Suno presses Apple for testimony on label deals and AI music claims

Suno has asked a California federal court to require Apple to provide live testimony in the music AI company’s copyright dispute with Universal Music Group and Sony Music, resisting Apple’s effort to quash the deposition subpoena or obtain a protective order.

The Oct. 27 opposition narrowed the dispute to four topics: Apple’s licensing negotiations with UMG and Sony; its assessment of whether Apple Music could operate without either catalog; streaming fraud on the service; and communications between Apple, the labels and the RIAA concerning Suno and the litigation. Suno says each bears on its fair-use and copyright-misuse defenses.

Apple is not a party to the Massachusetts lawsuit and had moved on Oct. 13 to block the subpoena, calling the requests irrelevant, overbroad and disproportionate. It described the inquiry into Apple Music’s ability to function without major-label catalogs as a fishing expedition by a new industry entrant seeking commercially sensitive information.

The dispute turns in part on the labels’ asserted market harm. Suno’s filing says UMG and Sony do not presently claim that Suno outputs infringe their recordings. Instead, it says, the labels contend that non-infringing AI tracks compete for plays, listener attention and shares of royalty pools on services including Apple Music.

Suno argues that guaranteed minimum royalties and any contractual exclusions for AI-generated music could undermine the claimed dilution of label royalties. Apple, however, has said it does not currently exclude AI-generated content from its royalty pool. UMG’s chief digital officer, Michael Nash, said in March that the company had anti-AI dilution provisions in numerous agreements, while seeing no indication that royalty dilution was then materially affecting UMG revenue.

Suno also contends that testimony about Apple Music’s handling of fraud could show whether fraudulent activity is actually tied to AI music. Its filing says Apple reported excluding 2 billion fraudulent streams in the preceding year. Apple has already responded to six subpoenas in the litigation and produced information covering millions of Apple Music tracks, including data on Suno-generated tracks and AI-music detection and tagging.

The company accepted written sworn declarations for five of its original nine deposition topics, leaving four subjects for live testimony. It also says it offered to exclude past and executed licensing agreements and technical details of Apple’s fraud-detection methods. Suno maintains that the labels’ witnesses lack insight into Apple’s own knowledge and commercial positions.

The subpoena fight arises from the first UMG and Sony case, filed in June 2024 over 560 recordings. The labels seek up to $150,000 per work, a theoretical maximum of about $84 million, as well as damages tied to alleged circumvention of YouTube’s anti-downloading technology. As we reported in September, UMG and Sony subsequently filed a separate case over 60,202 additional recordings and Suno’s v6 model.

The broader case is approaching two years in discovery, which is expected to run through mid-2027 before a ruling on whether Suno’s training was fair use. Magistrate Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi is scheduled to hear Apple’s motion on Dec. 1.