Gen Z turns on AI & Suno vs. UMG Impasse

1. Gen Z uses AI more than ever, but trust is collapsing. Here’s what that means for AI music:

Data Walton Family FoundationGSV VenturesGallup

A new Gallup poll of Americans aged 14-29 found that daily GenAI usage rose to 22% (up from 19% last year) while excitement about AI dropped from 36% to 22%.

Data Walton Family FoundationGSV VenturesGallup

Hope fell from 27% to 18%. Anger and anxiety both increased. Gallup described sentiment as “significantly more negative on three of the four emotions first measured in 2025.” The Walton Family Foundation, which co-commissioned the research, notes Gen Z increasingly believes AI undermines creativity and critical thinking.

The key finding: Gen Z is adopting AI tools because they are useful, not because they feel good about where the technology is heading. This mirrors what happened with social media. Teens kept using Instagram and TikTok out of necessity while reporting higher anxiety and dissatisfaction. Usage stayed high long after goodwill disappeared.

For AI music companies, Gen Z is the core target audience. They are the most likely to use tools like Suno, create short-form content, and build artist identities online. If that audience grows more skeptical of AI broadly, the “AI music is inevitable” narrative gets harder to sell. Tools that lead with human creativity plus AI assistance (Veena, Delphos, Neural Frames) have a genuine differentiator over full AI generation platforms with this demographic. The Suno CEO’s public backtrack on training data is a case study in exactly the kind of trust gap that fuels this skepticism.

If your audience skews Gen Z, lean into the human process behind your music. Be transparent about any AI involvement. Check how each streaming platform handles AI disclosure — that’s where the standard is being set. That is a stronger position than silence or ambiguity right now. And if you’re curious what AI artists are already earning on Spotify, those numbers show the commercial reality Gen Z is navigating.

2. UMG and Sony Hit an Impasse With Suno Over AI Music Downloads

Universal Music Group and Sony Music stalled settlement negotiations with Suno over whether users can share and distribute AI-generated tracks outside the platform, per a Financial Times report covered by Music Business Worldwide. The central disagreement is distribution rights. When Udio settled with the majors, one key concession was banning song-generation downloads. Users can generate tracks inside the platform but cannot take them out. UMG and Sony want similar restrictions for Suno. Suno, now at $300M in annual revenue and a $2.45B valuation, has the financial leverage to resist.

Warner Music already settled and Suno launched Voice Model, an opt-in feature letting artists create soundalike models of their voices. But read the fine print. DMN spotted a new clause in Suno’s terms: “This license to your Content and Voice Model includes a license to your likeness, voice rights and other indicia of your persona that may be embodied in your Content or Voice Model.” If you opt in, you are licensing your voice identity to Suno, not only your recordings. Every detail on what this means in practice is covered in our Suno v5.5 and Voices feature guide.

Sony has not settled with Udio either, making it the lone holdout among the three majors across both major AI music lawsuits. Meanwhile, licensed competitors keep gaining ground. Klay Vision has deals with all three majors. ElevenLabs has Kobalt and Merlin deals. Google Lyria 3 is enterprise-focused with undisclosed partner agreements. Every month the impasse continues, Suno’s licensed competitors build institutional credibility. For context on the legal position of independent artists in these suits, the stakes extend well beyond download buttons.

The real sticking point is not distribution. It is precedent. Billboard’s analysis of what these deals mean puts it clearly: if Suno settles without download restrictions, every other AI music company uses that settlement as the ceiling for what they owe rights holders. If UMG forces restrictions into the deal, it establishes that AI music generation is only legitimate as a closed, platform-controlled experience. This negotiation will define what AI music is allowed to be. If you are using Suno’s Voice Model feature via Warner’s deal, read the terms before uploading. And if you want a baseline on what AI music copyright actually protects, start there.

3. Swedish Startup Chapter Two Built a “Bloomberg Terminal for Music Assets.” It Already Tracks $2B in Royalties.

Source Billboard Inside Baltazar article

Billboard profiled Baltazar, an AI-powered music royalty valuation platform built by Swedish company Chapter Two. The tool ingests royalty statements from any format, cleans messy data, and standardizes it across global revenue flows for accurate catalog comparisons. It has processed $2B in royalty data from over 100,000 catalogs. Shot Tower Capital and its valuation unit RedBrick Advisors joined as design partners.

Baltazar runs a three-step AI process: identify the data, clean it (double-counting, formatting errors, spacing issues), and standardize it across territories, rights types, and time periods. The result is an apples-to-apples comparison of royalty income. Users’ data stays siloed and anonymized. A chat interface means a songwriter could ask “How much did my catalog earn in Japan in 2021?” without hiring a forensic accountant. CEO Michel Dahlberg Traore founded the company in 2021 with backing from Axwell (Swedish House Mafia), Sebastian Knutsson (King.com founder), and Stride.VC. If you’re unclear on what those royalty streams even consist of, our primer on what music royalties are is the right starting point.

