In this study group, M-RCBG Senior Fellow SK Sharma examines how the music industry is navigating generative AI through lawsuits, licensing deals, and emerging debates over consent, copyright, compensation, and creativity.
In less than two years, the music business went from suing the leading generative AI companies to licensing them. The fighting has not stopped. One major label is still litigating into 2027. A Munich court has twice ruled against AI firms. The musicians’ union sued Universal and Warner in June over the settlements themselves. On September 1, the United States filed a brief in the largest AI copyright case arguing that training is fair use. Almost every deal’s economics are confidential; only one royalty split has ever been disclosed. With no legislation and the courts divided, the working rules of this transition are being set in private contracts.
As the former Chief Analytics and AI Officer at Universal Music Group, I watched much of this take shape from the inside. Music matters here because it is the first creative industry to negotiate, at commercial scale, what it means for machines to learn from human work; that makes it the proving ground for questions that reach far beyond it. The ones I most want to put to the room: who consents when human expression becomes training data, and whether consent can be delegated at all; what is owed when a model learns from a work rather than copying it; whether a system trained on the whole of recorded music can make anything genuinely new, and what that implies about creativity and knowledge; and how the answers should shape intellectual property and AI policy.
For the policy-minded, this is regulation being written without a regulator. For the legally minded, fair use doctrine is forming in real time, with the first appellate ruling pending and the government’s brief filed days before summary judgment. For the ethicists, it is consent and moral desert with the labels filed off. For those drawn to where business meets government, it is a live study in markets moving faster than the state. And some of you, soon enough, will be the counsel, the regulator, the founder, or the advocate in these rooms.
