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The Lawsuit Tracker
Every major ongoing dispute involving record labels and the music-industry gatekeepers, in one place, what stage it’s at, the latest development, and what’s at stake. Sourced from public reporting and refreshed on a schedule.
Tracking 14 active disputes · last refreshed 2026-08-27
Sony Music v. Kroger, 392 recordings in social media ads
Whether a major retailer's use of copyrighted recordings in its own and paid influencers' social media ads constitutes willful infringement; with statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work across at least 392 alleged uses, exposure approaches $58.8 million, and the case extends Sony's campaign of enforcement actions against brands using music in social ads without sync licenses.
Latest Sony Music Entertainment and nine affiliated labels sued The Kroger Co. and 18 related entities on August 21, 2026 in the Central District of California, alleging at least 392 unauthorized uses of Sony recordings in social media posts by Kroger brands and by influencers paid to promote them. The complaint calls the conduct 'rampant infringement' and notes Kroger had signed at least 14 licensing agreements with Sony through 2025, which Sony says shows the company knew it needed licenses. Kroger has not publicly responded.
Round Hill v. Suno / Anthropic, twin $1B AI training suits
Whether AI companies infringed the copyrights in Round Hill's musical compositions, including 'Iris,' 'Total Eclipse of the Heart,' 'Lola,' and 'Holy Diver,' by training on them without a license; the publisher says damages in each case could exceed $1 billion and, unlike the majors, it is explicitly refusing to settle and wants a jury verdict on fair use.
Latest Filed August 17, 2026. Independent publisher Round Hill filed separate copyright suits against Suno and Anthropic in the Northern District of California, each listing roughly 500 infringed compositions with plans to amend to 'potentially ten thousand or more,' pushing potential damages in each case past $1 billion. Round Hill says there is 'nothing fair' about building multibillion-dollar AI businesses on copyrighted songs while rightsholders get nothing, and says it intends to take both cases to a jury verdict rather than negotiate licensing settlements.
UMG / Concord / ABKCO v. Anthropic, $3B AI lyrics copyright suit
$3 billion in alleged copyright infringement damages; whether AI large language models can train on and reproduce song lyrics without license; outcome could govern every LLM's relationship with song publishing catalogs.
Latest Anthropic is trying to carve down the $3 billion case: on August 3, 2026 it moved for partial dismissal, arguing the publishers' claim that Claude reproduces lyrics in its outputs 'lacks even a single example of any allegedly infringing output' and that the DMCA claim fails, while CEO Dario Amodei separately moved to dismiss the direct-infringement count against him personally. Anthropic is not moving against the core claims over torrenting lyrics from pirate libraries and copying works to train Claude. Both motions are set for hearing November 4, 2026 before Judge Eumi K. Lee in San Jose; the publishers' March 2026 partial summary judgment motion on fair use remains pending.
Sony Music v. Suno. AI training copyright infringement (D. Mass.)
Whether AI music generators training on copyrighted recordings without licenses constitutes copyright infringement or fair use; could determine the legality of the entire AI music generation industry.
Latest No fair-use ruling is coming this summer: under a June 30, 2026 amended scheduling order, fact discovery now runs through September 30, 2026, with dispositive motions due April 9, 2027, when both sides are expected to move for summary judgment on fair use. Meanwhile Judge Saylor has yet to rule on UMG and Sony's motion to add 61,026 recordings (raising theoretical exposure above $9 billion); Suno urged him to reject it, citing Judge Hellerstein's June 29 ruling in the parallel Udio case (S.D.N.Y.) denying Sony's bid to add over 30,000 works late in discovery. UMG and Sony remain plaintiffs against Suno after Warner settled in November 2025. Separately, on July 31, 2026 the Munich Regional Court ruled for German collecting society GEMA against Suno in the first European decision on a generative AI music tool, finding both the training and the outputs infringed copyright and rejecting Suno's fair use defense even for training conducted in the US; the judgment is not final and an appeal is expected, but it hands the labels a persuasive data point ahead of the fair-use fight here.
AFM v. UMG / Warner, AI licensing without musician pay
Whether major labels breached their collective bargaining agreement by licensing union members' recordings to AI companies Suno and Udio without compensation or credit; could determine if the 'new uses' provision entitles session musicians to a share of every label-AI licensing deal.