One important caveat: at $2B from 100,000+ catalogs, the average catalog value in the dataset is $20,000. That skews heavily toward indie and mid-tier publishers, not the billion-dollar major label catalogs where real valuation complexity lives. Whether Baltazar can attract that tier of data remains unproven. For scale: Citrin Cooperman reported $13B in music catalog deals in 2025 alone — the market Baltazar is positioning inside.

If you are considering selling or licensing your catalog, platforms like Baltazar will increasingly be used by buyers to benchmark your royalty history against comparable catalogs. Royalty Exchange’s valuation guide explains the multiples buyers use. Understanding your own royalty data, and its cleanliness, matters more than it did five years ago.

4. Udio Licenses UMG, WMG, Merlin, and Kobalt. Indie Artists Get a Very Different Deal.

Two stories broke simultaneously on April 10 that reveal Udio’s two-track strategy. First, Udio signed a licensing deal with Kobalt, adding to existing agreements with UMG, WMG, and Merlin. Second, Udio moved to dismiss two independent artist class actions filed by Tony Justice and David Woulard, using jurisdictional challenges and the recent Cox v. Sony Music Supreme Court ruling to block claims before discovery.

In the Tony Justice / 5th Wheel Records case (filed June 2025), the lawsuit alleges Udio trained on indie works without authorization, including via stream-ripping from YouTube. Udio is now using the Cox ruling to argue the contributory copyright infringement count should be dismissed. Under Cox, a third-party service can only be held contributorily liable if it induced infringement or tailored its service to infringement. In the David Woulard / Attack the Sound case (filed October 2025), Udio argues it has no personal jurisdiction in Illinois because it has no office or employees in the state. The artists counter that Udio repeatedly contracted with, billed, and delivered its service to Illinois residents. Billboard’s coverage of the Tony Justice suit lays out why these suits exist independently of the major label settlements.

This mirrors the two-track approach Spotify used in its early years: license the majors, fight or ignore the independents. The majors eventually got equity stakes in Spotify’s IPO. Independent artists got nothing. Our earlier piece on Udio’s training data practices remains relevant here — the stream-ripping allegations in both suits trace back to those same early findings. If Udio succeeds in dismissing these suits on procedural grounds, it sets a template for every other AI music company facing creator-led litigation. The majors will get licensing revenue. Independent artists will get a dismissal. The original MBW report on both class action filings is the foundational record on what’s at stake.

The Tony Justice / 5th Wheel Records case is one of the only legal vehicles independent artists have against AI music companies. If you make music and want to follow this, the oral arguments and filings are public record. Our piece on indie artists and the Suno/Udio lawsuits with top music attorneys breaks down what these suits can and cannot accomplish.

5. Ticketmaster Launches ChatGPT App With Sponsored Ads

Credit Ticketmaster

Ticketmaster released a ChatGPT app on April 10, letting fans search events and compare tickets inside the chat interface. The company is also testing sponsored ad placements targeting purchase-intent queries like “What concerts are near me?” OpenAI’s ad business already surpassed $100M in annual recurring revenue within six weeks of testing. OpenAI projects $2.4B in ad revenue this year and $11B by 2027. TechCrunch’s coverage of the ChatGPT ads rollout explains the ad infrastructure Ticketmaster is now plugging into.

SeatGeek launched a ChatGPT integration on March 31 with blended primary and resale inventory. StubHub did it in December 2025. Ticketmaster is also a “foundational partner” in Google’s agentic AI search test and recently integrated with Apple Music. Every major ticketer is racing to own AI discovery touchpoints. Music Ally’s analysis of the Ticketmaster move frames it clearly as a land grab for the AI discovery funnel. We covered the full race — SeatGeek, Ticketmaster, and Spotify — in detail in our AI ticketing race piece from earlier this month.

The timing is notable. This announcement landed the same week closing arguments concluded in the Live Nation/Ticketmaster antitrust trial brought by 30+ state attorneys general. Ticketmaster is being accused of monopolistic control over live events while simultaneously locking in distribution partnerships across every AI platform that could become the next discovery channel. If AI chatbots become the dominant event discovery interface, whoever gets the ad placement deal first captures upstream consumer intent.

If your distributor or ticketing partner does not have a ChatGPT or AI search integration, your events will be invisible in the discovery channel that is replacing Google search. Amazon Music’s AI-powered search shows how this discovery shift is already playing out across audio platforms too. This is a 2026 problem, not a future one.

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