The grueling fight over who profits from AI music

The music industry is becoming a test case for an economy transformed by generative AI.

For most of the last century, the music business operated under a surprisingly simple idea: If you want to use someone else's work, you ask permission and pay them money. Want to sample a song? There's a licensing process . Want to use a song in a movie, advertisement or television show? The people who own the song get paid.

The industry built a massive economy around identifying who owns a piece of music, who contributed to it, and who deserves compensation when it creates value. Now, generative AI is challenging that entire system.

AI music platforms like Suno and Udio let anyone generate complete songs, including vocals, lyrics and instrumentation, from a simple text prompt. Used by everyone from hobbyists and content creators to independent musicians and Grammy-award-winning producers, they've become the public face of AI-generated music. In February, Suno CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman said in a post on X that the company had surpassed two million paid subscribers.

Suno and Udio can generate songs in a few clicks, but the bigger disruption may not be the songs themselves. For us at Planet Money , we're interested in the economic question: When an AI model learns from millions of songs, who gets paid for that use?

This question is now at the center of a growing legal and financial battle in the music industry as AI music is already stealing income from human musicians.

Part of this battle's complexity is that it's been unclear exactly what material has gone into training many AI models. That lack of transparency has made it harder for artists and researchers to understand what these systems learned from, and build a legal case.

Alex Reisner , a journalist at The Atlantic , has been investigating AI training datasets through his AI Watchdog project . The tool has helped musicians, including artists such as SZA , spot their own work in AI training datasets.