Four stories, one week

For a long time the AI-music conversation was about what is possible. This week it turned into a question of who pays.

What Suno actually admitted

The filing sits in the case brought by Universal Music Group, Capitol Records and Sony Music in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Suno wrote that "audio data was obtained from YouTube for use as training data using YT-DLP" — a tool for downloading audio from online videos.

Suno does not concede wrongdoing. It argues that its technology is fair use — a back-end process, invisible to the public, that produces a new product — and it challenges whether the labels have standing for the part of their claim about circumventing YouTube's protections. A court will decide. I am a producer, not a lawyer.

What I can say is how it feels from the creator side: a platform where I publish my work for listeners may also have been a quarry for a machine. And nobody can tell me whether any of it was mine.

«The crime was never "using AI". It is taking what other people made and passing it off as demand, or as supply.» — Murat Koff

The arithmetic of a takedown

More than 250,000 takedown requests is what a major label with lawyers and tooling can do. Meanwhile Deezer was reporting roughly 90,000 AI-generated tracks per day by July — I wrote about it in my weekly briefing. An independent producer has no legal department. A takedown form is not a strategy; it is a lottery ticket.

The same logic is why I wrote that Spotify killed the remix: when the platform sets the rules, the artist is a tenant.

What I do about it

Two things. First, I release music that is mine — made by me, in a studio, for the late drives. Second, I keep a home base that does not depend on any platform's mood: this website. Yes, I built it with AI tools acting as my developer — in three languages. That is a different story from generating songs out of scraped audio, and I will not pretend otherwise: the music stays human, the plumbing got faster.

// Own your home base

A website you control.

If you are a musician, creator or freelancer and want your own corner of the internet, I wrote the whole process down: 7 short lessons, no code, $25. No promises about traffic or income — just the method I used to build this site.

See the 7 lessons →

Whatever happens in court, the lesson is the same: platforms rent you an audience. Real listeners — the ones who choose your music on purpose — are the only supply and demand that can't be faked. I explained what that growth looks like in how I made a viral deep house remix.

Sources