The AI music company generating tracks faster than you can say “copyright infringement” is now valued at $2 billion. Let that sink in.
On October 19, 2025, AI music platform Suno entered funding talks that could quadruple its previous valuation, with the company now pulling in over $100 million in annual revenue. Meanwhile, Universal Music Group, Warner, and Sony are all suing them for allegedly ripping copyrighted music off YouTube to train their AI models. The irony? While Suno fights these lawsuits in court, they’re simultaneously negotiating licensing deals with the same labels trying to take them down. 1
Welcome to the messy, hypocritical future of music creation, where stolen data becomes venture capital gold.
30,000 AI Tracks Flooding Streaming Platforms Daily
Here’s the nightmare stat keeping real producers awake: French streaming service Deezer reported that 28% of all tracks delivered to their platform daily are now fully AI-generated, over 30,000 synthetic tracks every single day. That’s up from 20% in April 2025 and just 10% in January. 2
Even worse, Deezer found that up to 70% of streams from fully AI-generated tracks are fraudulent. The platform now tags and removes AI content from recommendations, but they’re the only major service doing this. Spotify, Apple Music, and everyone else? Radio silence while your playlists get polluted with algorithmic slop.
“Following a massive increase during the year, AI music now makes up a significant part of the daily track delivery to music streaming,” said Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier. For electronic producers competing for playlist spots and algorithmic visibility, this is an extinction-level event in slow motion. 3
150,000 New Songs a Day: Is the AI Music Flood Drowning Out Real Artists?
The Copyright Lawsuit That Exposes Everything
The major labels aren’t holding back. In October 2025, they accused Suno of “stream-ripping” music from YouTube, circumventing anti-piracy protections to download copyrighted tracks without permission. When Suno tried to dismiss the allegations, the labels fired back: “The violation lies in the circumvention, not the reason for it”. 4
Suno’s defense? They admitted to training on unlicensed music but claim “fair use” protects them. Legal experts aren’t buying it. As the labels argued, if Suno “wanted fair use to shield it from liability entirely, it could have acquired its training data lawfully”. Instead, they chose the “cheaper and faster route”.
Independent artists are piling on too. Illinois-based musicians including R&B band Attack the Sound and Chicago group Directrix filed separate lawsuits accusing both Suno and competitor Udio of not just copying sound recordings, but scraping lyrics from Genius, AZLyrics, and Musixmatch without permission. These indie lawsuits emphasize “the significant and unequal harm inflicted on independent musicians” who lack the financial protections of major-label artists.
The International Confederation of Music Publishers called it “the largest IP theft in human history,” claiming platforms like Suno rip “tens of millions of works” daily. That’s not hyperbole when you’re looking at 30,000 AI tracks uploaded every single day.
Suno’s CEO Thinks You Don’t Enjoy Making Music Anyway
In perhaps the most tone-deaf statement of 2025, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman told The Twenty Minute VC podcast: “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music”. He’s referring to the “time and effort” required to actually learn instruments and production skills.
To Sell His AI, Suno’s CEO Must First Convince You That Making Music Is “Not Enjoyable”
The music community’s response? Rage.
Musicians and producers called out the “clear disconnect from the passion real musicians have for their craft”. One songwriter expressed “abject horror” after discovering how advanced AI music had become, noting: “The record and media companies won’t give a damn about professional songwriters if they can get the music via AI”.
British AI creator Oliver McCann (imoliver), who signed with Hallwood Media after his Suno track hit 3 million streams, freely admits “I have no musical talent at all. I can’t sing, I can’t play instruments, and I have no musical background at all”. He acknowledged that “AI lyrics tend to come out quite cliche and quite boring,” often creating “up to 100 different versions of a song” before finding something usable. 5
That’s not democratizing music. That’s replacing artistry with algorithm spam.
The Economic Devastation Nobody’s Talking About
The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) published a brutal projection: music creators could lose 24% of their revenues by 2028 due to AI-generated music, a cumulative loss of €10 billion. The AI music market is projected to explode from €3 billion today to €64 billion by 2028.
