Company
Sony Music is one of the three major record labels, owning and distributing recorded music and publishing rights for artists worldwide.
Three new models, one of them free, and no route back to the ones the labels sued over. The retirement was a settlement term rather than a product call, which tells you who the roadmap answers to.
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4 publishersReality
Universal Music and ElevenLabs announced a multi-year deal on September 10 for a remix and vocal platform still in development, with no launch date, no price and no participating artist named so far.
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3 publishersReality
Suno's v6 models shipped on September 9 trained on licensed Warner, BMG and Believe catalogues, about ten months after the deal was announced. Universal and Sony are still suing, so the price of the same catalogue is unsettled.
Reality
Universal's multi-year deal with ElevenLabs covers product development as well as rights, though the announcement does not name the participating artists, set a launch date or disclose terms, so the roster gets decided after signing.
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5 publishersReality
Sony Music and Warner have sued Anthropic over pirated music and lyrics, joining Universal. For publishers the live question is which crawlers still get the full text, and what evidence would show a training promise held.
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The $1.5bn is approved. The split now runs through decades of contracts nobody wrote with a copyright settlement in mind, and some educational authors are finding their share set at 10% instead of the 50/50 default.
Reality
The complaint against Suno argues the company encoded artists' identifying attributes into tokens and used their names for commercial gain, a claim that sits outside the catalogue licensing that ended Warner's copyright fight.
Reality
The publisher's complaints against Suno and Anthropic plead DMCA circumvention beside infringement, which moves a buyer's diligence question onto the corpus rather than the filter.
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Universal, Sony and Warner all took equity in Stability AI's $76 million Series B. Two years after suing AI song generators, the majors are buying the toolmakers.
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3 publishersReality