A legal firestorm. It's brewing today over this major clash between record companies and AI music services. The Recording Industry Association of America filing copyrighted infringement lawsuits today against two separate companies, accusing them of training their AI models on copyrighted music without permission and then spitting out AI-generated music that essentially sounds like other artists. We reached out to both defendants. One company CEO just got back to us, the CEO of Suno, saying in part this, We would have been happy to explain this to the corporate record labels that filed this lawsuit. And then in parentheses says, And in fact, we tried to do so. But instead of entertaining a good faith discussion, they've reverted their old lawyer-led playbook. I want to bring an NBC business and data correspondent, Brian Cheung, to break this all down for us. There's a lot of confusing stuff in all this. I think for those folks that are not necessarily familiar with AI-generated music scene, they're saying, Okay, wait, what's going on? What are they doing? Walk us through that and why these record labels are so angry about what's happening? Yeah, well, this is the next natural evolution of the conversation on AI with copyright, right?

Who owns this property? If it sounds like someone's voice, then who's liable if they try to copy that voice? Now, there are two defendants in these lawsuits that we're talking about, Suno, as you mentioned, which got back to us here at NBC News. But then the other company is this company known as Unchanted Labs. They have a software known as Udio. Interestingly, this is the software that's behind very prevalent songs. One example being Bibi El Drizzy. This is a song that was at the center of the SPAP between Kendrick Lamar and also Drake. This is technology that is being heard already by millions of people. But we have to remember that what's in the suit right now concerns a lot of the artists that are on these record labels. There are major record labels as part of this suit. The RIAA, which is basically the association that represents the industry, saying in a statement or in the lawsuit, unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it's fair to copy an artist's life's work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.

We have to remember that this type of software is very good. This is not just a few tunes and a few beats being put together. In fact, we actually had asked Udio This is one of the companies and the software is at the center of this suit, to generate a response. Take a listen to what they generated.

They got their eyes on you for the tunes you share. Labels coming after like they own the air.

Again, we asked them to generate that. This is not a statement from Udio, but you can see, I mean, those lyrics clearly take the side of AI. Very interesting there.

What are the larger implications of all this?

Yeah, well, the implications are that it's going to open up a real legal Pandora's box in terms of whether or not it's on the AI companies or on the record labels to prove that they actually have the right to use these voices.

I feel like we They went through this iteration, a different iteration of this with the dawn of Napster, right?

Certainly, yeah. In that case, it may have been a little bit more clear-cut because they were ripping the actual songs themselves. This is a little bit less clear. It might not be the exact same song, but in the legal filings, they did an example of a Michael Bouboublay song and said, Look, this AI actually generated a melody that was virtually identical note for note, and they actually show the notation out there. Is that enough? If the voice is not Michael Bouboublay's, that's where a court is going to have to decide, a jury or a judge, this is the exact same thing, or it's an artistic representation of something that already exists.

Artistic representation. We'll see. Yeah. Thank you, Brian. I appreciate it. That's really fascinating.

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