Sony Music Entertainment has filed a second federal copyright lawsuit against AI music company Udio, alleging the service copied 30,117 Sony-controlled sound recordings to train its generative music models without permission.
The complaint was filed July 20th in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by Sony Music Entertainment and nine affiliated labels. The recordings were identified after Sony gained access to Udio’s training information through discovery in earlier litigation, turning a broad dispute over AI training into a fight over tens of thousands of individually identified works.
The catalog includes recordings associated with artists including Alicia Keys, Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley. Sony is seeking statutory damages that can reach $150,000 per work for willful infringement, among other relief.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Sony accuses Udio of obtaining recordings from YouTube without authorization and using them to develop a service capable of generating music that competes with the recordings on which Sony says it was trained.
The separate lawsuit exists because Sony was unable to add the newly identified catalog to its original 2024 case. That procedural history makes the 30,117 figure more than an eye-catching damages multiplier: Sony says it emerged from discovery into what Udio actually used for training.
Discovery Put 30,117 Recordings Into Focus
Sony, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group originally sued Udio in June 2024 through litigation coordinated by the Recording Industry Association of America. The case accused the AI company of mass copyright infringement involving sound recordings allegedly used to train its music-generation technology.
Discovery later changed the scale of what Sony wanted to pursue. After obtaining access to Udio’s training information, the label sought permission to amend its complaint and add more than 30,000 additional recordings it said were present in the datasets.
Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein rejected that request on June 29th. His decision did not determine that Udio had lawfully used the additional recordings. Instead, the judge concluded that inserting more than 30,000 works near the end of document discovery would substantially enlarge the existing litigation.
“Adding more than 30,000 works near the close of document discovery would require substantial additional production and review,” Hellerstein wrote in the ruling, which Music Business Worldwide detailed in July.
Sony responded procedurally rather than abandoning the additional catalog: it filed another lawsuit.
The new complaint asserts 30,117 recordings as a separate case instead of attempting to reopen the older litigation around them. MBW’s filing report documented the July 20th action.
Sony’s Claims Center on Master Recordings
The copyright layer matters here.
Sony Music Entertainment is pursuing rights in sound recordings, not merely the underlying songs. A commercially released track can contain separate copyrights in the composition and the specific recorded performance. Music publishers typically administer composition rights, while record labels commonly control the masters.
Sony’s Udio lawsuit is aimed at the latter.
That makes the case different from disputes involving AI systems accused primarily of copying lyrics or other elements of musical compositions. Sony alleges Udio copied actual recordings to train a system capable of generating new audio.
The 30,117 works stretch across Sony’s label network. Plaintiffs include Sony Music Entertainment and nine affiliated labels, including Arista Records and LaFace Records, the filing coverage details.
Artists named in reporting illustrate the breadth of that catalog rather than functioning as individual plaintiffs. Alicia Keys, Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley are among the performers whose recordings Sony says appear in the training material, while Variety Australia also identifies recordings associated with Beyoncé and Harry Styles.
The distinction between compositions and masters becomes increasingly important as AI music litigation expands. A generated track can potentially raise questions about the song underneath it, the recording used to train a model, the output produced by that model or several of those layers at once.
Sony Says Udio Took Music From YouTube
The new complaint also sharpens Sony’s account of how the training data was allegedly assembled.
Sony accuses Udio of ripping recordings from YouTube and using them without licenses to train its models. The allegation moves the case beyond the abstract question of whether an AI system can legally learn from copyrighted music.
If Sony proves that specific commercial recordings were copied from YouTube into Udio’s training datasets, the court will have to consider both the copying itself and Udio’s argument about what happened to those recordings during model development.
Udio has previously defended its technology by comparing model training with the way musicians listen to existing music and learn from examples. In response to the original 2024 litigation, the company said it was not interested in reproducing material from its training set.
Sony rejects that analogy. Its complaint argues that commercial AI development does not give a company permission to copy protected sound recordings simply because the resulting model is designed to generate something new.
The label also argues that synthetic songs can compete with the music used to train the system. Unauthorized AI outputs could saturate the market and diminish the value of the recordings behind the technology, Sony told the Los Angeles Times.
Those claims remain allegations, and Udio is contesting Sony’s case.
Udio Says Training Is Fair Use
Udio’s defense places fair use at the center of the dispute.
