Elvis Presley's music owners and Eminem's publisher have filed two more lawsuits against Suno, the $5.4bn AI music generator. They join a growing line of rights holders suing Suno. Their complaints spell out two different grievances: the songs, and the voice.
The plaintiffs filed both suits on 6 November in federal court in Northern California, as Variety first reported. Courthouse News published the complaints.
Two suits, two kinds of claim
The first comes from Elvis Presley Enterprises and other owners of Presley's songs. Raleigh Music Publishing and several individual rights holders join them. Together they say Suno infringed 859 works, from “Can't Help Falling in Love” to a Chubby Checker hit.
The second comes from Eight Mile Style and Martin Affiliated, which control 269 Eminem compositions. Eminem himself is not a party. This suit is about copyright only.
Both quote Suno's own answer to an earlier suit by the major labels, describing its training data.
“Essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet,” Suno said in that filing.
Both complaints accuse Suno of “stream ripping”, copying audio from YouTube with tools that get around its encryption. They cite leaked code that they say shows Suno collected 2.06 million YouTube Music artist records. The code also logs 6.98 million song pages from the lyrics site Genius, they say. Suno gathered some of it through the data firm Bright Data, they allege.
The voice
Only the Presley suit claims the voice. It accuses Suno of breaking Tennessee's ELVIS Act. The 2024 law added a person's voice to the state's protections for name and likeness. The complaint says the law's backers asked Presley's rights holders for permission before naming it after him.
“All of the humanity, history, despair, and triumph that constitutes Elvis' identity was stolen,” the plaintiffs wrote.
Their test is simple. On 7 October, they say, they gave Suno only a few lyrics with his name spelled out letter by letter. It produced two songs in his voice. They attach 38 recordings they say copy his voice. One, “Elvis in The Jailhouse Rock”, has more than 125,000 plays.
In a separate case this month, led by the singer Jason Isbell, Suno told a court in Massachusetts this:
Suno outputs “do not replicate the auditory characteristics of any real artist's voice to the point that someone would confuse a Suno creation with one actually sung by a particular famous musician,” the company wrote.
The Presley owners call that statement false.
The lyrics
The Eminem complaint prints lyrics side by side. One Suno track, “Lose Yourself By Eminem”, copies the song's verse and chorus almost word for word, it says. It lists similar copies of “Till I Collapse”, “The Real Slim Shady” and “Houdini”.
Both suits say Suno's block on artist names is easy to get around. The Eminem suit cites a $29 guide from a third-party site that sells “Eminem-style prompts for Suno”. Both point to a creator in Suno's paid affiliate scheme who teaches users to sound like an artist without naming them.
What Suno says
Suno rejects the claims.
“Suno exists to help people create new, original music, not to trade on anyone's name or likeness, and we prohibit any unauthorized use of an artist's work,” a Suno spokesperson said in a statement.
The company says it blocks prompts with artists' names and songs. Outside providers screen uploaded audio and lyrics, it says. It has argued in court that training on music is fair use. It has also licensed music: Warner Music Group settled with Suno, and BMG and the distributor Believe signed deals that feed its v6 model.
Who else is suing
Universal Music Group and Sony Music sued Suno again in September. Round Hill Music and Gerencia 360 have sued in California, and Isbell leads a proposed class action in Massachusetts. Abroad, a Munich court ruled in July that Suno broke copyright in a case brought by GEMA, and collecting societies in Denmark and Canada have sued too. Several of the same Presley owners sued Anthropic in October.
What is at stake
Suno had more than 2 million paying subscribers and $300M in annual revenue in February, its chief executive Mikey Shulman said at the time, according to both complaints.
Catalogues carry big values too. Paul McCartney's largest asset is his song publisher MPL, worth at least $250M, Forbes estimated this week. It owns “Blue Suede Shoes”, the song Presley made famous.
The Presley group seeks up to $128.85M in statutory copyright damages and more than $50M under the ELVIS Act, which it wants tripled because Presley served in the US Army. Eight Mile Style seeks up to $40.35M. Both want a jury trial, and the destruction of copies held in Suno's training data and model weights.