🤔 A.I. Music Copyright Win??

Author

Helen Todd (Human)
November 06, 2025

In partnership with 

Creativity Squared: On Artist Consent and A.I.
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“Artist opt-in sounds promising, but participation without fair compensation isn't partnership; it's just permission.”

-Ron Gubitz, Music Artists Coalition’s Executive Director

Dear Creativity Squared Collective —

Hope this finds you well wherever you’re reading this!

GenAI’s original sin was scraping the web and ingesting it without permission. Hard stop: creators need to be paid for their work. The 4 C’s on this front are: consent, compensation, control, and credit.

While the new deal between Udio and Universal Music Group (UMG) appears to be an A.I. win for copyright protections, the reality is more complex.

On October 29, UMG and Udio announced that UMG is dropping its copyright lawsuit against Udio for “almost unimaginable” copyright infringement and are now entering into a strategic partnership together. They will launch a "new commercial music creation" platform in 2026. Lucian Grainge, Universal Music Group Chairman & CEO, shared, “We will not license any model that uses an artist’s voice or generates new songs incorporating their existing works without consent.”

This appears like a copyright win, but is it?

The UMG-Udio deal isn’t a win for artists. It’s a win for rights holders — as in label consent.

The distinction is critical.

The chaotic, open, and artistically explosive frontier of generative A.I. is being paved over and turned into a walled garden, corporate-owned theme park. You can play with the tools, but you can't take the rides home. For example, A.I. creations can no longer be downloaded or posted outside of the Udio platform and the upcoming 2026 version.

The advocacy group Music Artists Coalition (MAC) wrote their response to the UMG-Udio deal and posed questions I share:

  • Meaningful consent: How do artists actually control what uses they authorize? What happens when multiple songwriters or performers on a single song disagree about participation? 

  • Revenue splits: What percentage of revenue goes to artists versus the label versus the A.I. company when their music is used to train models or generate new works?

  • Data and deal transparency: Was settlement money paid? How will that be distributed to artists? Will artists’ pay-outs for a new revenue stream just be applied to old unrecouped balances? Will artists see exactly how their work is being used within the A.I. system and have ongoing visibility into its use?

One of MAC’s founders and a music industry heavyweight, Irving Azoff, stated in the response: "Every technological advance offers opportunity, but we have to make sure it doesn't come at the expense of the people who actually create the music — artists and songwriters. We've seen this before — everyone talks about 'partnership,' but artists end up on the sidelines with scraps. Artists must have creative control, fair compensation, and clarity about deals being done based on their catalogs."

With UMG absorbing Udio, it raises the question: Is a walled garden the price of consent?

It doesn't look like a decentralized, artist-to-fan P2P network. It looks like a centralized, rights-managed database controlled by corporate interests.

A true pro-artist solution is a decentralized, artist-first ecosystem. It combines defensive tools like Glaze and Nightshade to stop theft, technical signals like Spawning.ai to declare non-consent, new markets like Musical AI to enable opt-in monetization, and strong legislation like the No AI FRAUD Act to provide a legal hammer against bad actors.

These tools exist now — what's missing is the industry will to adopt them at scale.

Jordan Bromley, Leader at Manatt Entertainment and board member of MAC, concluded, "We're cautiously optimistic but insistent on details. True partnership requires appropriate oversight and remuneration for all involved parties. The industry needs to get this right — for artists, for fans, and for the future of music itself."

While the tides are shifting from a total Wild West on the A.I. generative front from Silicon Valley’s scrape and ask permission later to label-controlled rights management, we still have a ways to go to truly support creators to meet this moment.

Until next week, here’s to playing in the playground of possibility to manifest more magic in 2025! 🪄✨

-Helen

Helen Todd (she/her)
Human behind Creativity Squared
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