Music company sues AI song maker Suno for $157.5 million

A music company that owns the rights to famous songs is suing Suno, an app that makes full songs from a text prompt. Reservoir says Suno copied 1,050 of its songs without paying, to teach its AI how music works. It wants up to $150,000 per song, which adds up to $157.5 million.

What Reservoir claims

The filing names hits such as Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" and "Both Sides Now," Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach" and Miles Davis's "So What." Reservoir says it owns or exclusively controls the US rights to all 1,050 songs. The suit makes three claims:

• Direct copyright infringement, meaning copying the songs.
• Breaking through technical locks that guard websites and streaming services.
• Removing or changing songwriter credits and similar information.

Reservoir is asking for a jury trial. The case number is 3:26-cv-12305. Suno is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The leaked code

Much of the detail comes from what the complaint calls leaked Suno source code, reported by 404 Media. Reservoir says the code shows Suno used proxy services from a company called Bright Data. Proxies hide where web requests come from. The filing says they were used to pull millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer and Genius.

The complaint gives figures from the code: 2,057,486 artist records and 6,980,653 lyric page records. It also describes a file of over two million clips, about 113,879 hours of audio, or roughly thirteen years of music. Bright Data is not being sued.

Two stories that clash

In a separate case brought by major record labels, Suno said its training data includes essentially all music of reasonable quality on the open internet, "abiding by paywalls, password protections, and the like." Reservoir alleges the opposite, that Suno got around locks on services such as Tidal. How those accounts fit together will matter for the claim about breaking locks.

Who it affects

Anyone who uses AI tools to make soundtracks, jingles or ads is in the picture. If AI music tools must license the songs they learn from, those tools could get costlier or work differently.

What happens next

These are claims in a complaint, not court findings. The material does not include a response from Suno, and no ruling has been made.