In its response to the new lawsuit, Udio described its training as “quintessential fair use” and disputed Sony’s claim that copying the 30,117 recordings creates liability. The company also argues that damages, if infringement were ultimately found, could be far below the statutory maximum Sony invokes.
Udio contends potential statutory damages could fall as low as $200 per infringed work under its interpretation of the circumstances, its court response shows.
A central disagreement is whether copying recordings for commercial model training without licenses can qualify as fair use.
Sony argues permission is required. Udio maintains that the training process is transformative and lawful.
The outcome could matter beyond the recordings named in this complaint because full-song AI generators depend on large amounts of musical information to produce vocals, instrumentation, arrangements and genre characteristics from prompts.
Sony Keeps Litigating as Rivals Move to Licensing
The major labels no longer have identical strategies toward Udio.
Universal Music Group settled its copyright litigation with Udio in October 2025 and agreed to work with the company on a licensed AI music platform. Warner Music Group followed in November, settling its Udio case and moving toward a licensing relationship of its own.
Sony has continued litigating instead.
It remains the major music company from the original 2024 Udio litigation without an announced licensing settlement with the service. Rather than ending its dispute after discovery, Sony filed a second case asserting tens of thousands of additional recordings, a contrast also visible in the industry’s subsequent licensing fights.
That divergence makes the July lawsuit important beyond its catalog count. The major labels began from a similar position against unlicensed AI training, but their approaches have since split.
Universal and Warner are attempting to move at least some generative music activity into authorized systems where catalog access can be licensed. Sony is continuing to ask courts to establish liability for Udio’s earlier training practices.
The two strategies are not necessarily incompatible forever. A rightsholder can litigate over alleged past infringement while negotiating licenses for future technology. Sony, however, has not announced a Udio licensing agreement.
For now, the industry is getting a real-world test of two approaches: negotiate access to music catalogs or continue litigating while courts define the boundaries of AI training more clearly.
The $150,000 Figure Is a Maximum, Not a Bill
Multiplying 30,117 recordings by the maximum statutory damages available for willful copyright infringement produces an enormous theoretical number.
That is not the amount Sony has been awarded.
Sony seeks up to $150,000 for each work found to have been willfully infringed, along with other available damages and potential profits attributable to infringement. A court would first have to determine liability and then decide what remedies are legally appropriate.
Udio’s position demonstrates the distance between maximum exposure and an eventual award. The company argues that, even if infringement were found, statutory damages could be as low as $200 per work, according to its filing.
The 30,117 figure is therefore important for reasons beyond multiplication. It identifies the scale of Sony’s claimed catalog exposure and turns the litigation into a work-by-work dispute over recordings the company says were actually present in Udio’s training material.
That specificity marks a significant shift from the broad public debate that surrounded AI music when the original lawsuits arrived in 2024.
Training Data Is Becoming the Evidence
When the major labels first sued Udio and rival Suno in 2024, much of the public argument centered on what AI-generated songs appeared capable of reproducing. Labels pointed to outputs they said resembled copyrighted recordings and argued that those similarities suggested protected music had been used for training.
Discovery can move that argument closer to the datasets themselves.
Sony says the additional Udio recordings were identified after it gained access to training information during litigation. Earlier filings also fought over a confidential figure representing the total number of audio files allegedly used to train Udio, showing how valuable the underlying dataset has become inside the case. A June court filing documents that discovery dispute.
The July lawsuit turns the results of that process into a separate legal action.
Instead of arguing only that a generated track sounds suspiciously familiar, Sony is asserting 30,117 specific recordings that it says were copied into Udio’s system.
That shift also matters for the licensing side of AI music. Any durable licensing model requires rightsholders and technology companies to know which catalogs are being used, under what terms and how participating recordings or artists will be compensated.
Litigation is forcing some of those same questions into discovery before the industry has agreed on a universal licensing framework.
Universal and Warner have already chosen licensed relationships with Udio. Sony is still asking a court to decide what happened before those arrangements became part of the business.
The new Sony Music Udio lawsuit is therefore not simply a larger version of the 2024 case. The 30,117 recordings give the dispute something the early AI music fight often lacked: a claimed inventory of the copyrighted masters sitting at the center of the argument.
Whether Udio’s use of those recordings qualifies as fair use remains contested.
What is increasingly difficult to keep abstract is the training data itself.