Sony Music Sues Udio a Second Time Over 30,117 Recordings

On Monday, July 20, 2026, Sony Music Entertainment and nine affiliated labels — including Arista Records and LaFace — filed a second copyright infringement complaint against the AI music-generation service Udio in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Music Business Worldwide reported. The complaint asserts 30,117 sound recordings. Unite.AI, Engadget and Variety carried the same count. Most coverage published July 21 and after; the filing was Monday.

Every characterization of Udio's conduct below is an allegation in a pending civil case. Nothing here has been decided.

What was filed, and when

The defendant is Uncharted Labs, Inc., which does business as Udio. The complaint pleads three counts, per Music Business Worldwide and Unite.AI: infringement of sound recordings fixed in or after 1972; infringement of pre-1972 sound recordings under the Music Modernization Act; and circumvention of technological protection measures under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The claims concern sound recordings, not musical compositions — a distinction some early aggregation got wrong.

Reporting cites recordings by widely known artists: Dexerto lists Beyoncé, Michael Jackson, Harry Styles, Mariah Carey and Elvis Presley; the Los Angeles Times names Alicia Keys, Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley. We are not reproducing song-and-year pairings, because the versions in aggregator summaries contain errors.

The June ruling that set this up

The second suit exists because of a procedural loss. Sony had moved to fold roughly 30,442 recordings into the 2024 case. On June 29, 2026, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein denied that motion and held the case at 333 works, writing, as quoted by Music Business Worldwide: “Adding more than 30,000 works near the close of document discovery would require substantial additional production and review, generate further disputes, and materially alter the scope of the case before me.” The court noted that the plaintiffs retain the right to seek to stop infringement of all their works — that is, elsewhere. Three weeks later, Sony did exactly that.

Note the arithmetic: the failed motion sought 30,442 recordings; the new complaint asserts 30,117. Both figures are correct — different filings, not a contradiction.

How Sony says it built the list

This is the part practitioners should read closely. Sony alleges that discovery in the 2024 case gave it access to Udio's training data, and that audio fingerprinting run against that data matched hundreds of thousands of its own recordings. The 30,117 in the complaint are a subset. Per Dexerto, the asserted works “remain only a small portion” of the Sony recordings Udio is alleged to have copied.

Sony further alleges that many recordings were stream-ripped from YouTube using the open-source tool yt-dlp, bypassing the platform's anti-copying protections — the factual basis for the DMCA circumvention count, according to Dexerto, Unite.AI and Winbuzzer.

What Sony is asking for

The complaint seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, up to $2,500 for each act of circumvention, and an injunction barring further use of the material. Engadget reports a jury trial was demanded.

That figure is being repeated as though it were a demand. It is arithmetic: 30,117 works at the $150,000 willful-infringement maximum is about $4.52 billion, a ceiling outlets contrast with the roughly $50 million implied by the 333-work case. Statutory maximums are rarely what courts award.

From the complaint, as quoted by Music Business Worldwide: “Udio's belated embrace of licensing only underscores the unlawfulness of its decision to copy Plaintiffs' copyrighted sound recordings, without a license, in the first place.” The Los Angeles Times quotes a further passage arguing that synthetic outputs “will compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings.”

Where Udio stands

Udio did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the new suit, per the Los Angeles Times and Variety. Its earlier positions are on the record: answering the original litigation, Udio acknowledged its models were built on a large volume of recordings and argued that such training is fair use, per Unite.AI. In 2024 it said it is “uninterested in reproducing content in our training set.”

Sony is now the only major label still litigating against Udio. Universal Music Group settled and announced licensing agreements on October 29, 2025; Warner Music Group did the same on November 19, 2025. Music Business Worldwide reports Merlin and Kobalt have also reached agreements.

Why it matters

The section above is reported fact. What follows is our analysis.

The durable lesson is not about music. It is that training-data provenance is discoverable, and discovery output is reusable as a complaint. Sony's list did not come from guessing at what a model memorized; it came, by its own account, from obtaining the training corpus in litigation and fingerprint-matching across it. A team that cannot say where its training data came from should assume a counterparty with subpoena power eventually can.

Second, the DMCA circumvention count is worth watching independent of the fair-use fight, which remains unresolved here. Circumvention turns on how data was acquired, not what the model does with it — so a defendant could prevail on fair use and still face acquisition-method exposure. That reframes the pipeline question from “is this transformative?” to “did we get it in a way we would be comfortable describing in a deposition?” Our guide to model provenance and citation covers that discipline; using AI with regulated data covers the adjacent compliance surface.

Third, note the shape so far: three majors sued, two settled into licensing deals, one kept litigating and expanded. Licensing and litigation are running in parallel, not in sequence.

Sources: Music Business Worldwide (new suit); Music Business Worldwide (June ruling); Unite.AI; Engadget; Variety; Los Angeles Times via Yahoo Finance; Dexerto; Winbuzzer; Music Ally; Original 2024 complaint (RIAA, PDF); UMG–Udio announcement; WMG–Udio announcement; TechCrunch. Analysis and framing by Precision AI Academy.

Common questions

Is this Sony's first suit against Udio? No. Sony, Universal and Warner sued Uncharted Labs in June 2024. The July 20, 2026 complaint is a second, separate action; the 2024 case remains live with Sony as the only major-label plaintiff left.

Why a new case instead of amending the old one? The court declined to let Sony amend, and noted the plaintiffs could pursue their other works separately.

Has Udio been found liable? No. Every allegation here is unproven, and whether training on copyrighted recordings is fair use has not been resolved in this litigation.

Does this affect people using Udio today? Nothing in the filing changes the service on its own. The injunction is requested, not granted.