Key Takeaways
- Suno lawsuit: Suno is facing a lawsuit from Jamendo over copyright infringement related to its AI music generator.
- Claims against Suno: Jamendo alleges that Suno used its music library without authorization, gaining significant value from it.
- Licensing discussions: Jamendo attempted to initiate licensing talks with Suno but did not receive a response.
- Legal implications: The case raises questions about the legality of using AI for training on copyrighted materials.
Suno has been sued again over the training data powering its successful AI music generator — this time by production music licensing library Jamendo.
Jamendo filed copyright infringement claims on Sunday (June 29) against Suno, which has been embroiled in high-stakes litigation with the major record labels for two years now. The AI music company, valued at $5.4 billion in its latest fundraise, reached a licensing deal with Warner Music Group (WMG) last year but is still fighting both Universal Music Group (UMG) and Sony in court.
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Belgium-based Jamendo sued tech giant Nvidia last week for allegedly training AI music models Fugatto and Audio Flamingo on 55,600 tracks in its music library, as well as curated metadata that tags those songs for genre, mood and instrumentation. Sunday’s lawsuit, obtained by Billboard, levels similar claims against Suno.
“By using the [Jamendo] dataset without authorization, Suno obtained substantial value, including immediate access to a large, organized and commercially useful music catalogue,” write Jamendo’s attorneys in the complaint. “Suno also avoided the time, cost and effort required to independently source, clean, organize and validate comparable data.”
This 55,600-track dataset is publicly available on the developer platform GitHub as part of a research collaboration between Jamendo and Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra. The lawsuit alleges, however, that this dataset is only free for non-commercial academic purposes. Jamendo says a paid license is required for a company like Suno to train AI models on the data.
According to the complaint, Jamendo sought to initiate licensing discussions with Suno in September. The company allegedly sent Suno a €16 million ($18 million) invoice, broken down as €289 ($330) for each track in its dataset.
“Suno confirmed receipt of the invoice by October 3, 2025, but did not further respond to Jamendo’s communications and did not pay the invoice,” reads the lawsuit. Jamendo is now seeking at least €17.8 million ($20 million) in damages for copyright infringement and other civil claims.
Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Jamendo’s owner Winamp Group, said in a Tuesday (June 30) statement that the Suno lawsuit “marks another important step in Jamendo’s efforts to protect the rights of artists in an environment where artificial intelligence is transforming the music industry.”
“We believe that innovation and respect for intellectual property must go hand in hand to ensure a sustainable ecosystem for creators, rights holders and the companies developing tomorrow’s technologies,” added Saboundjian.
Suno declined to comment on the claims. The AI firm has consistently been open about the fact that it trained its models on vast amounts of music from the internet without first buying licenses. It says this process should be free under the principle of fair use, a tenet of copyright law that allows for unlicensed material to be used for transformative purposes.
Whether AI training indeed falls under the umbrella of fair use is an unsettled legal question that’s at the center of dozens of copyright lawsuits currently pending in courts across the country. This includes the ongoing claims against Suno by UMG and Sony, as well as cases brought against various other AI companies by publishers, writers, visual artists and movie studios.
