Jason Isbell and several other musicians have filed a lawsuit against Suno, accusing the AI music giant of training its models on the identities of popular artists.
While Suno and other AI companies have faced (and in some cases settled) litigation over their alleged use of copyrighted music to train their models, this lawsuit centers on alleged violations of right-of-publicity laws. Filed in Massachusetts federal court and obtained by Rolling Stone, the lawsuit claims that Suno “encoded” the identities of countless artists into its AI model “without consent, and now exploits those identities” for its own “considerable commercial benefit.”
To back up its claims, the lawsuit is filled with alleged examples of how typing an artist’s name into Suno can generate songs, descriptions, and graphics that evoke the real artist’s identity. The suit also suggests that supposed guardrails meant to deter this kind of prompting are easy to skirt.
“Suno knows the commercial value of a machine that can conjure up a beloved musician’s identity simply by invoking their name,” the lawsuit reads, adding: “Many musicians sell their rights to specific recordings. However, the identity right belongs to the performer regardless of who owns any copyright in an underlying recording unless the identity right is separately licensed, typically for merchandise under the artist’s control. This lawsuit seeks to recover the value of those misappropriated identities and to stop their ongoing commercial exploitation.”
The suit’s claims rest on the allegation that Suno took the identifying attributes of particular musicians and turned them into “tokens,” which could then be used to generate sound and descriptions reminiscent of the artist’s actual work. For instance, prompting Suno with “Jason Isbell” allegedly “produced an Americana song called ‘Paper Bell,’ imitating Isbell’s characteristic clear male vocals and country twang. Suno described it as ‘contemporary Americana singer-songwriter with fingerpicked acoustic guitar’ and provided an image of a paper bell with a church and trees in the background, evoking a country scene.”
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(As of publication, “Paper Bell,” as well as many of the other AI songs generated for the lawsuit, are still available on Suno.)
The lawsuit also includes alleged examples describing what happened when other notable artists were used as prompts. “Buddy Guy” led to the creation of a song called “Stone Blues in My Shoes,” which was paired with a description that read in part, “vintage electric Chicago blues.” A “Carly Simon” prompt generated a song described as “soft 70s confessional pop.” And entering “Less Than Jake” created a song called “Parking Lot Anthem” that was described as “ska-punk with fast offbeat guitar chops, jumping baseline, and punchy two-step drums.” Suno allegedly even generated album art “invoking the surreal, comic book art” of actual Less Than Jake album covers.
Last month, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman appeared to address this issue in a blog post, writing: “Unlike many AI music platforms, we’ve never allowed prompts for specific artists or copyrighted songs. Instead, when a prompt references a specific artist, we remove the artist’s name and redirect the request toward descriptive musical characteristics.”
But the suit claims that these filters are easy to sidestep. One way is allegedly using an artist’s real name instead of their stage name. Prompting Suno with Common’s real name — Lonnie Rashid Lynn — produced tracks that allegedly captured the Chicago rapper’s “more poetic, reflective, socially conscious hip-hop, relying on samples of jazz and soul music.”
And, the suit claims, users can successfully prompt Suno with the names of some of the biggest artists in the world — including Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, and Bruno Mars — if they just add a space between every letter of the artist’s name. For instance, entering “m i c h a e l j a c k s o n” purportedly led to the creation of two songs called “Glovebox Moonwalk.”
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“Both songs,” the suit reads, “are described as ‘1980s pop-funk dance track[s],’ and include a photo of a white glove. Additionally, both the moonwalk and the glove feature in the lyrics. With his name alone, the Michael Jackson experience relies on two of his most iconic associated attributes: the moonwalk and the single white glove.”
Along with Isbell, the lead plaintiffs in the case are David Lowery, who makes music as Camper Van Beethoven; singer-songwriter Guy Forsyth; and prominent jazz saxophonist Ed Calle. Reps for Suno did not immediately return Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
