Product1 publisher3 min readPublished
Universal and Sony name 60,202 recordings in a second suit against Suno
A judge refused to let Universal and Sony amend their 2024 case and pointed them toward parallel suits, so the labels filed one built on a forensic analysis of Suno's training data and on Suno's own terms of service.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Universal and Sony filed a second complaint against Suno in the District of Massachusetts on Friday, as case 1:26-cv-14275, asserting 60,202 sound recordings.
- Twelve label entities are named as plaintiffs, led by UMG Recordings and Sony Music Entertainment.
- On 18 August the court denied without prejudice the labels' motion to fold the new works into their June 2024 case, mainly because amending would disturb the case schedule.
- The labels commissioned a forensic analysis of Suno's training data after the company declined to name the recordings, and say the analysis found millions of their works in the corpus.
- Suno has not yet responded to the new complaint, which reached the docket on Friday.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure The labels are reaching for willfulness, and their route runs through Suno's own user contract. A company whose terms claim derivative-work rights over uploads has put its own view of when audio needs permission in writing.
- precedent Signed deals establish that a price exists. The next audio model sued over unlicensed training has to argue against a market the plaintiffs can name, and these three agreements are the ones they will name.
- constraint A corpus-level defence now has to survive being applied 60,202 times, title by title, against a record assembled by an outside forensic vendor rather than by the defendant's own disclosure.
- decision Teams shipping on scraped media are choosing between enumerating their training data themselves and letting a plaintiff's analyst do it for them, with the second version arriving as an exhibit.
A Suno user can now put a recording artist's name into the prompt box and get a result through prompt augmentation, according to the labels' new complaint, which says the company's old block on artist-name prompting is switched off [26]. Mikey Shulman, Suno's co-founder and chief executive, had cited that block as proof the models were built to generate "completely new outputs" [25]. The complaint hands the change back: "This design feature turned out to be so fundamental that Suno simply switched it off" [26]. The block was a product setting and a legal exhibit at the same time.
Suno's own answer in the first case is why there is a second one. The labels say Suno described building its models "by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings" [11], and conceded those "presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case" [12]. It did not list which ones, so the labels paid to have the list made [13].
They first tried to bolt the results onto the existing case, moving to amend with more than 61,000 further works [5]. The court did not touch the merits, writing that the labels are "of course entitled to pursue valid claims for copyright infringement" [8] and that proceeding in "parallel cases" best balanced their interests with judicial economy [9]. In August it also told Suno that "The magnitude of the alleged infringement is not a defense" [10]. The complaint filed on Friday asserts 60,202 recordings [2], at least 798 fewer than the amendment sought [1].
For anyone selling a model trained on scraped audio, the costly part of this filing is the part Suno's own dealmaking supplied. The complaint lists three agreements: Warner Music Group in November 2025, which it calls a "former plaintiff" and which is not a plaintiff this time [15][3]; BMG on 12 August, from a company that had "never sued Suno" [16]; and Believe on 8 September to supply training data, nine days before Suno launched v6 on licensed catalogue [17]. Three deals in under a year, the labels argue, "confirm that a functioning market exists for licensing sound recordings to train generative AI models" [18]. Chief product officer Jack Brody has said the revenue share is "not in exchange for training" and that the deals are "not really about the data" [19]. The complaint sets that against Shulman saying the company "will be licensing works" [20], and calls the arrangements "a functioning licensing market, whatever nomenclature Suno adopts for litigation purposes" [21].
Then the contract. Since January 2024, Suno's terms have required every user to grant it a "worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid-up, sublicensable" and "irrevocable" licence over anything they upload [22], covering reproduction, storage, modification and derivative works [23]. The labels' argument from that is short. A company demanding those rights upstream knew that training on someone's audio needs permission, which the complaint says makes the taking "knowing and willful", the finding that unlocks the higher damages tier [24]. An early investor told Rolling Stone that Suno "needed to make this product without the constraints" [28], and that "If we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn't have invested in it" [27].
The usable version of this for a product team is two documents on one desk. One is the training manifest, and whether you can enumerate it before an outside analysis enumerates it for a plaintiff, because the second version arrives with a docket number and 60,202 titles in it [2]. The other is your own terms of service, where every right you demand over user uploads is a right you have already conceded is needed to train on audio [22]. Suno now has three counts to answer, two of them direct infringement, split between post-1972 recordings and pre-1972 ones protected under the Music Modernization Act [29].
What to watch
- Suno's answer to the second complaint, and whether it identifies which of the 60,202 recordings it now claims a licence for.
- Whether the court consolidates the two Massachusetts cases or holds the 2024 schedule intact as it said it wanted to.
- Whether any of the three licensees named in the complaint discloses per-recording pricing that a court could treat as a market rate.