Weekly wrap-up
This Week in AI Music: Ask First
The week one word kept coming up: consent. Who agreed to train the models, who gets asked before a remix, and who gets paid. Six stories, plus what we shipped.
Published on Song Tested this week
Mureka review (Oct 20). Same eight prompts as our Suno v6 and ElevenLabs tests, 16 takes scored blind: 4.31 out of 5, between Suno v6 (4.56) and ElevenLabs (3.82). Both takes of our country ballad and both takes of our duet got a 5, and on the duet Nathan wrote, "if i didn't know better, I would think this was a legit human song." The misses are about control: there's no length setting, and asked to switch from a waltz to punk and back, it blended the two instead. Read our Mureka review.
AI music price tracker (Oct 20). Five tools, every figure linked to the tool's own page and dated. Sticker prices are close, but what you can keep isn't: Suno Pro's $10 gets you 20 downloads a month, Mureka Pro's $10 gets you hundreds of MP3s, and Udio's $10 plan gets you none, because downloads are switched off. We recheck it weekly. See the price tracker.
Reservoir sues Suno over 1,050 songs
On Oct 21, the independent music company Reservoir sued Suno in federal court in Northern California, alleging Suno copied 1,050 of its compositions to train its models without permission. The songs named include Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now," Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" and Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach." Across three counts, including two under the DMCA, the figures pleaded come to just over $186 million, and Reservoir wants copies of its works destroyed, including any in training datasets and model weights. It filed a separate suit against Anthropic the same day over the lyrics of 853 compositions (Music Business Worldwide; docket). These are allegations, not findings.
Suno says it hasn't deleted all its training recordings
A day earlier, on Oct 20, Suno filed its 44-page answer to Universal and Sony's second lawsuit, the one aimed at its v6 models. In it, Suno admits it "has not deleted all of the sound recordings it has used to train its AI models," and says that's consistent with the labels' own earlier demand that it retain its training data sets. It also admits users have been able to put artist names in prompts since January 2026, which it says are converted into style descriptions. Suno denies that v6 was trained on the same recordings as its earlier models, and argues any copying is fair use (Music Business Worldwide).
Spotify: 50 million slop and spam tracks out of recommendations
On Oct 20, Spotify said it has taken more than 50 million slop and spam tracks out of its recommendations this year, on top of more than 75 million "spammy tracks" removed from the platform altogether. It says it combines listener feedback, upload patterns, metadata and several third-party AI detection tools, and that tracks with a high probability of being AI-generated are 10 times more likely to fall below its 1,000-stream royalty threshold. Its AI Credits feature, launched in April, now gets tens of thousands of submissions a day (Spotify). If you use AI in your songs, disclosing it in your credits is now a normal thing to do.
Spotify signs Believe and TuneCore for its AI remix tool
Also on Oct 20, Believe and Spotify announced a licensing deal for Spotify's upcoming tool for AI-powered fan remixes and covers, "not entirely new works." Streams of the remixes pay the artists and rights holders behind the original, and the tool is planned as a paid add-on for Premium. Believe and TuneCore artists have to opt in twice: first to AI programs in general, then to this deal (Spotify). It follows Spotify's deals for the same tool with Universal, Merlin and Kobalt. There's still no price or launch date (Music Business Worldwide).
Musicians' union launches "Human Made, Human Paid"
This week the American Federation of Musicians launched "Human Made, Human Paid," a campaign for consent, credit and compensation whenever musicians' work is used to train AI or make music with it. The union resumes talks on its Sound Recording Labor Agreement with UMG, Sony, Warner and Hollywood Records on Nov 3 (AFM; Human Made Human Paid). "If AI learns, we should earn," the campaign site says. Rolling Stone puts the union at more than 80,000 professional musicians (Rolling Stone).
An AI system takes the stage at Symphony Hall
Not every AI music story this week was in court. On Oct 22, the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere of Tod Machover's "already and not yet," conducted by Kent Nagano, with performances through Oct 24. A live AI system built at the MIT Media Lab listens to players and sections through microphones and answers with variations of its own over speakers around the hall (BSO; MIT News). "It's a collaborator, and we've designed it like that," Machover told WBUR (WBUR).
Coming this week
Tuesday, Oct 27: Audius, where AI music lives. Audius is free to upload to and its terms don't mention AI at all; what they do say, at length, is that what you upload has to be yours. We walk through its AI-attribution setting, the rules, and how to upload.
Thursday, Oct 29: a short history of AI music, from a computer writing a string quartet at the University of Illinois in 1956 to Suno, Udio, the lawsuits and the licensing deals, with sources for every step.
Opinions are Nathan's.