Sony Music files second lawsuit against Udio over 30,000 recordings

Sony Music Entertainment has initiated a second copyright infringement lawsuit against the generative AI music service Udio. The complaint, filed on Monday, July 20, 2026, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that Udio utilized 30,117 sound recordings without authorization to train its machine learning models. This legal action follows a June 29 ruling by Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who denied Sony’s request to append these specific recordings to its existing 2024 litigation, citing the potential for substantial prejudice against the defendant due to the advanced stage of the initial case.

The new filing is brought by Sony Music alongside nine affiliated labels, including Arista Records and LaFace. According to the complaint, evidence of the unauthorized usage was uncovered during the discovery phase of the original lawsuit. By employing audio fingerprinting techniques, Sony identified a vast quantity of its proprietary works within the training data used by Udio. The label contends that the 30,117 works listed in the new suit represent only a small portion of the recordings Udio allegedly infringed.

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Legal Strategy and Financial Stakes

The financial scale of this new litigation is significant. Sony is seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work, potentially placing the total claim against Udio at $4.5 billion. The complaint asserts three primary counts: infringement of post-1972 sound recordings, infringement of pre-1972 recordings protected under the Music Modernization Act, and the circumvention of technological measures in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Sony further alleges that Udio obtained audio data by using tools such as YT-DLP to bypass protection measures on YouTube, a practice Udio has previously acknowledged while maintaining that such activity is protected under the doctrine of fair use.

The Licensing Market as a Weapon

A central component of Sony’s argument involves the changing landscape of AI licensing. While Sony remains the sole major record label without a licensing agreement with Udio, other industry entities—including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Merlin, Kobalt, and Believe—have already secured such deals. Sony is leveraging these agreements as evidence to challenge the defendant's fair use defense. The complaint argues that Udio’s decision to pay for rights indicates that a functioning market exists for AI training inputs, thereby undermining the claim that no such market is required.

"A company that pays to license the very inputs at issue cannot credibly maintain that no market exists for those inputs."

Sony Music legal complaint, via The Next Web

Sony argues that Udio's "belated embrace of licensing" only underscores the original illegality of its data harvesting practices. Furthermore, the label claims that the synthetic musical outputs generated by Udio’s models inevitably saturate the market with content that competes with, cheapen, and drown out the genuine human-created sound recordings used during the training process.

Broader Industry Context

This development occurs within a wave of parallel copyright disputes involving generative AI. Sony and Universal Music Group are currently pursuing a separate, larger lawsuit against Suno in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. In that case, the plaintiffs have sought to include 61,026 recordings in their claims. Sony continues to request a jury trial for its claims against Udio, framing the company's development as an aggressive attempt to achieve market dominance while disregarding the rights of copyright owners.

As the case progresses, the court’s interpretation of market dilution is expected to serve as a pivotal indicator for the legal standing of generative AI training processes. Industry observers remain focused on whether the threat of multi-billion dollar damages will drive Udio toward a licensing settlement with Sony, mirroring the agreements established by its competitors.