Latest UMG filed its motion to dismiss the amended complaint in early August 2026, reported August 6, arguing the 'new use' provision cannot generate a payment because no AFM agreement sets a rate for AI training. 'The provision does not set the price,' the motion says. 'It says where the price lives: in the separate AFM agreement that governs the new use... For the AI use alleged here... AFM concedes no such agreement exists. A payment measured by an agreement that does not exist is no payment at all.' On that reading UMG 'breached nothing, and the claim fails on the face of the pleading.' The filing follows a July 21, 2026 pre-motion conference at which Judge Edgardo Ramos granted the AFM leave to amend and both majors leave to move to dismiss; the union filed its First Amended Complaint on July 24, dropping Warner Music Group Corp. as a defendant and naming Warner Records, Inc. and Atlantic Recording Corp. alongside Universal Music Group, Inc. Briefing runs through September 11, 2026.
Sony / UMG v. Musi, 'parasitic app' copyright action in Canada
Whether a free streaming app that pipes YouTube's catalog into its own ad- and subscription-supported interface infringes copyright and unlawfully circumvents technical protection measures; the majors are using the case to press app stores to remove similar services.
Latest Sony Music Group and Universal Music Group announced on August 6, 2026 that they are commencing legal proceedings in Canada against Musi's developers, coordinated by the IFPI and its Canadian national group Music Canada. The action alleges Musi makes copyright-protected sound recordings available to the public without authorization and deliberately circumvents YouTube's technical protections to take content from the service. IFPI CEO Victoria Oakley said the industry is 'serving notice on parasitic apps' and called for 'effective, direct action from the mobile app stores.' Musi has not publicly responded.
33 States v. Live Nation / Ticketmaster, antitrust monopoly (remedies phase)
Potential forced divestiture of Ticketmaster from Live Nation, venue sell-offs, fee caps, and structural breakup of the live-music industry's dominant vertically integrated conglomerate; billions in consumer damages.
Latest On August 4, 2026, Judge Subramanian denied without prejudice the states' bid for discovery into the DOJ's settlement with Live Nation, writing in a one-page order that 'the Court has no actual requests for testimony or documents to review, and so the precise scope of what the states are asking for is unclear.' He directed the states to serve 'narrow and targeted' requests on the DOJ and Live Nation, told both to 'entertain these requests in good faith,' and signaled that discovery in the Tunney Act review is legally available when kept within reasonable bounds. Separately, he heard argument on Live Nation's post-trial Rule 50(b) and Rule 59 motions on July 31 and has not ruled; at that hearing he pressed the states hardest on the amphitheater market definition and the promotion tying claim, while also questioning Live Nation's statute-of-limitations theory and its attempt to discount evidence of threats and conditioning. Remedies discovery remains stayed until those motions are resolved.
RBX v. Spotify, two-tier streaming fraud class action
Whether Spotify polices artificial streams aggressively for independent artists while tolerating them for superstars, and whether it owed rightsholders a duty to disclose that. The complaint estimates fraudulent streams diverted at least $600 million in royalties away from other artists and labels over roughly 48 months through 2025.
Latest Judge Josephine Staton dismissed the original complaint on June 22, 2026, finding RBX had not shown Spotify owed him a duty to protect him from third-party bot activity and questioning why a case centered on Drake's streams did not name Drake as a defendant. She allowed an amended filing, and RBX filed one in late July 2026 that expands the two-tier theory: that Spotify 'intentionally ignores fraud committed by certain a-list artists,' letting their manipulated plays count toward a finite royalty pool shared by everyone else, and that Spotify had a duty to disclose this while representing that it 'evenhandedly protects the integrity of its music royalty ecosystem.' A Spotify spokesperson told CMU on July 30 that the amended complaint is 'baseless' and 'doesn't address the deficiencies the court already identified,' adding: 'we intend to seek dismissal.'
Jermaine Dupri / So So Def v. Sony Music, $18M royalty accounting suit
More than $18 million in allegedly unpaid and underreported royalties across three decades of So So Def recordings, and whether a major label maintained parallel accounting systems that kept a producer and label partner from ever seeing what he was owed.
