Who Did the AI Music Copyright Fight Actually Protect?

Part 2 of 3 · Copyright, Power and the Licensed Future of AI Music

Artists, performers, songwriters, labels and rightsholders were often presented as one side. Their interests overlap—but they are not the same.

A finished recording can sound like one creative object.

Legally and commercially, it may contain several.

The melody and lyrics may belong to a songwriter or publisher. The recorded performance may be controlled through the sound-recording copyright. A featured artist may own part of the master—or none of it. Session musicians may have helped create the sound without owning the recording. A producer may have contributed authorship to the final recording while a label possesses the rights required to license it.

Then an AI company asks to use the catalogue.

Who gets to say yes?

That question sits underneath nearly every public promise that the AI music copyright fight would protect artists. The phrase sounds clear until we ask who held the right being enforced, who possessed approval power, who was represented at the negotiating table and how the eventual benefit would reach the people whose labour made the catalogue valuable.

In Part 1 of this series, I argued that the public was given a story that compressed artists, performers, songwriters, publishers, labels and rightsholders into one side. This second article examines what that simplification concealed.

The point is not that copyright protected no one. It clearly protected valuable rights and created negotiating leverage.

The harder question is how that protection was distributed.

A song is not one right

The first problem with the phrase “protecting the music” is that a commercially released song is not one legal object.

Copyright law commonly separates the musical work—the music and lyrics—from the sound recording, which is the particular fixed performance and production of that song. The two can be created by different people, owned by different parties and licensed through different systems. The U.S. Copyright Office explains this distinction directly in its guidance on registering musical compositions and sound recordings.

A songwriter may control or share rights in the composition. A label may control the master recording. A publisher may administer the song. Performers and producers may have contributed authorship to the recording while contracts determine who owns the resulting exclusive rights.

This matters because an AI dispute may involve several different questions at once. Was a sound recording copied for training? Were lyrics or a composition reproduced? Was a recognizable performance imitated? Did a licence cover the master but not the composition? Did the copyright owner authorize a new use while a separate labour agreement required notice or additional payment?

The words “their music” can hide all of those distinctions.

Before asking whether an AI company obtained permission, we have to ask a more precise question:

Permission from whom, for which right and under what contract?

Creation, authorship and ownership are different forms of power

The public conversation often moved directly from “an artist made this” to “the artist controls this.” The music business is rarely that simple.

The Copyright Office recognizes that sound-recording authorship can arise from performance, production or both. Singers, instrumentalists, producers and others may contribute copyrightable expression to a recording. But the party that ultimately owns the exclusive rights may be determined through employment rules, work-for-hire arrangements or contractual transfer.

A label may therefore be the claimant or owner even when human performers and producers supplied the creative work that gives the recording its identity.

That ownership can be lawful and commercially necessary. Labels finance recordings, coordinate releases, administer rights, enforce infringement claims and negotiate across markets that an individual artist may not be equipped to reach alone.

But legal authority to negotiate is not the same as universal representation of every human interest attached to the asset.

Four different questions may produce four different answers:

Who made the work? Who owns the right? Who controls the licence? Who is contractually entitled to the money?

When those positions belong to different parties, a licence can protect the asset without giving every contributor equal information, approval or financial participation.

The word “artist” hides several kinds of labour

The word artist is emotionally powerful because it brings a human being into view. It is also commercially imprecise.

A featured recording artist may be the public face of a song while owning little or none of the master. A songwriter may own a share of the composition while having no control over a famous recording of it. A session musician may create the riff, rhythm or texture listeners immediately recognize yet receive compensation through a union agreement rather than an ownership interest. A producer may shape the recording’s structure and sound while their approval and royalty rights depend entirely on the contract.

Background vocalists, arrangers, engineers and instrumentalists can be indispensable to the finished record without appearing in the public debate at all.

The Copyright Office describes sound-recording authorship as potentially including activities such as singing, playing, recording, mixing, manipulating and mastering. That makes the human contribution broad. The ownership and bargaining power remain uneven.

The market hears one record. The contract sees several contributors with different forms of power.

