Universal Music Group and Sony Music are seeking to require indie music distribution platform DistroKid to disclose how many AI-generated songs the service uploads each month, claiming they need the information in the major record companies’ ongoing litigation against AI music generation platform Suno.
In a new filing filed in federal court earlier this week, UMG and Sony said it had filed subpoenas against DistroKid seeking the company’s monthly recording submissions and its AI detection tools. DistroKid, the companies said, has refused to share any documents, and Sony and UMG called the data “highly relevant information that only DistroKid possesses and are proportional to a case in which the market effect of AI-generated music is a central contested question.”
A representative for DistroKid didn’t immediately respond to request for comment.
Notably, the new action comes about a month after UMG had sued DistroKid in September, claiming the company has helped empower bad actors to upload AI slop songs at mass scale, diluting the royalty pool for genuine artists. Sony Music, is not part of UMG’s DistroKid lawsuit.
Regarding UMG’s lawsuit, DistroKid had previously told Billboard that “We take copyright protection, fraud prevention and the integrity of the music ecosystem seriously, and work closely with digital streaming platforms, rightsholders and other industry partners on these efforts.”
“We strongly disagree with UMG’s allegations and are disappointed that it chose litigation rather than established industry processes to address these issues,” DistroKid said at the time.
The latest filing from UMG and Sony further says that DistroKid has “an outsized role in distributing AI-generated music to digital services.” The company called DistroKid’s scale of releases “staggering,” stating that between March and September 2026, “DistroKid distributed nearly 12 million tracks to a single major digital service, comprising more than half of all tracks delivered to that service and exceeding deliveries from all other distributors combined.”