UMG v. Uncharted Labs (Udio)
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UMG Recordings, Inc., et al. v. Uncharted Labs, Inc. (case number 1:24-cv-04777) is a federal copyright infringement lawsuit filed on June 24, 2024 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against Uncharted Labs, Inc., the company that operates the Udio generative AI music platform. The action was brought by a group of major record companies coordinated by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and was assigned to United States District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein.[1][2]
The complaint alleged that Uncharted Labs trained Udio's AI music generation model by copying massive quantities of copyrighted sound recordings without permission, and that the resulting service produced outputs that imitated specific, recognizable hit songs, including Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You," Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean," ABBA's "Dancing Queen," and the Beach Boys' "I Get Around." The plaintiffs sought a declaration of infringement, injunctive relief, and statutory damages under the Copyright Act of up to $150,000 per infringed work.[3][4]
On October 29, 2025, Universal Music Group (UMG) and Udio announced a settlement that resolved UMG's claims and established a new licensing relationship under which Udio committed to launching a redesigned, "licensed and authorized" AI music platform in 2026.[5][6] Warner Music Group reached a similar settlement on November 19, 2025, leaving Sony Music Entertainment as the sole remaining major-label plaintiff in active litigation against Uncharted Labs as of May 2026.[7][8]
The Udio action is widely regarded as a landmark case for the music industry's response to generative AI and is generally discussed in tandem with the parallel suit filed the same day against Suno, Inc. in the District of Massachusetts. Together the two cases are commonly known as "RIAA v. Suno" and "RIAA v. Udio."[1][9]
Uncharted Labs, Inc. is a New York-based artificial intelligence company founded in December 2023. The founding team consisted of five former Google DeepMind researchers: David Ding, Conor Durkan, Charlie Nash, Yaroslav Ganin, and Andrew Sanchez. The founders had previously contributed to work on generative models inside DeepMind, with several members involved in audio and image generation research.[10][11]
The team released the consumer product, branded as Udio, in a free public beta on April 10, 2024. Udio allowed users to generate fully produced audio tracks by entering text descriptions of a song's genre, mood, lyrics, or stylistic inspirations. The initial release attracted attention because outputs sounded markedly more polished than then-comparable systems, with cleaner vocals, mastered mixes, and clearer stylistic mimicry.[10][11]
At launch, Udio disclosed an approximately $10 million seed financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The round included participation from individual investors associated with the music industry, including will.i.am and Common, as well as technology figures such as Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram.[10][11]
By mid-2024, several systems demonstrated the ability to produce vocal music from short text prompts. Suno, launched in 2022 and operated by Suno, Inc., reached broad public adoption following its v3 release; Udio entered the market in April 2024 and competed directly with Suno on consumer features and audio quality. Industry observers placed both systems within the broader category of generative AI and AI music generation, which also included research models such as Google DeepMind's Lyria and Meta AI's MusicGen.[12]
Unlike many earlier research models, neither Udio nor Suno publicly disclosed the composition of its training data. Each company described its training corpus only in general terms (for example, as "a vast amount of different kinds of sound recordings" or "a large dataset of music"), an approach that became central to the dispute that followed.[12][13]
The RIAA, the U.S. trade association that represents the three major recorded-music companies (UMG, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group), had publicly criticized unlicensed AI training on commercial sound recordings throughout 2023 and 2024. In January 2024, the RIAA included generative AI on its list of "notorious markets" submitted to the U.S. Trade Representative. Public statements from RIAA officials in the months before the suits framed generative AI services that trained on commercial catalogs without permission as "industrial scale" copyright infringement.[14][15]
The complaint in the Southern District of New York was filed jointly by the following recorded-music plaintiffs:
The sole named defendant was Uncharted Labs, Inc., doing business as Udio.com. The case was captioned UMG Recordings, Inc., et al. v. Uncharted Labs, Inc. and assigned case number 1:24-cv-04777 on the Southern District of New York docket. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein was assigned to preside over the matter.[2][3]
The complaint pleaded direct copyright infringement of the plaintiffs' sound recordings under the Copyright Act of 1976. The core theory of the case was that Uncharted Labs had copied the plaintiffs' phonorecords during the construction of its training dataset and again during model training, and that those reproductions were themselves infringements regardless of the nature of any subsequent generated outputs.[3][4]
The complaint also alleged that user-facing outputs from Udio's service infringed the plaintiffs' sound recordings by reproducing protected elements of specific named tracks. The plaintiffs sought:
On the same date, the RIAA also coordinated the filing of a parallel suit in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts against Suno, Inc., styled UMG Recordings, Inc., et al. v. Suno, Inc. The two complaints relied on similar legal theories but were filed in different jurisdictions because of the locations of the defendants' principal places of business: Uncharted Labs in New York, and Suno in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[1][15] The two cases have proceeded independently on separate dockets and before different judges.
