#TheWeeklyRoundUp - 25.05.24

AI Music Generator Suno Raises $125M, Valuing Company at $500M (Report)(Music Business Worldwide)

Suno, the AI-driven music creation app that has been getting attention for its ability to create unnervingly good music, has raised USD $125 million in a Series B funding round.

Among the investors in Suno are VC firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has also invested in Stability AI and Everyrealm, the metaverse firm backed by music stars like Nas and Lil Baby.

Other investors include VC fund Founder Collective, and Nat Friedman, a tech executive and investor known for his stint as CEO of GitHub. He is an advisor at Midjourney, an AI techn platform that generates images.

Joining them is Daniel Gross, a colleague of Friedman’s who led AI development efforts at Apple and served as a partner at Y-Combinator.

“We released our first product eight months ago, enabling anyone to make a song with just a simple idea. It’s very early days, but 10 million people have already made music using Suno,” Co-Founder and CEO Mikey Shulman said in a blog post announcing the funding round.

“While Grammy-winning artists use Suno, our core user base consists of everyday people making music — often for the first time.”

According to sources cited by The Information, the funding round gives the two-year-old, Massachusetts-headquartered company an implied value of $500 million.

The newly-raised funds will be used to expand the company’s staff, which as of earlier this year, amounted to just 12 employees.

Suno has been soaring in popularity ever since a Rolling Stone article earlier this year described how the AI tech’s ability to create authentic-sounding music unnerved even some of its creators. The algorithm uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate lyrics, and its own proprietary algorithms to generate music and vocals.

However, speculation has grown that Suno’s model was trained on copyrighted music without license from the rights holders.

In a guest column for MBW, Ed Newton-Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, a non-profit that certifies ethically trained AI, listed off uncanny similarities between music generated by Suno and copyrighted songs such as Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, Abba’s Dancing Queen and Oasis’ Don’t Look Back In Anger, among others.

Suno’s founders – Shulman, Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho, and Keenan Freyberg, all formerly of AI startup Kensho – stress that, unlike some other generative AI models, Suno doesn’t allow users to ask for music created in the style of any specific artist.

However, an early investor in the firm, Antonio Rodriguez, a partner at VC firm Matrix, told Rolling Stone he is prepared for the possibility that Suno may face lawsuits from music labels and publishers.

He described this as “the risk we had to underwrite when we invested in the company, because we’re the fat wallet that will get sued right behind these guys…”

He added that “if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think that they needed to make this product without the constraints.”

---

Live Nation settles final Astroworld wrongful death lawsuit, thousands of injury claims remain (Complete Music Update)

Live Nation has now settled all ten of the wrongful death lawsuits that were filed in the wake of the 2021 Astroworld tragedy. The final settlement was announced yesterday. Terms of the settlement deals are not known, although - in an Astroworld litigation update contained in an SEC filing earlier this month - Live Nation listed $186 million in “estimated probable losses in excess of our expected probable insurance recoveries”. 

The final wrongful death lawsuit to be settled involved the family of Ezra Blount, who was just nine years old when he was killed in the fatal crowd surge that occurred during the headline set of festival founder Travis Scott. The family’s lawyer, Alex Hilliard, announced that a settlement deal had been reached, telling Law360, “The parties will cooperate in the future to honour Ezra Blount’s legacy and promote improvement in concert safety”. 

Live Nation, Travis Scott and various other entities involved in Astroworld were sued in the wake of the crowd surge tragedy, both by the families of the ten festival-goers who died, and by thousands more people who were injured during the incident. The lawsuits claimed that failings by those involved in organising the festival, both before and during the event, contributed to the crowd control issues that resulted in the fatal surge. 

Settling the wrongful death lawsuits was obviously a priority for Live Nation’s lawyers, with the first two settlements being confirmed in October 2022. Then, in an SEC filing earlier this year, Live Nation said six of those cases had been settled. 

One of the remaining four cases, involving the family of Madison Dubiski, was due to reach trial earlier this month, but was delayed because of legal wrangling by Apple. It was named as a defendant because it livestreamed Scott's Astroworld set, but presented various arguments as to why it should be removed from the lawsuit. When the judge overseeing the case rejected those arguments, Apple took the matter to appeal, putting the whole trial on hold. 

Before a new trial date could be set, it was announced that more settlements had been agreed, including with the Dubiski family. That put the spotlight very much on the Blount family’s lawsuit. The court then said that case should get to trial in September. But not now it’s been settled. 

With all the wrongful death lawsuits now dealt with, there remains the matter of the injury claims. About 2400 of those are still reportedly pending. Lawyers working on those lawsuits previously said they were prepared to take a group of their cases to trial later this year if the Blount wrongful death action was settled. 

Live Nation has been providing brief updates for investors on the Astroworld litigation in its filings with the US Securities & Exchange Commission, including providing estimates on any potential costs in relation to the lawsuits that are not covered by the live giant’s insurance. 

In its most recent filing on 2 May, reporting figures for the first quarter of 2024, it stated, “During the three month period ending, and subsequent to, 31 Mar 2024, we settled certain lawsuits and began settlement discussions in earnest with certain remaining parties”. 

“As a result”, it added, “we have recognised $186 million in the first quarter within selling, general and administrative expenses for the estimated probable losses in excess of our expected probable insurance recoveries”.

That estimate, it added, “may prove to be incomplete or inaccurate”, or “unanticipated events and circumstances” might require the company “to change those estimates and assumptions or recognise additional losses". With that in mind, it concluded, “The amount of additional liability, if any, that may result from these or related matters cannot be estimated at this time”.