The £123K Question: When AI Artists Outstream Real Musicians
Frequencies To Watch
💰 AI-Generated Artists Are Banking Six Figures from Streaming
Blow Records has earned £123,176 since June with their viral hit “Predador de Perereca” hitting 45 million streams. Meanwhile, Deezer reports 28% of all daily uploads (30,000+ tracks) are now fully AI-generated.
🚀 Suno Hits $100M Revenue Whilst Fighting Billion-Dollar Lawsuit
The AI music platform is generating over $100 million annually and negotiating a $2 billion valuation, even as major labels sue for potentially billions in damages over alleged copyright infringement.
🎚️ Sony AI Drops Instruct-MusicGen: Edit Tracks with Natural Language
Presented at ISMIR 2025 in South Korea, the breakthrough tool lets producers add instruments, remove parts, or refine mixes by typing commands like “add more bass” instead of twisting knobs.
🇮🇹 Italy Makes History with AI Copyright Law
New legislation limits copyright protection to works of “human creativity”, even when AI assists, becoming the first comprehensive national framework addressing AI in creative work.
🎤 Real-Time AI Voice Transformation Goes Offline
Session Loops released VocalNet for real-time vocal cloning inside DAWs with zero latency, whilst Positive Grid’s Project BIAS X generates guitar tones from text prompts like “warm vintage clean with shimmer”.
Editor’s Note
Last week we covered Spotify’s major label partnership. This week is the reality check.
Whilst the industry negotiates frameworks and principles, AI-generated music isn’t waiting for permission. It’s already here, it’s already making serious money, and it’s already changing what “artist” even means.
An AI artist made £123,000 in four months. Let that sink in. No touring, no rehearsals, no years of practice. Just algorithms and streaming royalties. Meanwhile, 28% of everything uploaded to Deezer daily is AI-generated. That’s over 30,000 tracks every single day.
As a DJ, I’m starting to see these tracks appear in pools and on playlists. Sometimes they’re obvious. Sometimes they’re not. And that’s what’s keeping me up at night (if work isn’t already!).
This week’s deep dive is about Suno because I think their story crystallises the contradiction we’re living through. A company generating $100M revenue whilst being sued for billions by the same industry whose products they’re disrupting. It’s Napster 2.0, except this time the technology isn’t just distributing music, it’s creating it.
Also below: Italy just became the first country to legally define that only humans can hold copyright. That’s big, and we need to talk about it.
-ENZi
Deep Dive: Suno’s $2 Billion Gamble - The Napster Moment We’re All Ignoring
Suno is having the kind of year that would make any startup founder weep with joy and terror in equal measure. The AI music generation platform is pulling in over $100 million in annual recurring revenue and is currently negotiating a funding round that would value the company at more than $2 billion. That’s four times their previous valuation. For context, that’s bigger than many established music technology companies that have been around for decades.
But where it gets messy is these same revenue numbers are being generated whilst Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group are actively suing Suno for copyright infringement through the Recording Industry Association of America. The labels are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per infringing work. When you’re talking about AI models potentially trained on millions of copyrighted recordings, the maths gets astronomical fast. We’re talking potential damages in the billions.
The lawsuit centres on a fundamental question: did Suno unlawfully train its AI models on copyrighted sound recordings without permission or compensation? The labels allege that Suno “stream-ripped” content from platforms like YouTube to build its training datasets. Suno, for their part, asked a federal court in October to dismiss these allegations. Co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman has maintained that their technology “is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content.”
This is the crux of the entire AI music debate compressed into one legal battle. On one side, you have the traditional music industry arguing that training AI on copyrighted works without permission, or payment is theft, plain and simple. On the other, you have technologists arguing that AI is transformative, that it learns patterns rather than copying content, and that this represents fair use under existing copyright law.
But what makes Suno’s situation particularly fascinating is that they’re still thriving. That $100 million in revenue isn’t theoretical or projected, it’s actual money from actual users who are paying monthly subscriptions to generate music. The company recently released version 4.5+, which for the first time lets users directly upload vocals and instruments, giving producers more control to blend AI-generated elements with real recordings. That’s not a desperate pivot, that’s a confidence play.
The parallel to Napster is impossible to ignore, but there’s a crucial difference. Napster distributed existing copyrighted content without permission. Suno generates new content based on patterns learned from existing music. That distinction might seem semantic, but legally and practically it’s enormous. Napster could be shut down by removing access to copyrighted files. Suno’s technology, once trained, exists independent of the training data. You can’t un-teach the AI.
This is why investors are still lining up despite the legal risks. Even if Suno loses the lawsuit, even if they’re forced to pay substantial damages, the technology itself represents a fundamental shift in how music can be created. The demand is real. Users aren’t being forced to use Suno, they’re choosing to, and in massive numbers, because it democratises music creation in ways that traditional tools never could.
For working musicians and DJs, Suno’s success is either inspiring or terrifying depending on where you sit. If you’re someone who’s struggled to translate musical ideas into finished productions because you lack technical skills or expensive equipment, Suno is liberating. If you’re someone who’s spent years developing those technical skills and building a career on that expertise, Suno feels like an existential threat.
The music industry learned brutal lessons from Napster about not taking technological disruption seriously until it’s too late. That’s why we saw last week’s Spotify partnership with major labels trying to establish “responsible” AI frameworks. But Suno’s continued growth demonstrates that frameworks negotiated between established players might be irrelevant if the technology and its users simply move around them.
We’re watching the collision of two different futures for music. One where creation remains primarily human, with AI as an assistive tool controlled by industry gatekeepers. Another where AI democratises creation entirely, making anyone with an idea and an internet connection capable of producing professional-quality music. Suno is betting $2 billion on the second future. The major labels are betting billions in potential damages on the first.
Who’s right? We’re about to find out. But I’ll tell you this much. That $100 million in annual revenue suggests the market has already cast its vote. The question is whether the courts will overrule it.
Crowd Cue
Italy just became the first country to legally state that only works of “human creativity” can be copyrighted, even when AI tools assist in the process. Does this set the right precedent?
On one hand, it protects human artists from being replaced by fully AI-generated content that can claim the same legal protections. On the other hand, where’s the line when producers are using AI for stems, mastering, or generating elements they then manipulate?
If you use AI for drum programming or melody suggestions, is your track still “human creativity”? What about if you use AI mastering? AI vocal tuning?
And here’s the bigger question: as AI-generated artists are already making six figures from streaming, does copyright even matter anymore if the market doesn’t care about the distinction?
I’m genuinely curious where this community draws the line. Because the law is starting to, but the technology and economics are moving faster than legislation.
Wow, the part about 28% daily uploads really stood out. This exponential growth is wild, author.