Ai, Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music negotiate with Suno and Udio

"If you can't beat them, join them," sang the Queens in the late 1970s. If you can't beat them, join them. A very topical concept, even in the days of artificial intelligence: Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music, in fact, in parallel with the lawsuits they are pursuing, are opening negotiations with Suno and Udio, two of the most promising Ai tools applied to music.

The news, obtained by Bloomberg from sources working on the dossier, revolves around the horizons of copyright, because it happens to be the case that the two 'text to music' programmes - which allow you to create a song from a prompt, from a description of how it should be - have long been trained on all the musical knowledge, much of which is covered by the copyright of the three majors of the world record industry. Reportedly, Universal, Warner and Sony are now pushing to collect licensing rights to their works 'studied' by the artificial intelligence, also receiving stakes in Suno and Udio. A possible agreement would help settle the lawsuits between the parties. Because exactly last year, the three majors sued the two start-ups accusing them of copyright infringement.

The Recording Industry Association of America, the trade association of the American majors, went so far as to demand up to USD 150,000 per infringed work, for a total compensation claim of nine zeros. Alongside the level of conflict, there is also the level of negotiation: the record companies and the artificial intelligence start-ups are talking to see if they can come to an agreement rather than continuing to clash in court. Finding a square is not easy, because the record companies demand more control over their material, while Suno and Udio want maximum flexibility, as well as a sustainable cost.

Not that there is any shortage of money: last year, Suno, for example, raised $125 million from investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, securing an implied value of $500 million. Udio, on the other hand, took home $10 million from Andreessen Horowitz and other backers. The history of the industry seems to be rooting for a deal. Even Napster's war for the digitisation of music in the late 1990s and early 2000s was in fact all fought in court. It ended in victory for the traditional record industry, of course, but by then the proverbial horse had bolted from the barn: filesharing (more or less legal) had effectively taken over the consumption of listeners, and for the music business, complex decades were on the way. Now that game is happily behind us: streaming, particularly premium streaming, is the new engine of a discography that in 2024 moved globally 29.6 billion dollars, posting its tenth consecutive year of growth.

No one has any intention of making the mistakes of the past again, and so, on the artificial intelligence revolution, potentially at least as disruptive as the digitisation of media, there is a war on the other side. In business, as in music, trying to outdo each other is useless.