A sincere, helpful, slightly uncomfortable note to lyricists releasing AI-composed tracks.
You wrote the lyrics. They’re yours, they mean something, and they’re actually good. Then you may have typed a genre and a vibe into Suno, or Udio, or one of the others, hit generate a few times, and somewhere between the third and eleventh try, a song came out that made the hair on your neck stand up. That’s the song you intended, heard in your head, you’d have written it yourself. You even tweaked it, regenerated it, and settled on your winner. You put your lyrics on it, hit render, and now it’s a song.
And now you’re about to release it. Is it yours?
Well, in my view, it’s way more yours than not. But indulge me for about five minutes. I’d like you to leave this page a little better informed than you arrived, because there are two very different issues tangled together in what you’re about to do, and sorting them out now is a lot cheaper than sorting them out after a demand letter.
Two different questions
The question most lyricists are asking right now is, “Can I copyright this?” Of course they are — shouldn’t they be able to protect this somewhat? And the flip side of the same coin, which deserves equal time, is “Can I infringe with this?” Those aren’t the same question, and they don’t have the same answer.
It sounds a little wacky, but a song can be uncopyrightable and infringing at the same time. You can own very little of your own track and still owe someone else money for it. That’s the strange little trapdoor this piece is about.
I’m a forensic musicologist. I look at songs for a living and figure out whether one has copied from another, and to what degree, and whether any of that matters legally. I’m not a lawyer, I don’t give legal advice, and you should have one of those too. But on the music itself, this is what I do. So let’s take the two questions one at a time.
Question one: Can you copyright it? (Right now, yes and no.)
Here’s where the US Copyright Office stands as of this writing.
In January 2025, the Copyright Office released Part 2 of its Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, and it said, in essence, what it had already been saying: copyright protects human creative expression, and material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine is not copyrightable. Prompts alone — even clever ones, even long ones, even iterated ones — don’t rise to the level of authorship. On May 12, 2025, the D.C. Circuit affirmed in Thaler v. Perlmutter — a visual art case, not a music one, but whose reasoning turned on the Copyright Act itself and applies to both. Human authorship is a requirement. And on March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler’s appeal, which settles the question at the federal level unless the statute is changed. So the shorthand version: you cannot copyright the music that Suno or Udio hands you, because you didn’t write it. A machine did, in response to your prompt. (for the present at least.)
That’s the bad news, and it’s the part of the story that’s gotten most of the press. I’ve written previously about how AI and copyright were always going to be natural frenemies, and this is the shoe that’s finally dropped.
The better news, if you wrote the lyrics yourself, is that your lyrics are copyrightable as a literary work regardless of whether the music attached to them is. The Copyright Office can register the human-authored portions of a hybrid work while excluding the AI-generated portions from the copyright claim. You’d declare the composition as AI-generated in the application and claim authorship only over your lyrics. Ask your lawyer, but that’s my understanding of where things sit.
Evolution seems to happen quickly these days, don’t it? So, I could fill this page with recurring, “this is how it seems for now at least,” and “don’t forget, I’m not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice.”
That reestablished, what about the song as a whole — the combination of your lyrics with that specific AI-generated music, the cut you chose, the arrangement you settled on? This is where it gets subtle. Copyright does recognize a kind of thin compilation protection over original selection and arrangement of otherwise unprotectable materials. For a song with AI-composed music and human lyrics, the best realistic picture is that your lyrics are yours; your assembly of them on top of that particular music may well enjoy thin protection, and the underlying music remains outside your rights, away from the lyrics. If someone lifts your whole track, you have a claim. If someone lifts just the instrumental, you don’t; you never owned it. Ask a copyright lawyer for the specifics; I’m a musicologist, and this is an area where the doctrine is still settling.
Question two: Can you infringe with it? (Yes. Easily.)
There’s an intuition and an assumption floating around the AI music community that goes something like this. If I can’t copyright the music, then the music must be free of copyright obligations on the way out, too. AND NO. It doesn’t work like that.
