Compliance
Paid AI music is not cleared music
Munich Regional Court ruling, GEMA v Suno
What happened
The Munich Regional Court ruled that Suno infringed copyright by training on, storing and reproducing music controlled by GEMA, the German collecting society. Three separate acts, and the court went against the tool on all three. What it never examined was anyone's subscription. The question was where the material came from, not who had paid to be there.
That distinction is the whole story for an agency. A subscription is an agreement with the vendor about using their software. The people who own the underlying music were never part of it, and the ruling says their rights survive it.
What the plan covers
A paid plan gives you access to the tool and commercial use under the vendor’s terms. It does not prove the training music was licensed or cover a rights claim after publication.
What it does not
What it does not: Any warranty that the training data was licensed, or cover if a rights holder comes after the track. That risk sits with whoever published the work.
Why it matters here
Large agencies keep legal review between the studio and the client. A ten person agency does not. Whoever made the track also cleared it, in the same afternoon, with nothing written down.
The exposure is rarely a big brand film. It is the music bed under a social edit, made in ten minutes, still live on a client channel two years later, with nobody able to say which tool made it or on which plan.
Do this by Friday
Log the tool, the licence and the edits for every AI-made track that has gone out this year. An hour, once.
01
List every AI-made track that has shipped this year, with client, campaign and date.
02
Record the tool and the plan for each, and screenshot the terms.
03
Note what a human changed, and put a name against each track.
04
Agree the one sentence you would say to a client, and keep the record behind it.
Try it now
Here is the licence page for our AI music tool. In plain English: what does it say about commercial use, who owns the output, and what happens if a rights holder complains?
Also in that Monday’s email
Worth watching: anti-AI design is becoming a selling point.
Safe to ignore: Astra's delay changes nothing for agencies.
Run it properly
The Client Report Playbook
The full job, stage by stage, if this week’s steps open a bigger conversation.
Members get every briefing four weeks earlier.
They had this one while there was still time to act on it. In AI, a month is a long time: this week’s briefing is already with them.