Here’s the sick part: tech companies rake in billions while creators face two simultaneous threats, the unauthorized use of their works to train AI models without compensation, plus direct competition as synthetic content replaces human-made music.
By 2028, AI-generated music is projected to account for approximately 20% of traditional streaming platforms’ revenues and around 60% of music library revenues. For electronic producers who already navigate razor-thin margins, a 24% revenue loss is catastrophic.
Australian music rights organization APRA AMCOS found that 82% of music creators are concerned AI could end their ability to make a living, with 97% demanding policymakers pay more attention to AI and copyright challenges. 6
Spotify’s “Responsible AI” Partnership: Who Actually Benefits?
In mid-October 2025, Spotify announced partnerships with Universal, Sony, Warner, and independent distributors to develop “responsible AI” music products. The announcement, packed with corporate buzzwords about “empowering artists” and “respecting copyright,” revealed almost nothing about what these AI tools would actually do.
Universal CEO Sir Lucian Grainge stated the company “will not authorize any model” using artists’ voices or music without permission. Great. Except these same labels are negotiating equity stakes with AI companies that allegedly trained on unlicensed material. The message is clear: industry power players want a piece of the AI pie while working musicians face displacement.
Critics noted that Spotify’s recent crackdown on AI spam, implemented just weeks before announcing these partnerships, was performative window dressing. The platform already offers AI DJ features and allowed AI-generated bands like Velvet Sundown to rack up hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners while earning an estimated $34,235 in just 30 days.
Community Response: “AI Lyrics Tend to Come Out Quite Cliche”
On forums like Reddit’s r/edmproduction, producers debate whether AI music generators “will replace music producers,” with many acknowledging that “the ability for AI to generate complete tracks with just a few clicks could pose a threat”.
Musicians noted recurring clichés in Suno-generated tracks, words like “neon” and “whispers” appearing with suspicious frequency. Indian musician Arjun Kanungo, after generating hundreds of Suno tracks, observed that “quality is inconsistent across genres” and “regional and ethnic music is way off,” highlighting how AI tools flatten cultural specificity into algorithmic approximations.
A songwriter on The Songwriters Forum argued that AI-generated songs shouldn’t “have a seat and voice at the songwriting table,” calling it “absurdity”. Another forum member noted the wider implications: once record companies realize they can get music via AI, professional songwriters become expendable.
Academic researchers examining Suno, Udio, and other platforms found that “democratization” rhetoric functions as “marketable rhetoric rather than a genuine guiding principle”. The study identified a “total ideology” among AI music producers that is “individualist, globalist, techno-liberal, and ethically evasive” while “obfuscating individual responsibility”.
The Future We’re Fighting For
Suno’s $2 billion valuation isn’t just a tech success story. It’s a warning about what happens when innovation prioritizes speed and profit over creative rights and cultural integrity. The technology exists. The legal frameworks lag behind. And the music industry’s most powerful players are cutting deals with companies allegedly built on theft.
For electronic music producers, the question isn’t whether AI will transform music production, it already has. The question is whether that transformation will obliterate opportunities for human artists or whether we’ll demand accountability, transparency, and fair compensation.
The choice is ours, but the window to act is closing fast.
- https://news.bloomberglaw.com/private-equity/ai-music-generator-suno-in-funding-talks-at-2-billion-valuation ↩︎
- https://www.euronews.com/culture/2025/09/15/french-streamer-deezer-reveals-that-28-per-cent-of-music-uploaded-to-platform-is-ai-genera ↩︎
- https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/09/28-fully-ai-generated-music/ ↩︎
- https://www.thefader.com/2025/10/21/suno-copyright-lawsuit-major-labels-update ↩︎
- https://business.inquirer.net/544400/the-success-of-ai-music-creators-sparks-debate-on-future-of-music-industry ↩︎
- https://www.apraamcos.com.au/about-us/news-and-events/ai-in-music-report ↩︎
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