Suno wasn’t supposed to be an important part of Amazon’s Alexa Plus presentation. The AI song generation platform was a minor demonstration of how Alexa Plus could integrate into other apps, sandwiched between other announcements. But it caught my attention all the same — because whether Amazon realized it or not, the company blundered into a massive copyright fight.
Suno, for those of you not familiar, is an AI song generator: enter a text prompt (such as “a jazz, reggae, EDM pop song about my imagination”) and a song comes back. Like many generative AI companies, it is also being sued by all and sundry for ingesting copyrighted material. The parties in the suit — including major labels and the RIAA — don’t have a smoking gun, since they can’t directly peek at Suno’s training data. But they have managed to generate some suspiciously similar-sounding AI generated materials, mimicking (among others) “Johnny B. Goode,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and Jason Derulo’s habit of singing his own name.
Suno essentially admits these songs were regurgitated from copyrighted source material, but it says such use was legal. “It is no secret that the tens of millions of recordings that Suno’s model was trained on presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case,” it says in its own legal filing. Whether AI training data constitutes fair use is a common but unsettled legal argument, and the plaintiffs contend Suno still amounts to “pervasive illegal copying” of artists’ works.
Amazon’s Suno integration, as demonstrated, requires a Suno account to be linked to Alexa. Suno is meant to be hyper-personalized music, letting anyone generate a song. One of the current core features in Alexa’s Echo speakers is taking verbal requests for (non-AI-generated) music. With the Suno demo, Amazon risks antagonizing the very players that make this possible, while simultaneously undercutting Suno’s legal case. Amazon declined to provide an on-the-record comment about the Suno demonstration.
One of the key questions in a fair use lawsuit — including the RIAA’s suit against Suno — is whether a derivative work is intended to replace the original thing. In 2023, the Supreme Court found that Andy Warhol had infringed on photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s copyright when he screenprinted one of her pictures of Prince; a deciding factor was that outlets like Vanity Fair had licensed Warhol’s work instead of Goldsmith’s, offering her no credit or payment.
Every minute spent listening to Suno’s ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ is one spent not listening to Mariah Carey’s
This hasn’t been tested with AI music, but the RIAA is making similar arguments, and Amazon’s integration seems to provide a concrete example. Every minute spent listening to Suno’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is one spent not listening to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” through Spotify or Amazon Music Unlimited — and Carey et al. get stiffed to boot.
If “Suno is suddenly available to every Alexa subscriber, that would be of great concern,” says Richard James Burgess, the president and CEO of the American Association of Independent Music. (Currently, the feature requires both a Suno subscription and either a subscription for Prime or Alexa Plus.) Burgess emphasized that the problem is the alleged copyright violations, not AI-generated music as a whole. “If it hasn’t been licensed correctly from rights holders, then that’s problematic for all music,” he says. “It affects people’s businesses. It affects their livelihoods.”
Suno, like a lot of other AI companies, offers subscriptions that allow users to generate songs, which are not very good. (The free tier allows 10 songs per day.) I’ve seen little about how Suno plans to make a sustainable business, but I do know this: if the company is found to have infringed on copyright, the damages for the songs it’s already used will be sky-high, on top of any other licensing fees Suno will have to pay. That could result in bankruptcy.
I’m not convinced Suno understands why people care about music or what the point is. In a Rolling Stone interview, its cofounder Mikey Shulman complains that musicians are outnumbered by their audience — it’s “so lopsided.” I emailed Shulman to see if he wanted to chat for this article. He didn’t reply.
Music, like all worthwhile art, is about people. If more people want to make music, they can — by learning how to play an instrument or sing. One of the benefits of learning an instrument is that it deepens your appreciation; suddenly you can hear a song’s time signature or notice the difference in feel between keys. You don’t even have to be very good to make music people enjoy — that’s why God created punk!
The AI songs that have broken through to public consciousness have been ones like “BBL Drizzy” and “10 Drunk Cigarettes,” which are not purely AI generated. Rather, there’s a musician working with the AI as a tool to curate and edit it. But that’s not what the Suno demo showed. Instead, it’s just raw prompt generation. This is the least interesting way to interact with generative AI music, and the one that most threatens the actual music industry. An Alexa speaker is not a tool for editing or playing with generative music.
There’s another way in which Suno can undercut real musicians, besides just stealing listening time. The music industry already has a problem with soundalikes and AI-based fraud; Suno’s slop makes it even easier to generate fraudulent tracks.
And Amazon is doing itself no favors here, either. Amazon Music has its own deals with record labels, including the ones suing Suno. In a December 2024 press release, Universal Music Group touts an “expanded global relationship” with Amazon that means the “advancement of artist-centric principles.” It goes on to say that “UMG and Amazon will also work collaboratively to address, among other things, unlawful AI-generated content, as well as protecting against fraud and misattribution.”
