The RIAA, Udio, Suno and the fight for AI music

Surely, you’ve heard Mariah Carey’s big Christmas hit, “All I Want for Christmas Is You”. But have you heard of this other song? And also called “All I want for Christmas is you”, and uh, it looks a lot like Mariah Carey. We’re about to spend a lot of time discussing how this happened.

About this episode of The Vergecastwith the help of Pop onCharlie Harding, we took a deep dive into the new lawsuit filed by the RIAA against two AI companies, Udio and Suno. These two companies allegedly violated the music industry’s copyrights by ingesting large amounts of recorded music to train their AI models. Copyright law is complicated, these fights against AI companies are everywhere, and there’s no telling how this will all play out. But there’s really no way to hear the AI ​​sing “Jay-son De-RULO” and not know exactly where it came from.

After that, we talk about upcoming phone releases from Samsung, Google, and Motorola and try to figure out if any of the AI ​​features we’ll hear about will actually convince us to buy a new phone. We also talk about some important speaker news, because this is the summer of party speakers.

If you want to learn more about everything we discussed in this episode, here are some links to get you started, starting with the RIAA process:

And in the lightning round: