Suno is back in court, and for publishers, songwriters, and rights holders, the complaint lands on a blunt message: if an AI music tool trained on protected recordings and then displaces licensing income, the money can vanish fast. Poseidon Wave Media LLC, the entity behind instrumental post-rock duo The American Dollar, says Suno copied and ingested the duo’s catalog without permission and helped drive a nearly 80% drop in licensing revenue.
A claim built around lost licensing income
The lawsuit was filed last week in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York by Poseidon Wave Media, the entity behind The American Dollar. The complaint covers 236 sound recordings and compositions across 164 US Copyright Registrations.
According to the filing, The American Dollar has made a living for more than two decades from licensing and streaming its purely instrumental recordings. The duo, John Emanuele and Richard Cupolo, formed the band in 2005 while in college.
The complaint says Suno trained its AI model on their copyrighted tracks without permission and that the resulting flood of AI-generated music has reduced the duo’s licensing revenue by nearly 80% since Suno launched its service.
“In fact, there is a clear line of demarcation in revenue fall-off dated from the public launch of Suno’s AI service,” the complaint states.
The American Dollar says its work was copied and repurposed
Poseidon Wave Media says the duo’s music has been licensed by Warner Brothers, Activision for Spider-Man 2, Apple, Colgate, Sony, PBS, MLB Network, and the American Heart Association, among others. Their work has also appeared in CSI: Miami, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, 30 for 30, and 16 and Pregnant.
The suit says the band’s tracks are in the top 1% on music streaming services, like Spotify. It also argues that Suno used decades of work to “destroy the very market” the duo developed.
The complaint says the creators spent weeks to months developing each original piece, and that process was co-opted by Suno to supplant their original music in the marketplace.
Testing claims against Suno’s output
The filing says Emanuele signed up for a Suno Pro membership in September 2024 and entered prompts such as: “Create a song that sounds like [track title] by the band The American Dollar.”
Poseidon Wave Media says Suno repeatedly generated outputs with what the complaint calls “indisputable similarities” to the original recordings.
One example cited in the complaint involves Age of Wonder. Suno allegedly generated a recording titled Echoes of Wonder in both v1 and v2 of its service. The complaint says both outputs replicated the “rhythmic structure, production, and delay-based temporal architecture” of the original.
What to watch next: the complaint has been filed, covers 236 works across 164 copyright registrations, and centers on allegations that Suno’s AI training and outputs have nearly eliminated the duo’s licensing revenue.
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