This is why “artists and rightsholders” should never be treated as a redundant phrase. An artist may be a rightsholder. A rightsholder may be a company. A performer may be neither the owner nor the party authorized to negotiate the new use.

What did “rightsholder control” actually promise?

When the Recording Industry Association of America announced the 2024 lawsuits against Suno and Udio, it framed the cases as a response to alleged unlicensed copying and said the actions would help assure “artist, songwriter, and rightsholder control.”

That language reflected legitimate interests. Copyright enforcement can prevent unauthorized exploitation. It can create leverage for licences, require approval systems and produce new revenue. It can establish that technology companies do not get to treat commercially valuable catalogues as ownerless raw material.

But a promise of rightsholder control answers only one layer of the problem: who can authorize or prohibit the use.

It does not automatically tell us which artists possessed approval rights, whether session musicians were notified, how songwriters and recording performers would be treated differently, how proceeds would be divided or whether every contributor could verify that their work had entered the agreement.

Control at the ownership level may create opportunity for human creators. It may also consolidate the negotiation in organizations whose obligations to those creators are determined by contracts the public cannot see.

That distinction became much harder to ignore in 2026.

The AFM lawsuit exposes the fault line

In June 2026, the American Federation of Musicians sued Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group in federal court.

According to reporting on the complaint, the union alleges that the labels licensed recordings involving AFM-represented musicians to Suno and Udio for AI training without providing the permission, information, credit or compensation the union says its labour agreements require. The case has not been resolved, and the allegations have not been established as fact.

Universal has said its approach has protected and advanced artist and songwriter interests through responsible licensing. Warner has disputed the union’s position and indicated that the matter belongs within bargaining and contractual processes.

The legal outcome remains open. The significance of the case is already clear.

The labels say licensed AI agreements can create control and compensation for creators. A union representing working musicians alleges that some of the performers whose recordings supplied the value were not included in the way their agreements required.

That dispute cannot be summarized honestly as “artists were protected.”

It asks what happens after the industry obtains the permission it said was missing.

Does the new licence activate obligations to session musicians? Who receives notice? Which contributors receive additional payment? Can a copyright owner lawfully authorize access while still facing a separate contractual dispute over what is owed to the people who performed on the recording?

The AFM lawsuit does not prove that Warner or Universal violated their agreements.

It does prove that corporate authorization and performer consent are not necessarily the same event.

Copyright can protect the work while contracts determine the worker’s outcome

Copyright establishes exclusive rights in creative works. Contracts determine how those rights move through the business.

A recording agreement may transfer ownership, establish royalties and reserve or waive approval rights. A producer agreement may define points, credits and reuse. A collective bargaining agreement may require additional payment when an existing recording enters a new commercial use. Publishing agreements determine who administers the composition and how income is divided.

That means a catalogue licence can be valid at the copyright level while creating a separate dispute over labour obligations, consent, disclosure or money.

This is not unique to AI. New technology often exposes the distance between an ownership system and a labour system. The owner negotiates the new market. Workers then have to determine whether agreements written for an earlier market protect them inside it.

AI did not invent that tension.

It made the tension visible at extraordinary scale.

“Artists will be compensated” is not a distribution model

Public announcements frequently promise that licensed AI systems will create new revenue for artists and songwriters. That may be true. The phrase still leaves the most important mechanics unanswered.

Is the payment an upfront settlement, a training licence, an output-based royalty or a share of subscription revenue? Is the money allocated at the catalogue level or traced to individual recordings? Do featured artists receive approval? Do songwriters receive a separate publishing payment? Are session musicians covered by new-use provisions? Can contributors audit the calculation? Are payments subject to recoupment?

Those are not cynical questions. They are the difference between a promise and a payment structure.

Universal and Udio’s 2025 announcement described recorded-music and publishing licences designed to create new revenue opportunities for UMG artists and songwriters. The agreement demonstrated that licensing could replace litigation with a commercial relationship.

It did not, through the public announcement alone, answer every contributor-level question later raised by the AFM.

“Artists will be compensated” is a promise. A transparent, enforceable distribution system is evidence.

Consent depends on who is being asked

Consent is another word that sounds singular until the rights chain is examined.

