Topic
Three gatekeepers now ask about AI, and each asks a different question. The US Copyright Office wants to know which parts a human made, PROs want a human writer, and distributors increasingly care which tool you used and how it was trained. Here is what each rule says as of 23 Oct 2026, a checklist that covers all three, and the mistakes that cost artists money.
Workflows
Stable Audio 3, Lyria 3, Suno v6, ElevenLabs' music products and Udio all describe themselves as responsible about rights, but their terms differ sharply on who owns the output, whether you can release it, and whether your own creations become training data. We read each vendor's terms. Here is what they actually say.
Artist rights
In the same week, Suno asked a Nashville court to force the MLC to hand over years of streaming data, and UMG and Sony asked a Manhattan court to force DistroKid to hand over its AI-detection numbers. Both sides want the data that will decide whether AI music has harmed the market. The artists whose plays and uploads fill those tables can't see any of it.
Artist rightsvia US District Court, Southern District of New York (via Music Business Worldwide)
In its answer to Universal and Sony's second lawsuit, Suno admits it has not deleted all the recordings it trained on, and repeats that v6 learned from "creations and preference signals" from its community. That makes Suno's own users part of the training pipeline the labels call laundering, under a licence they can't take back.
Artist rightsvia US District Court for the District of Massachusetts (via Music Business Worldwide)
A labels' court filing shows DistroKid tests uploads with an undisclosed third-party "prediction model" and has made statements about false positives, none of it published for artists. Here is what is known about distributor AI detection, what you control, and how to protect a release that gets misjudged.
Industryvia US District Court, Southern District of New York (via Music Business Worldwide)
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