Sony drops the hammer: 30,000 songs in new Udio AI lawsuit

The gloves are off, and the playlist is 30,000 tracks long. Sony Music Entertainment isn’t just tweaking its legal strategy against AI music generator Udio — it’s starting fresh with a massive new complaint filed in a New York federal court on Monday. The suit explicitly names a sprawling catalog of allegedly infringed works, ranging from Elvis Presley’s ‘Hound Dog’ to Beyoncé’s ‘Say My Name’ and Harry Styles’ ‘As It Was.’ That list, the company warns, is ‘only a small portion’ of what it claims Udio’s models actually ingested.

This isn’t Sony’s first swing at the startup. Last year, the label giant joined Universal Music Group (UMG) and Warner Records in a broadside against both Udio and fellow AI music-maker Suno. During discovery in that earlier case, Sony says it deployed audio fingerprinting technology to scan Udio’s training data, surfacing thousands of matches. When a judge rejected Sony’s motion to fold those additional tracks into the original suit — keeping the scope capped at 333 works — the company simply turned that rejected evidence into an entirely new lawsuit. It’s a legal pincer movement.

Sony’s central claim hinges on an alleged admission from Udio itself. The complaint asserts that Udio conceded its models were ‘constructed by showing the program a vast amount of different kinds of sound recordings,’ including material scraped from YouTube. The stakes are astronomical in dollar terms: Sony is seeking a permanent injunction to block further infringement and statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work. Do the math on 30,000 tracks and you’re staring at a theoretical maximum that stretches into the billions.

The industry landscape around this fight has already splintered. UMG and Warner quietly settled with Udio and have since pivoted to partnerships, a move that signals some labels see licensing deals as the smarter long-term play. Sony, clearly, is not ready to make nice. While the other majors are building bridges, Sony is still lobbing lawsuits. The real question isn’t whether AI companies trained on copyrighted music — everyone knows they did — but whether the courts will treat that ingestion as theft or as fair-use learning, and how much a single holdout can reshape the market while its competitors sign deals.