By Jennifer Matthews
- Anthropic sued by Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell alleging a “brazen campaign” of torrenting and scraping music
- R&B and hip-hop drew 349.9 billion of America’s 1.4 trillion on-demand audio streams last year
Sony (SONY +0.11%) Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, the publishing arm of Warner Music Group (WMG -2.61%), sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic in federal court in California. They are accusing the AI company of pirating songs to to the tune of $150,000 per copyright to train Claude, a claim Anthropic denies. Warner Music Group’s current U.S. structure includes Atlantic Music Group (Atlantic Records, 300 Entertainment, 10K Projects and related imprints) and Warner Records, so its hip-hop/R&B bench is quite deep.
Why This Matters: As a songwriter and active member of the Recording Academy, I’m watching the NO FAKES, TRAIN, and CLEAR acts through two sets of lenses. Those $150,000 damages only exist if the copyright was registered on time and only matter if the creator can afford lawyers.
Anthropic already paid $1.5 billion to settle with authors after a judge ruled that training on copyrighted work was legal but pirating it to get there was not. That distinction matters because if a songwriter in Atlanta writes a bridge that a producer later flips into a chart-topping hit and gets credited with a share of the composition. They affiliate with ASCAP or BMI and assume they are protected. But a PRO collects when a song plays on the radio or in a venue — it does not collect mechanicals, the royalties a stream owes the composition.
Money moves through the Mechanical Licensing Collective, the nonprofit Congress created in 2018 to pay songwriters directly, and a PRO deal does not register you there. Signing up is free, nobody does it for you, and plenty of people in the business are content to let you never find out. The MLC told the Copyright Office it has matched nearly $317 million of the $397 million streaming services handed over, leaving roughly $80 million whose owners it cannot identify. If the system cannot find money a writer already earned, an AI settlement will not either. Wealth in the music business is not made from hits or streams. It is made from ownership a creative can prove.
Situational Awareness: Register every composition on time, even if the song is a rough cut or demo. Audit your splits at the MLC. When creating with AI music companies like Suno or Udio, read the terms before feeding the machine your intellectual property. Rules are good, but a paper trail is better because the major labels will always get paid whether a creator does or not.
CBx Vibe: “The Story of O.J.” Jay-Z
