Sony Music Entertainment filed a second copyright infringement lawsuit against AI music platform Udio in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on Monday, July 20 — this time asserting exactly 30,117 sound recordings allegedly copied without permission to train Udio's generative models.
Why a second lawsuit
Sony's original 2024 case against Udio covers just 333 recordings. After winning discovery access to Udio's training data, Sony's team used audio fingerprinting to identify tens of thousands of additional tracks — allegedly ripped from YouTube. On June 29, the court denied Sony's motion to fold those recordings into the existing case, but noted "there is no requirement that it be done in [that] lawsuit." Three weeks later, Sony took the hint and filed fresh.
The damages math
Copyright law allows up to $150,000 per work in statutory damages for willful infringement. Across 30,117 recordings, that is roughly $4.5 billion in maximum exposure — up from about $50 million in the original case — plus up to $2,500 per act of DMCA circumvention. These are ceilings, not a demanded sum, but they transform the negotiating leverage entirely.
The lone holdout
Udio has already made peace with the rest of the majors: Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group both settled and signed licensing agreements. Per the complaint, "Sony is the only major music company yet to reach a licensing agreement with Udio." The new filing quotes Udio's own admission that its models were trained on vast amounts of recordings that "presumably included" the plaintiffs' catalog. Udio has not yet formally responded.
Timing
The suit landed the same day a federal judge in California gave final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with book authors — a coincidence that gives Sony a fresh, court-approved benchmark for what AI training on pirated content can cost.