Uncopyrightable is not the same as non-infringing. It hardly seems fair, right?
Kinda like a risk profile you need to accept in exchange for all the assistance. Infringement doesn’t ask whether your output is protected. Infringement asks whether your output impermissibly copies something that someone else owns and can protect. The Copyright Office’s human-authorship rule is a question about what you own. It is not, and it has never been, a question about what you might owe.
So the real question for a lyricist releasing an AI-composed track isn’t whether the Copyright Office will give you a registration certificate. The real question is whether the song that came out of Suno or Udio is substantially similar to something already in the world, something by a real artist on a real label whose real lawyers read Billboard. Maybe you’ve just stepped on a rake.
AI music may be structurally more likely to step on a rake!
When a human songwriter sits down to write a pop ballad, they’ve absorbed thousands of pop ballads over a lifetime, and they’re drawing on that vocabulary. They’ll repeatedly arrive at familiar and easily absorbed chord progressions, contours, and other moves, and that’s fine. Our ears want conventional things blended with new, interesting things. That’s how songwriting has always worked. Influence isn’t infringement.
The mechanism of AI composition is its own thing. It’s also drawing on thousands of pop ballads but its version of “drawing on them” is a statistical reconstruction of patterns in a dataset that it copied into its memory to do the training. Suno and Udio have each faced major-label copyright litigation. These tools are built by training on enormous amounts of copyrighted music. I covered an earlier version of the same fight when UMG, Concord, and ABKCO sued Anthropic over lyrics in LLM training data, and the underlying questions are broadly similar. The major labels sued; the dust is still settling; the details don’t really matter for our purposes. What matters to you is what comes out of the machine when you hit generate.
When a model has been trained on, say, “Billie Jean,” and you prompt it with “funky 80s bassline, pop vocal, minor key,” it does its best to produce something that’s, in certain ways, “like” what it learned. That may be fine, or it may be something that, to a forensic musicologist’s ear, is too close to a specific thing. The RIAA’s complaints against both Suno and Udio named specific tracks as evidence of what the model was trained on. But they’re also, if you step back, a preview of what the model may be inclined to output in response to certain prompts.
If your prompt happens to evoke the same neighborhood, you may get something back that’s in that neighborhood. And if you publish it, the resemblance is yours to explain, not the AI company’s.
Wait, what? Even though you didn’t write the music?
“I didn’t compose it! I’m the lyricist! The AI did the thing!“
Copyright infringement is what’s called a strict-liability offense. That’s a fancy way of saying you don’t have to have meant to copy anything. A plaintiff doesn’t need to prove intent; they need to show they own a valid copyright, that you had access to their work, and that your output is substantially similar to theirs in protected expression. Intent matters, though. It comes into play when a court is figuring out damages. Willful infringement carries much bigger statutory damages than innocent infringement. The ceiling is at $150,000 per work for willful, $30,000 for non-willful, and as low as $200 for innocent.
It’s one of the benefits of having a forensic musicologist conduct an originality clearance check. Applied to AI-assisted music: “I didn’t write the music, the AI wrote the music” may well be true, but it’s not a defense to the claim. Clearance isn’t about shaping those damages numbers; it’s about not getting named in the first place. Originality clearance is a pre-release analysis that flags potential risks; if one is found, work with creators to eliminate it. But it’s also a demonstration that you didn’t proceed carelessly, much less willfully infringe. You looked! A professional told you what they heard, and you released accordingly. I consider that the opposite of willfulness, and it’s the kind of documented good-faith effort that should shape things should a wrong-minded accusation arise. It follows that a clearance changes their veracity. Ask your attorney. I’ll bet they say it more strongly even than I have.
Your risk is a function of your reach. More ears, more problems.
Kidding. No, that’d be a pretty bad take. But as you might imagine, a lot of the originality clearance analysis I do is for agencies with brands that are gonna put the music on television, in movies, and in social media campaigns, where there are lots of ears who might think “that sounds like MY song!” The threshold isn’t reach, exactly. It’s attention. A sync placement, a playlist add, a repost from an account with a following — these are the moments a latent resemblance question suddenly becomes a real one, and they tend to arrive unannounced.