A copyright owner may authorize use of the protected recording. A featured artist may possess a contractual approval right. A union agreement may require notice, negotiation or additional compensation. A vocalist may have separate claims involving identity, publicity or digital replication. A songwriter may control part of the composition while having no say over the master.

These forms of consent can overlap. They are not interchangeable.

An AI company can obtain a copyright licence from the party controlling the right without receiving the personal approval of every performer. Depending on ownership and contract terms, that licence may still be lawful. But describing the result broadly as “artist consent” may claim more than the transaction delivered.

When a platform says its AI system is authorized, the professional question should be:

Does that describe the rights chain, the human approval chain—or both?

A licensed system can distribute security unevenly

Licensing reduces real risks.

It can reduce infringement exposure for AI companies, protect catalogue value for labels, monetize compositions for publishers, provide regulatory certainty to platforms and create approval or compensation opportunities for participating creators.

That is meaningful progress compared with a system that assumes all protected material is freely available for ingestion and commercial use.

But security can still be distributed unevenly.

An AI company may obtain certainty while an individual performer remains unsure whether their recording was included. A catalogue owner may gain leverage while an independent artist outside the catalogue has no bargaining channel. A platform may advertise responsible licensing while users misunderstand which outputs, territories or commercial uses the agreement covers.

A licensing system can be responsible without being perfectly equitable.

The serious task is to evaluate both claims at once.

Labels are not villains—and they are not the same as artists

The correction to “artists versus AI” should not become a new story called “artists versus labels.”

Labels can provide financing, distribution, marketing, rights enforcement, international administration and negotiating power that individual creators may genuinely need. Their scale can force technology companies to negotiate where isolated artists would have little leverage.

Those functions are real. So is the power that comes with them.

The accurate picture is a network of partially aligned interests, unequal bargaining positions and contracts determining who controls each decision.

A label may protect a catalogue and create benefits for artists. A union may still dispute whether working musicians received what they were owed. A songwriter may benefit through publishing while a performer on the same recording faces a different agreement. None of those facts cancels the others.

The ability to negotiate at scale gives labels an important role.

It does not make a label identical to every artist whose work it controls.

What independent creators should learn

Independent AI music creators often occupy several roles that the traditional business separates.

They may be the songwriter, producer, vocal director, master owner, publisher, distributor, brand and archivist at the same time. That combination can provide more direct control than many contributors inside a major-label recording.

It also places more responsibility on the creator.

Control is only as strong as the records supporting it. Creators need to preserve lyric drafts, project files, prompts, edits, collaborator agreements, voice permissions, ownership splits, platform terms and release records. They need to understand which elements they authored, which were generated, what the platform permits and what a collaborator has authorized.

My AI Music Rights and Ownership Guide is built around that practical principle: a finished song is not the whole creator record.

Independent creators may have more direct authority over their work—but only when they can demonstrate what they own and what they agreed to.

A better test for “artist protection”

The next time a company, platform or industry organization says an AI agreement protects artists, the claim should be tested through measurable questions.

Artist protection should be measurable through rights, information, compensation and enforceable control—not inferred from the moral language of a press release.

Protection is a distribution question

The AI music copyright fight did not protect no one.

At the ownership layer, it protected catalogues from alleged unauthorized use. At the corporate layer, it created leverage for settlements and licences. At the artist and songwriter layer, those licences may create approval and compensation opportunities. At the labour layer, the AFM case alleges that some performers were not included in the way their agreements required.

Different parties may therefore be protected in different ways.

The public language rarely made those differences clear.

Copyright matters because it gives owners the power to authorize, prohibit and negotiate. But copyright protects rights. Contracts, bargaining power and payment systems determine how that protection reaches people.

Who had the authority to negotiate?

Who received the information?

Who possessed approval?

Who received the money?

Who remained outside the agreement?

Those are the questions that tell us whether “artist protection” became a practical outcome or remained a public justification.

They also make the industry’s next move easier to understand.

The lawsuits did not end generative music. They created leverage to build a licensed version of it.

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This article provides industry analysis and general educational information. It is not legal advice. Claims in active litigation are described as allegations unless and until established by a court.