Suno and Music AI: A Major Challenge for Copyrights

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Key Takeaways

1Suno, an AI music platform, allows users to create covers that closely resemble the originals, raising copyright issues.

2With Suno Studio, users easily bypass filters by slightly modifying protected tracks.

3Artists like Murphy Campbell have seen their works illegally covered, necessitating actions on social media to restore their rights.

💡Why it matters — Streaming platforms need to strengthen their systems to protect artists in the face of the rise of AI music.

Suno and Copyright Rights at Risk

The AI music platform Suno is at the center of a growing controversy regarding copyright rights. Although it claims not to allow the use of protected material, its copyright filters appear to be easily circumvented. Users can upload their own tracks to remix or add original lyrics to music generated by AI. However, it is possible to create imitations of popular songs such as "Freedom" by Beyoncé, "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath, and "Barbie Girl" by Aqua, which are alarming in their proximity to the originals. Suno has declined to comment on this situation.

Suno Studio: A Tool for Covers

To create these covers, users must use Suno Studio, available in the Premier plan for $24 per month. Unlike generating an entire song from text, Suno Studio allows users to upload a track to edit or cover. Although the system is supposed to detect and reject a well-known hit without modifications, it is often possible to bypass the filter using free tools like Audacity to slow a track down to half speed or speed it up to twice the normal speed. Adding white noise at the beginning and end seems to ensure success. Then, it is possible to restore the original speed and cut the white noise in Suno Studio, thus transforming the protected song into a basis for new AI-generated music. The imitations could be mistaken for alternative versions or B-sides during casual listening.

Copyright Issues

Creating unauthorized covers violates both Suno's stated purpose and its terms of service. Moreover, Suno seems to only scan tracks upon upload; it does not appear to recheck outputs for potential violations or rescans tracks before export. The path to monetizing covers created by Suno is straightforward. Unscrupulous users could upload them via a distribution service like DistroKid and profit from others' songs without paying the usual royalties that a cover should pay to the original songwriter. Independent artists seem to be the most vulnerable.

Cases of Affected Artists

Folk artist Murphy Campbell recently discovered that someone had uploaded what appear to be AI-generated covers of his songs released on YouTube to his Spotify profile. Shortly after, the distributor Vydia filed copyright claims against his YouTube videos and began collecting royalties on them. To illustrate how flawed the system is, the songs for which Vydia successfully filed copyright claims are all in the public domain. Spotify eventually removed the AI-generated covers, and Vydia canceled its claims, but this only happened after a social media campaign led by Campbell.

Reactions from Streaming Platforms

Suno is just one cog in a clearly flawed system. Services like Deezer, Qobuz, and Spotify have taken steps to combat AI-generated content and imitators. A spokesperson for Spotify stated that the company "takes the protection of artists' rights very seriously" and approaches the issue from multiple angles, including systems to prevent the upload of unauthorized content. However, no system is perfect, and dealing with a flood of AI-generated content facilitated by platforms like Suno presents a challenge.

Conclusion

Suno is a part of a failing system, but it is an area where artists have particularly few recourses to defend themselves. Groups can contact Spotify to have imitations removed from their profile, but it is more difficult to determine how these imitations are generated and whether they result from a failure of Suno's filters. So far, Suno's response has been silence.