Latest Filed July 6, 2026 and amended July 7 in the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleges a 'systemic pattern' of underreporting, non-reporting, and retroactively altered statements, and says Sony kept Kris Kross royalties in a separate accounting system for more than 20 years without disclosing it, never reporting producer or override royalties on 'Totally Krossed Out' and 'Da Bomb' until 2023, with more than $2.2 million still outstanding on those two albums alone. Dupri says the discrepancies surfaced in a 2025 audit by Gelfand, Rennert & Feldman.
Sony Music v. Udio (round two), 30,117 recordings AI training suit
Whether Udio's copying of 30,117 Sony recordings to train its AI models, allegedly including stream-ripping from YouTube via YT-DLP, constitutes copyright infringement and DMCA circumvention; statutory damages could reach roughly $4.5 billion, and Sony is the only major label that has not licensed or settled with Udio.
Latest Filed July 20, 2026. After Judge Alvin Hellerstein's June 29 ruling barred Sony from adding more than 30,000 recordings to its original 2024 case, Sony filed this separate suit asserting 30,117 recordings identified via audio fingerprinting of Udio's training data during discovery, spanning artists from Elvis Presley to Beyonce and Harry Styles. The complaint brings three claims (post-1972 infringement, pre-1972 infringement under the Music Modernization Act, and DMCA circumvention over alleged YouTube stream-ripping) and seeks up to $150,000 per work plus an injunction.
Kratter v. Spotify, undisclosed stream-filtering / royalty suppression
Whether Spotify's undisclosed stream-filtering rules and its 1,000-play royalty threshold constitute unfair and deceptive business practices that systematically suppress independent artists' payouts while favoring major labels and high-volume catalogs.
Latest A venue fight is now underway: after Spotify filed a notice of removal on July 2, 2026 to shift the case to federal court, Kratter moved on July 3 to remand it to Connecticut state court, calling the removal 'improper, frivolous, and unsupported by any objectively reasonable basis' and arguing Spotify cannot show the $75,000 amount-in-controversy threshold. The underlying claims are unchanged: Kratter alleges Spotify uses 'opaque rules and undisclosed filtering criteria' that disproportionately harm independent artists, tracing a March 2026 recommendation-system overhaul to a 'sharp and measurable decline in counted streams' for his catalog, and seeks damages, an injunction, and a full accounting of filtered streams.
Drake v. UMG, defamation over 'Not Like Us'
Whether UMG is liable for publishing and promoting Kendrick Lamar's 'Not Like Us,' which Drake alleges falsely portrays him as a child sex offender; foundational question of whether rap diss tracks can constitute actionable defamation.
Latest As of April 17, 2026, Drake filed his reply brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, completing the full briefing cycle; oral argument has not yet been scheduled.
Limp Bizkit v. UMG, $200M royalties fraud suit
Allegations that UMG deliberately engineered royalty-accounting software to conceal unpaid artist royalties across its entire catalog, with $200M+ in claimed damages; parallel copyright infringement claim based on UMG's continued distribution after contract termination notice.
Latest As of March 2025, Judge Percy Anderson (C.D. Cal.) denied UMG's motion to dismiss the copyright infringement claims, allowing them to proceed in federal court, while redirecting breach-of-contract and fraud claims to state court; Limp Bizkit filed those claims in Los Angeles County Superior Court on March 24, 2025, and both tracks are in active litigation as of June 2026.
Salt-N-Pepa v. UMG, copyright termination / masters reclaim
Whether hip-hop artists who signed to an intermediary label in the 1980s can invoke Section 203 of the Copyright Act to terminate UMG's ownership of master recordings including 'Push It'; broader precedent on who controls catalog originating from work-for-hire and third-party-signed deals.
Latest As of May 5, 2026, UMG filed its response brief with the Second Circuit, arguing Salt-N-Pepa's termination bid 'lacks legal foundation' because the duo never themselves executed the original copyright transfer; the duo can still file a reply brief before oral argument is scheduled.
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Methodology: entries are compiled from public reporting (court-records coverage by outlets like Billboard, Reuters, Variety, and Music Business Worldwide), allegations are allegations until a court rules. This tracker is not exhaustive and is not legal reporting of record; see each entry’s sources for the underlying coverage. Spot an error or a missing dispute? Tell us - corrections take priority. For the history behind these fights, see the case archive.