MBW Views is a series of op-eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say.
The following MBW op/ed was written by prominent Entertainment and IP lawyer Krystle Delgado, owner of Delgado Entertainment Law PLLC and host of the popular Top Music Attorney YouTube Podcast, which has over 200,000 subscribers.
As an attorney, Delgado is leading high-profile class-action lawsuits against the generative AI music platforms SUNO and UDIO.
In the following op/ed, she weighs in on the debate about Walled Gardens vs. Open Studios.
Over to Krystle…
The music industry keeps dancing around an uncomfortable question: whether AI companies using artists’ music without permission is really that bad… or just an awkward step before everyone signs deals and moves on.
The conversation has shifted from “they stole tens of millions of songs from the internet illegally” to “hey, we can all just make money together.”
Well, at least for major labels.
An unfortunate truth is that a large portion of these songs belong to independent artists, who were never asked for permission, offered compensation, or are even being included in the “let’s start fresh” AI campaigns today.
Whether independent artists can truly get justice through their pending class action lawsuits against Suno and Udio remains to be seen.
But here we nonetheless are, and the conversation has officially shifted to how AI should operate going forward. Some companies say the solution is to do a “walled garden.” The term sounds technical, but the idea is simple.
Think of it like a video game. You can log into the platform, create music inside the system, experiment with sounds, maybe share tracks with other users – but you cannot take AI music off the platform.
Warner, Universal, and Merlin have all signed up for this structure through settlements with Udio. The goal is “properly licensed” AI models going forward.
But here’s where things get complicated.
We do not actually know what other music is still being included in these licensing pools. Independent artists certainly have not been consulted.
Meanwhile, Warner stands as the only major that has settled with Suno, which wholly rejects the walled garden approach. Warner appears comfortable allowing its catalog to exist in both worlds – AI platforms and wherever users want to share their AI songs (albeit with ‘opt-in’ terms for artists).
This raises a pretty uncomfortable question.
Is this “start fresh” campaign really about protecting music?
Or is it about protecting the largest catalogs while everyone else’s work remains part of the unauthorized training data?
Because while the majors negotiate deals, the original issue has not disappeared. These companies built their platforms on mass copyright infringement.
Having seen what these deals actually look like on the back end, additional concerns come up regarding whether the major label artists will actually be able to say ‘no’ to participating in AI training.
Implementing licensing structures does not erase the original theft. And notably, there’s a new group caught in the middle of all this: AI users.
Most people using AI music tools reasonably assume the legal risks have already been figured out. But if you read the terms of service on many of these platforms, the users are the ones carrying the risk.
AI users are often required to indemnify the company if an AI-generated track leads to a copyright claim.
In other words, if an AI song sounds too much like a real artist and someone gets sued, the user may be the one responsible, not the AI company. Udio even shockingly said in one court filing that its AI users are legally responsible for any allegedly infringing AI songs, not Udio.
So the current structure of the AI music ecosystem looks something like this:
Artists may have had their music used without permission to train AI. Users experimenting with AI tools may carry the legal exposure if something goes wrong. And the AI companies, the ones that built the AI models off artists for free in the first place, are comfortably protected in the middle.
AI music is not going away. That much is clear.
But the current debate about “walled gardens” is missing the real issue. Because before the industry decides what the future should look like, there’s still a very obvious question hanging in the air:
If the foundation of these AI companies is mass piracy and theft, can AI companies really just start fresh and pretend that part never happened?
Music Business Worldwide