A distinctive feature of the Udio complaint was its detailed presentation of paired audio examples: a recognizable commercial recording, alongside a Udio-generated output that the plaintiffs asserted reproduced protected expression from that recording. The complaint described prompts, output titles, and musicological similarities (such as melodic contour, rhythm, vocal style, and harmonic structure) for each example. Multiple secondary sources have summarized the most prominent examples, although a small number of details (such as exact prompt text) appear primarily in the complaint and its exhibits rather than in widely accessible press coverage.[3][4][16]
According to reporting that summarized the complaint, plaintiffs prompted Udio with a description that included references to Mariah Carey's voice, contemporary R&B, the holiday genre, and biographical descriptors of the artist. The complaint alleged that the resulting generated output contained chords, vocal stylings, and a melody that were closely modeled on Carey's original 1994 recording. The complaint identified additional Udio outputs that contained recognizable elements of the same recording.[4][16]
The complaint alleged that prompts referencing the style and subject matter of Michael Jackson's 1982 hit produced multiple Udio outputs that incorporated melodic and rhythmic patterns from the original. One example output identified in coverage of the complaint was titled "Midnight Denial." Plaintiffs argued that the rhythm and pitch contour of the generated melody on the disputed phrase closely tracked the original recording, and that further outputs reproduced elements of the chorus and Jackson's vocal style.[4][16]
The complaint cited Udio outputs that allegedly reproduced features of ABBA's 1976 single "Dancing Queen" and the Beach Boys' 1964 single "I Get Around." Both examples were used to demonstrate the plaintiffs' contention that Udio could reproduce era-specific production characteristics that were unique to particular hit recordings, not merely to a broader genre.[4][16]
Press coverage of the complaint and the parallel Suno complaint noted additional Udio outputs alleged to imitate works such as The Temptations' "My Girl" and Green Day's "American Idiot." The plaintiffs framed these examples as illustrative rather than exhaustive, and indicated that the complete set of allegedly infringing outputs would be developed through discovery.[16]
The plaintiffs argued that the alleged closeness of these outputs to specific commercial recordings was evidence that Udio's training set must have contained the plaintiffs' copyrighted phonorecords, and that the only plausible source for such fine-grained imitation was unauthorized copying of the underlying recordings.[3][4]
Udio did not publish a detailed point-by-point response to the complaint at the time of filing. The company's principal public statement was a blog post titled "AI and the Future of Music," which framed Udio's training process as one of analyzing existing recordings to extract patterns about musical style. The post argued that musical "ideas" and "styles" are not themselves owned by anyone and that learning patterns from a body of recordings is, in Udio's view, analogous to how human musicians study and absorb existing music.[17]
In its answer to the complaint, filed in August 2024, Udio formally asserted that any reproduction of the plaintiffs' sound recordings during training was protected by the fair use doctrine codified at 17 U.S.C. section 107. The company argued that:
Udio's filing characterized its training pipeline as "a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product," and labeled this kind of use "quintessential fair use."[13]
In the same answer, Udio formally admitted that it had built its models by ingesting "a vast amount of different kinds of sound recordings" obtained from publicly available sources. In subsequent filings, Udio further acknowledged that it had obtained training data from YouTube using the open-source tool YT-DLP, an admission that drew significant press attention because it confirmed long-standing speculation about how generative audio systems obtained their training material.[13]
Udio's pleadings also advanced a competitive-injury framing, arguing that the major-label plaintiffs were attempting to use copyright litigation to suppress a new class of music-creation tools, and asserting that the plaintiffs collectively held positions of market power in commercial music that influenced their willingness to negotiate licenses. This framing did not develop into a separately briefed counterclaim before the UMG settlement, but it featured in the case's broader public narrative throughout 2025.[13]
The RIAA responded publicly to Udio's fair use position in August 2024 with statements that characterized "industrial scale" copying of commercial recordings as outside the scope of fair use and rejected the notion that wholesale copying of phonorecords for training purposes could be analogized to ordinary musical learning. The RIAA framed Udio's outputs as products that competed directly with commercial recordings and argued that the fourth fair use factor (effect on the market for the original) decisively cut against Udio.[14][17]
On October 29, 2025, UMG and Udio jointly announced that they had reached a comprehensive settlement of UMG's claims in the lawsuit. The companies issued a joint press release describing the agreement as the first of "strategic agreements" between the two parties, and characterized the resolution as a transition from litigation to commercial partnership.[5][6]