Musicologize already sees the parallel — the shifting landscape where, as the world fills with AI-generated Intellectual Non-Property, suspicion and perhaps culpability will be a function of your track’s pedigree. As risk correlates with being heard, suspicion expands with being heard and being AI-assisted. The prevailing assumption, not entirely unfounded, is that what’s coming out of these tools is derivative, and to some, therefore stolen from the jump. That’s the weather system your track has to walk or wade through. The listener hears “AI-made” and the skepticism fires.
And because I happened to be thinking about this other case this morning, I’d add that it’s worth remembering that the people who pursue resemblance claims are not uniformly the most rational economic actors. Some are. Some aren’t. Ask the Verve about “Bittersweet Symphony” sometime — a track whose sample was licensed, whose creators did what they were supposed to do, and whose publishing they lost anyway because the person across the table took the whole pot when he had the cards. That kind of plaintiff exists, and they tend to show up exactly when the song is finally worth showing up for.
Musicologize does lots of originality clearance, and increasingly, clients, to some extent, didn’t entirely write the music, which is the opposite of insulating. The time to clear a track is before it travels, because after it travels, whether the resemblance is worth somebody else’s time (there’s that veracity again) isn’t your decision anymore.
The short version
To compress this into something portable:
- Your lyrics are yours. Register them. They’re copyrightable even when the music isn’t.
- The music isn’t yours. Under current US Copyright Office guidance, an AI-composed track generated from prompts isn’t copyrightable to you.
- You can still infringe with it. The fact that you don’t own the output doesn’t mean the output is free of obligations to what it resembles.
- Your risk scales with your reach, and to make matters worse, we’re entering an interesting time.
- Take a little caution with those tracks, and if you’re concerned about the risk, a pre-release Musicologized clearance is a standard, sensible response. It’s what labels and agencies do. AI probably makes it more worth doing.
Frequently asked questions
Can I copyright a song that was composed entirely by Suno or Udio if I wrote the lyrics? You can register the lyrics as a literary work and claim copyright over them. You cannot claim copyright over the AI-composed music itself under current US Copyright Office guidance. When registering, you’d declare the musical composition as AI-generated and limit your authorship claim to the lyrics. Run the specifics by a lawyer; I’m a musicologist.
If the AI wrote the music, how can I be liable for infringement? Because you’re the one releasing the track. In my experience watching these cases, plaintiffs tend to name the person who put the work into the world, regardless of how the work got made. “The AI did it” isn’t an argument I’ve seen get anyone out of anything.
Do I need to worry if I’m only sharing songs with friends or posting casually? Risk scales with reach, but who’s to say? A small audience reduces your practical risk considerably. That’s not controversial; it’s just math. And that same math says the concern sharpens the moment you’re monetizing, placing, licensing, or going after real reach.
Will the ongoing Suno and Udio and other AI lawsuits sort this out for me? No. Most of what’s out there right now centers on whether the AI companies infringed on the training side. Even if either the labels or the frontier AI labs win every one of these cases, the result is unlikely to affect what’s always been copyright law’s controlling factor if the output happens to resemble a protected song. Exposure is based on how your track sounds, not on what happened during the training run.
I’m anything but pessimistic, by the way. I’m gonna be on a DAW later today, letting Suno do its thing. It’s an exciting time. But if this article made your stomach do something funny cuz you were thinking you maybe heard something familiar in that full-blown production that your awesome lyric spawned, that’s a reasonable response. It doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. It means you’re thinking about a question most of your peers probably haven’t looked at yet. The tools are extraordinary. The obligations are older than the tools. Mind both.
If you’d like to discuss a track, or just ask questions:
☎︎ Call: (212) 217-9512 Initial calls are free. ✉ Email: brianmcbrearty@gmail.com → Schedule: Book a free preliminary call
