The three biggest music labels have signed deals over the past year to train AI on their music. Their stars, however, refuse to give consent.

“Madonna does not want her music trained on. Don't care what you want to pay her. She's very clear. I do not want my music to be trained on. I want my music to be its own thing.” That is how her manager, Guy Oseary on The Tim Ferriss Show, described her stance at the start of July. Oseary has managed Madonna for 36 years.

Reporters Ashley Carman and Lucas Shaw described the problem in a Bloomberg article from 6 August. Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music Group own millions of recordings, and they can license their catalogues to whomever they choose. AI companies, however, cannot work with those recordings without the consent of the artists who recorded them. Madonna and SZA are among those who are not interested in the technology.

What the labels signed

Warner Music Group settled its lawsuit against Suno on 25 November 2025 and entered a licensing partnership with it. Suno committed to launch licensed models in 2026 and to retire those trained on unlicensed music. The agreement also included the acquisition of the concert platform Songkick.

Universal Music Group settled its dispute with Udio on 29 October 2025 and announced plans for a jointly licensed AI platform, which had still not launched by summer 2026. Sony Music did not join, and as of 11 July 2026 it continues to pursue lawsuits against both Suno and Udio.

In parallel, a second layer of deals is running, this time on the side of streaming platforms. Spotify announced a licensing deal with Universal on 21 May 2026 for its AI covers and remix tool, and on 4 August it added a deal with Merlin, which represents 15% of the global recorded music market.

The offer is clear. For a surcharge, a fan can turn a rock song into a country ballad or generate a new track with a star's voice, and both the label and the artist get paid.

Licences to a catalogue and licences to a voice are two different things. A label can sell rights to a recording it owns, but it cannot sell a performer's name, voice and likeness without their permission. And this is exactly where the consent matters. According to Bloomberg, singer SZA responded to the training of her music on Instagram with the words “There's nothing you could ever say to me to make this okay”.

The labels know this and speak carefully. According to Bloomberg, Michael Nash, Universal's chief digital officer, said the company has long been “in conversations” with thousands of artists and their estates. Robert Kyncl, CEO of Warner, described the situation this way: “It's a bit complex, and it's laborious, and we're all working through it.”

Kyncl himself built Warner's deal with Suno on the principle that AI is acceptable to artists only when they are given “an opt-in for the use of their name, image, likeness, voice and compositions in new AI songs”.

Spotify builds the whole product on opt-in

Opt-in is the foundation of the entire product in these tools. Spotify describes its remix tool as a product “grounded in consent, credit, and compensation” and is launching it as a paid add-on to the subscription.

Artists under the Merlin deal get “the option to participate”, in other words a choice about whether to take part. The model works only with those who say yes.

That is also its weakness. According to Bloomberg, some deals with artists will come about, but the biggest names must join for the feature to take off. If the catalogue is made up mainly of second- and third-tier artists, the value of the offer for fans is lower.

An uncertain market and Bromley's doubt

Nobody yet knows whether there will be demand for remixes of this kind. Jordan Bromley, who leads the entertainment practice at the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, put the doubt bluntly to Bloomberg. “This whole thing could be a pet rock. How many people want to pay extra to make weird remixes of Time After Time or American Pie? It provides a moment to discuss and set the market as it relates to artist consent, clarity and compensation.”

Whether people will pay to manipulate someone else's music is an uncertain assumption on the demand side. The supply side is uncertain too, because without the stars' consent the product has nothing to attract people with. Suno has a licensing framework with Warner, Udio with Universal, and Spotify with Universal and Merlin. But they will receive training and product data only from those who decide to supply it.

The AI Act and training data

The European layer of the dispute revolves around transparency. In July 2025, the European Commission published a template under which providers of general-purpose AI models must disclose an overview of the data used for training, including sources and main domains. General rules on labelling AI content come into force under the same framework from August 2026.

For artists who want to know what a specific model is built on, disclosure of training data is leverage. For AI companies, it is one more reason to build models on licensed and traceable data rather than on a scraped catalogue.

The labels therefore hold signed deals and court settlements, but not the one input on which the entire model rests. That input is the consent of the names people know.

By Tereza Tiller