Top 5 Music & AI Moments of 2025
Plus some honorable mentions
2025 was a banner year for music & AI. We finally evolved from wild west novelty to real infrastructure: lawsuits gave way to settlements and licensing partnerships to build authorized, paid GenAI music tools (UMG & Udio) and the first label/AI alliances (ElevenLabs & Merlin/ Kobalt, WMG & Suno). Consumer products got more diversified and complex, speaking to a variety of different creators - from the novice to the professional.
At the same time, lawmakers moved to close the most obvious loophole - voice and visual likeness - with federal proposals like the NO FAKES Act of 2025. And we got real guidance on how AI should be governed: by the courts, trade bodies, and national governments alike.
To that end, I give you my Top 5 Music & AI Moments of 2025.
Let me know in the comments what I missed, and where I got it wrong.
5. U.S. Copyright Office set key guideposts for AI + copyright
(Part 2 on copyrightability in Jan 2025; Part 3 training pre-publication in May 2025)
Business hates uncertainty. Which is why it’s so important for the U.S. Copyright Office (and other copyright offices around the world) to provide guidance on what works are getting protection and what are not when AI is involved.
Two reports from the U.S. Copyright Office in 2025 spell it out: Part 2 (Copyrightability, January 2025) reaffirmed the human-authorship requirement and declared that prompt-only outputs (usually) aren’t copyrightable. AI-assisted works may be if a human contributes “protectable expression” - through edits, selection or arrangement, curation, or incorporating human-made material.
Part 3 (Generative AI Training, pre-publication May 2025) gave a much needed opinion around training on copyrighted works, signaling what facts will matter in fair-use and infringement fights (purpose, scale, market harm, and licensing feasibility).
These two reports followed an earlier report on digital replicas in July 2024.
Taken together, these are sensible reports. While these aren’t signed legislation or binding law, they give us a huge, blinking red arrow of where to go from here. It’s the closest thing to a national “operating manual” while Congress and the courts catch up. And as the U.S. goes, (most of) the rest of the world goes.
The downstream effect for music? It immediately gives guidance on how artists document process, how rights holders clear risk, how platforms design creator tools, and how the music publishing industry can operate.
4. The NO FAKES Act of 2025 became the flagship U.S. “voice/likeness” policy push (introduced Apr 2025).
When Ghostwriter977 released “Heart on My Sleeve” in April 2023, with Drake and The Weeknd vocal models as the topline, mass confusion erupted. Spotify initially declined to take it down because it didn’t violate their terms of service; it was eventually pulled after DistroKid was bullied by UMG. Harvey Mason, Jr, CEO of The Recording Academy, said the song would be eligible for a GRAMMY, then backtracked (on a technicality - it was no longer commercially available). No one knew quite what to make of this song, nor how to handle it legally.
A year later, we had distinct clarity: It was illegal. Thanks to a handful of state laws, principally Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, and pending federal legislation, “voice” has been added to the name, image and likeness statutes around the “Right of Publicity” law. This is an example of legislation and policy makers acting quickly, decisively, and in the best interest of all involved.
If only the rest of our government worked this way.
3. Suno launches Suno Studio (Sept 2025)
The first wave of consumer Gen AI platforms were largely two-dimensional: type a prompt, get a novelty song. Then Suno released Suno Studio.
Earlier platforms typically spit out a single stereo file. Suno Studio brought music generation onto a timeline and into a workflow, introducing Gen AI in a real digital audio workstation environment. Along with multi-modal prompting and Suno’s new V5, users got a world-class model with real production control: multitrack timeline editing, stems, and arrangement tools that let creators isolate parts, edit, and export as audio or MIDI.
It widened Gen AI’s musical user base overnight - from hobbyists who want hand-holding to professionals who want a true co-pilot.
And the cultural impact may have been even bigger. I watched skeptical, even hostile, working musicians get won over once they experienced what the tool could actually do.
We still have thorny questions around training data, attribution, and rights. But Suno Studio is an incredibly powerful creation platform that has reframed the debate: AI can be a serious creative instrument, akin to once-controversial technologies like synthesizers, sampling, and plugins that we now take as standard creative tools.
After acquiring the startup WavTool, Suno released their latest model (V5) and their most powerful and interactive tool (Suno Studio) on the same day. From a Suno Studio demo.
2. Anthropic Agrees to Pay $1.5 Billion to Settle Lawsuit With Book Authors (Sept 2025)
Until this case, the fight over training data lived in abstractions - “fair use,” “innovation,” “transformative,” “public benefit.” This settlement grounded it in reality, and put a number on the table big enough that got everyone’s attention.
It also clarified an important distinction: you can argue about whether training is fair use, but how you get that training data matters. You can’t scrape the internet and “build a shadow repository,” as one judge put it, without consequence. The settlement’s remedies - cash, dataset destruction, and compliance commitments - effectively means that in the future, Gen AI companies will be licensing IP for their models.
A byproduct? It has accelerated the market for music licensing - something that might turn into a very lucrative business for artists and rights holders.
Furthermore, it’s not a coincidence that we got the first major label/ Gen AI music deals within a few weeks of this settlement. Speaking of…
1. Major labels settle with the biggest Gen AI music platforms (UMG/ Udio in Oct 2025; WMG/ Suno Nov 2025)
We all knew these deals were coming. Now that they are starting to appear, it’s nothing less than historic.
Twenty-five years ago, the industry ignored the most promising technology of its generation - and when it couldn’t ignore file sharing anymore, it tried to sue it to oblivion. It was a disaster, and a total collapse of the business ensued.
Five years after that, the industry was marginally warmer to streaming but still not totally on board. Spotify launched in Northern Europe years before it arrived in the major music territories, including the U.S. As a result, the recorded music business didn’t truly begin its comeback until around 2015 - 15 years after its peak.
Today, the industry’s relationship with technology has dramatically improved. Rights holders began negotiating with the leading Gen AI music platforms almost immediately after they launched. And while the last 18 months might have been full of token lawsuits and general press posturing, we ended 2025 with two major deals.
So we enter 2026 with Gen AI being partners with the industry, with new products, features, and consumer tools on the horizon. And all this adds up to - hopefully - more engagement from consumers (ie, more money).
It’s not hyperbole to call this a complete 180 from a generation ago. We’re all better off for it.
Warner boss Robert Kyncl. He rushed out a Suno deal to be the first of the three majors. With all the drama at WMG, he needed a win. He got one. Photo credit: Robert Kyncl.
Honorable mentions:
ElevenLabs announce first-ever “industry” Gen AI deal with Merlin/ Kobalt; publishers get 50% of revenue (Aug 2025).
Spotify announced “artist-first AI” collaboration with majors + Merlin/Believe (Oct 2025).
Publishers vs. Anthropic (“Claude lyrics”) clarifies the output liability fight (Reuters “guardrails” deal Jan 2025; injunction decision Mar 2025).
UK “AI training opt-out” proposal collapses after backlash (Dec 2025).
Spotify escalates enforcement against AI-enabled spam/impersonation - as part of their new UMG deal (Sept 2025).
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