, and utilizing them to construct the fashions that run its music technology service.
The brand new submitting in opposition to Suno, obtained by MBW, may be learn in full right here.
US copyright legislation units damages for willful infringement at as much as USD $150,000 per work.
At that ceiling, the 60,202 recordings would carry a theoretical most of simply over $9 billion.
The labels are additionally asking for as much as $2,500 for every act of circumventing YouTube‘s anti-downloading know-how, which is the utmost US legislation permits on that separate declare.
Utilized as soon as to every of the 60,202 recordings, that may add roughly $150 million.
Common and Sony are additionally in search of a courtroom order stopping Suno from any additional use of their recordings, and have demanded a jury trial.
The grievance’s central new allegation considerations v6, the mannequin suite Suno launched on September 9.
Suno says v6 was in-built partnership with Warner Music Group, BMG, and Imagine.
Chief Product Officer Jack Brody advised MBW at launch that “v6 was skilled solely from scratch, from the bottom up,” on information that “doesn’t embody information from Common or Sony.”
The labels argue that this doesn’t wipe out Suno‘s legal responsibility as a result of, they allege, v6 was constructed on the output of fashions skilled on their recordings.
“Coaching a ‘new’ mannequin on the outputs of an infringing mannequin doesn’t remove the infringement; it launders it, passing the worth of Plaintiffs’ expression from the copied recordings into the contaminated fashions, from these fashions into their outputs, and from these outputs into v6,” the grievance states. “…v6 just isn’t a recent begin; it’s the fruit of the identical poisoned tree.”
“Coaching a ‘new’ mannequin on the outputs of an infringing mannequin doesn’t remove the infringement; it launders it.”
Common and Sony’s new swimsuit
On the info used to construct the brand new fashions, the submitting alleges: “Suno has admitted that it skilled v6 utilizing ‘person interactions’ with earlier iterations of its fashions.
“However these ‘interactions’ are the outputs of, and choice information derived from, Suno’s prior fashions, every of which was skilled on the unlicensed corpus of copyrighted sound recordings described above, together with Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Recordings.”
(Suno generates two tracks per immediate. The “choice information” is its document of which one the person picks in every case – information it’s used to tell the event of V6.)
“To this point, each such sign has been a judgment about audio outputs generated utilizing Suno‘s unlicensed fashions – that’s, artificial outputs embodying the expressive options that Suno’s tainted fashions derived from Plaintiffs’ recordings,” the grievance states.
The submitting additionally alleges that Suno constructed v6 utilizing information distillation, a course of it describes as one “whereby a brand new ‘scholar’ mannequin is skilled to breed the discovered conduct of a predecessor ‘trainer’ mannequin.”
“Right here, the ‘lecturers’ are Suno‘s prior fashions, and the capabilities they transmit – learn how to compose, organize, and render convincing imitations of human-created music throughout genres and kinds – had been derived from the unlicensed recordings on which these fashions skilled, together with Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Recordings,” the grievance reads. “…v6’s coaching corpus, in substance, embodies the collected learnings of fashions constructed on Plaintiffs’ works.”
“the capabilities Suno’s prior fashions transmit [to V6] – learn how to compose, organize, and render convincing imitations of human-created music throughout genres and kinds – had been derived from the unlicensed recordings on which these fashions skilled.”
Accusation in Common and Sony swimsuit
The submitting names v4, v4.5, v4.5+, v5, v4.5-all, and v5.5 as skilled on the identical copied corpus.
“Thus, each mannequin Suno has ever launched – from its earliest variations by way of v6 – is the product of, and continues to take advantage of, Suno’s unauthorized copying of the Copyrighted Recordings,” the grievance states.
The submitting provides that Suno has by no means mentioned it destroyed the recordings it copied: “v6 thus rests on a basis of unauthorized copies of Plaintiffs’ works that Suno continues to carry and exploit…”
The grievance moreover turns Suno‘s personal offers in opposition to it.
The corporate settled with Warner Music Group in November 2025, signed BMG on August 12, and introduced a partnership with Imagine on September 8.
“Three agreements with three main rightsholders in lower than a yr affirm {that a} functioning market exists for licensing sound recordings to coach generative AI fashions and that Suno itself acknowledges that utilizing copyrighted sound recordings for this goal requires permission,” the submitting reads.
That issues as a result of Suno‘s core protection is that coaching a mannequin on copyrighted materials is ‘truthful use’, and one issue a courtroom weighs is the potential market injury such a follow may inflict on the unique works.
The grievance quotes Brody saying the income share with companions is “not in alternate for coaching” and that the offers are “probably not in regards to the information”.
It calls that characterization “self-serving.”
On market hurt, the grievance factors to Deezer, which mentioned in July 2026 that greater than half of recent tracks arriving on its platform every day had been AI-generated, at round 90,000 a day.
“Each machine-generated monitor delivered to a streaming service competes with the Copyrighted Recordings for placement, for discovery, for finite listener consideration, and for a share of the mounted royalty swimming pools from which real artists and rightsholders are paid,” the submitting states.
“Dilution at this scale and velocity isn’t just a future hurt; it’s a current, measured, and accelerating one.”
“Dilution at this scale and velocity isn’t just a future hurt; it’s a current, measured, and accelerating one.”
Common and Sony’s new swimsuit
Setting out the broader hurt, the grievance states: “Suno‘s wholesale theft of the Copyrighted Recordings threatens all the music ecosystem and the quite a few individuals it employs.
“It additionally degrades the rights of artists to manage their works, decide whether or not future makes use of of their works align with their aesthetic and private values, and determine the services or products with which they want to be related.”
The identical passage quotes Suno co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman saying: “[i]t’s probably not gratifying to make music now…[i]t takes loads of time, it takes loads of follow, you must get actually good at an instrument or actually good at a chunk of manufacturing software program.”
“The time, follow, and talent Mr. Shulman derides are precisely what copyright legislation exists to encourage and reward, and precisely what spurred the creation of the Copyrighted Recordings Suno copied and ingested into its AI fashions,” the grievance states.
This second case has been triggered by a latest ruling in UMG and Sony‘s first case in opposition to Suno, initially filed in June 2024.
The 2 majors had requested so as to add 61,026 recordings to that unique lawsuit in opposition to Suno, which covers 560 works.
Choose F. Dennis Saylor IV refused that request on August 18, ruling that the additional works would delay a case he desires selected truthful use, and noting that the labels might carry them as a separate swimsuit.
“As a result of Suno hid the contents of its coaching information, the grievance within the earlier motion recognized a minuscule, illustrative fraction of the recordings Suno had really copied,” the brand new grievance states.
“Although the 60,202 sound recordings asserted on this motion might extra carefully replicate the breadth of Suno’s infringement, in actuality they continue to be solely a small portion of Plaintiffs’ works that Suno infringed.”
The labels say they pinpointed their works inside Suno‘s coaching information utilizing audio fingerprinting firm Audible Magic, throughout discovery within the first case.
Within the first case introduced in opposition to it by Common and Sony, Suno argues that coaching its fashions on copyrighted recordings is “quintessential truthful use.” It admitted in a September 1 submitting that it obtained audio from YouTube utilizing the instrument YT-DLP.
Truth discovery in that case closes on September 30.Music Enterprise Worldwide