The press release framed the settlement in three parts:
Udio co-founder and chief executive Andrew Sanchez stated:
"This moment brings to life everything we've been building toward, uniting AI and the music industry in a way that truly champions artists. Together, we're building the technological and business landscape that will fundamentally expand what's possible in music creation and engagement."[5]
UMG chairman and chief executive Sir Lucian Grainge stated that the settlement reflected UMG's commitment to "do what's right by our artists and songwriters, whether that means embracing new technologies, developing new business models, diversifying revenue streams or beyond."[5][6]
According to the joint announcement and reporting on the settlement, Udio's redesigned platform will:
The companies did not publicly disclose the financial terms of either the compensatory settlement payment or the per-use rates under the new licenses. Public reporting and music-industry commentary noted that the lack of disclosed economic terms drew criticism from artist representatives, who called for more transparency about how revenue from licensed AI training would flow to individual creators.[18][19]
Following the public announcement, the parties filed a notice of settlement on the Southern District of New York docket on October 31, 2025, followed by a stipulation of dismissal with prejudice. Judge Hellerstein entered an order of dismissal terminating UMG's claims on November 5, 2025.[1][2]
On November 19, 2025, Warner Music Group (WMG) announced that it had reached a settlement with Uncharted Labs that closely mirrored the structure of the UMG agreement. As with UMG, the terms of the WMG settlement included:
WMG chief executive Robert Kyncl framed the settlement as consistent with the company's stated position that it was "unwaveringly committed to the protection of the rights of our artists and songwriters."[7]
Following the UMG and WMG settlements, Sony Music Entertainment became the sole remaining major-label plaintiff with active claims against Uncharted Labs in the Southern District of New York action. Sony's claims continued to proceed under Judge Hellerstein's case management.[7][8]
In December 2025, Sony Music and Uncharted Labs jointly requested an extension of approximately two months in the schedule for document discovery, citing the volume of materials at issue. Judge Hellerstein granted the request and extended the document-production deadline to January 30, 2026.[8] Sony's continued litigation against Udio paralleled its continued litigation against Suno in the District of Massachusetts, and was widely interpreted in the music industry press as a strategic decision to pursue a fair-use ruling on the merits rather than settle on terms similar to those reached by UMG and WMG.[8][21]
In addition to the major-label claims, Uncharted Labs became the subject of follow-on class actions on behalf of independent artists who alleged that their sound recordings had also been used in training Udio's models. These class actions, separate from the main RIAA-coordinated litigation, were in their early procedural stages as of mid-2026.[21]
The Udio settlements with UMG and WMG were widely characterized in industry commentary as a turning point in the music industry's approach to generative AI. In contrast to early disputes between rightsholders and large-language-model developers, in which the issue of unlicensed training data was litigated primarily through fair-use defenses and settlements that addressed past harms (such as Concord Music Group v. Anthropic in the lyrics context), the Udio settlements established a structure under which the AI developer agreed to operate on licensed and authorized music going forward.[18][22]
The Udio settlement structure shared several common elements with other late-2025 music-industry AI agreements:
The settlements increased pressure on other AI music developers that had relied on similar training practices. As of May 2026, Suno, Inc. remained in active litigation against all three major labels and had not announced a comparable licensing arrangement with the majors as a group; Warner Music Group did, however, reach a separate settlement with Suno in November 2025 that observers compared to the Udio template.[7][9][21]
Reception of the licensed-AI partnerships among working artists was mixed. Some artist-rights groups welcomed the move from unlicensed training to opt-in licensing as a meaningful improvement, but others publicly criticized the lack of transparency regarding the financial terms of the settlements and the per-use compensation that individual artists would receive from training and output revenue. Public statements from artist advocacy organizations called for more detailed disclosure of payment structures and clearer attribution and consent mechanisms before catalog rollouts.[18][19]
While the Udio and Suno suits were filed on the same day and presented largely parallel legal theories, the two cases diverged significantly in their subsequent procedural and commercial paths:
These distinctions are commonly drawn in legal and industry commentary on the AI music cases.[21][22]
As of May 19, 2026, the procedural state of UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Uncharted Labs, Inc. is as follows:
The case has been widely cited in subsequent legal and policy debates over generative AI and copyright as one of the first AI-training disputes to be resolved through licensing rather than judicial ruling on the merits, and as a leading example of the "license plus settlement" template that emerged in the music industry during 2025 and 2026.[18][22]