Udio, a generative AI music company backed by will.i.am, Common and a16z, has partnered with Audible Magic to fingerprint all tracks made using the platform at the moment they are created and to check the generated works, using Audible Magic’s “content control pipeline,” for any infringing copyrighted material.
By doing this, Udio and Audible Magic have created a way for streaming services and distributors to trace which songs submitted to their platforms are made with Udio’s AI. The company also aims to proactively detect and block use of copyrighted material that users don’t own or control.
“Working with Audible Magic allows us to create a transparent signal in the music supply chain. By fingerprinting at the point of generation, we’re helping establish a new benchmark for accountability and clarity in the age of generative music,” says Andrew Sanchez, co-founder of Udio. “We believe that this partnership will open the door for new licensing structures and monetization pathways that will benefit stakeholders across the industry from artists to rights holders to technology platforms.”
Last summer, Udio, and its top competitor Suno, were both sued by the three major record companies for training their AI music models on the companies’ copyrighted master recordings. In the lawsuits, the majors argued this constituted copyright infringement “at an almost unimaginable scale.” Additionally, the lawsuits pointed out that the resulting AI-generated songs from Udio and Suno could “saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [the services were] built.”
Udio’s new partnership with Audible Magic stops short of promising to eliminate copyright material from its training process, as the majors want, but it shows that Udio is trying out alternative solutions to appease the music establishment. Suno also has a partnership with Audible Magic, announced in October 2024, but the two partnerships believes these deals hold key differences. Suno’s integration focus more specifically on its “audio inputs” and “covers” features, which allow users to generate songs based on an audio file they upload. With Audible Magic’s technology, Suno prevents users from unauthorized uploads of copyrighted material.
“This partnership demonstrates Udio’s substantial commitment to rights holder transparency and content provenance,” says Kuni Takahashi, CEO of Audible Magic. “Registering files directly from the first-party source is a clean and robust way to identify the use of AI-generated music in the supply chain.”
