Jason Isbell Leads New Class Action Lawsuit Against Suno AI

A new class-action lawsuit is being brought against the leading company for consumer-level AI music generation, Suno. While pretty much every major and independent label has an open and active lawsuit pending against Suno for using the copyrighted material from their catalogs without consent or compensation, the one being led by Americana songwriter Jason Isbell is slightly different. It focuses on how the software is using the names of artists to generate its music, thus exploiting the identities of musicians.

There’s also a unique angle in how they’re approaching this lawsuit that will have fans of Star Trek smirking.

Along with Jason Isbell, Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery, Texas blues musician Guy Forsyth, and Florida-based saxophonist Eduardo Calle are all part of the class-action lawsuit that cites Star Trek villain The Borg in its legal briefs.

“A musician’s identity is their property, but Suno took it without consent,” writes attorney Alan D. Rose for the plaintiffs. “This lawsuit is how these musicians resist the premise that resistance is futile.”

The lawsuit was filed on Monday, August 31st in the U.S.District Court in Massachusetts. Central to the lawsuit is how Suno subscribers use the specific names of artists or their tracks in prompts to generate songs or albums. The lawsuit claims this is tantamount to identity theft. “It encoded musicians’ identities into its AI model to create its commercial product without consent, and now exploits those identities by publicly using musicians’ names to Suno’s considerable commercial benefit,” the lawsuit states.

Having faced criticism previously for allowing users to mimic existing artists, Suno did implement some guardrails to prevent direct prompting to “make a song that sounds like Jason Isbell,” for example. But by asking the AI program to make “tone and phrasing like Jason Isbell,” or using an artist’s real name when they perform under a pseudonym are simple was to circumvent those rules.

“Many musicians sell their rights to specific recordings,” the lawsuits says. “However, the identity right belongs to the performer regardless of who owns any copyright in an underlying recording unless the identity right is separately licensed, typically for merchandise under an artist’s control. This lawsuit seeks to recover the value of those misappropriated identities and to stop their ongoing commercial exploitation.”

Suno is currently being sued by scores of labels, artists, rights organizations, and others, including Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. However, Warner Music Group settled with Suno, and is now developing a model in partnership with the label.

Jason Isbell has been a strong proponent of copyright and controlling media in his career, including refusing phones at many of his events, and aggressively policing posts with his music on social media.


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