Universal Music Group and Udio have settled their legal battle by striking a deal for a fully-licensed artificial intelligence music platform. But the broader litigation involving rival AI firm Suno and both Sony Music and Warner Music is still very much pending.

The deal, announced Wednesday, will end UMG’s allegations that Udio broke the law by training its AI models on vast troves of copyrighted songs. Under the agreement, Udio will pay a “compensatory” settlement and the two will partner on a new subscription AI service that pays fees to UMG and its artists, and allows artists to opt in to different aspects of the new service.

But that agreement will not resolve the entire legal battle, in which all three majors teamed up last year to sue both Udio and Suno — the other leading AI music firm — for allegedly “trampling the rights of copyright owners” by infringing music on an “unimaginable scale.”

For now, Sony and Warner will continue to litigate their case against Udio, but a settlement like the one struck by UMG obviously creates a framework for them to reach a similar deal. The revamped Udio 2.0 will not be an exclusive UMG partner, according to sources close to the situation — meaning it’s able to strike similar catalog licensing deals with Sony and Warner, as well as any other parties.

Udio has ample incentive to do so. Past experience has shown that music licensing for tech platforms is something of a zero-sum proposition; it often doesn’t work for users if you have glaring gaps in your catalog of songs. Spotify wouldn’t be nearly as ubiquitous if it were missing catalogs by Taylor Swift, Drake or The Beatles, while TikTok’s standoff with UMG last year ended up impacting non-UMG recording artists like Beyoncé and Adele due to rights being owned by different companies.

In striking the deal, Udio has also effectively put its cards on the table: it wants to be the music industry’s AI good guy. Though not legally impossible, it’s hard to argue in court that you don’t need training licenses and artist consent while touting the benefits of both in press releases. Udio has also already made concrete changes to its platform, including controversially disabling downloads for its existing subscribers — a further sign that it’s no longer looking to fight it out.

It’s worth noting that the settlement makes for odd bedfellows in any ongoing litigation. The same team of lawyers that repped UMG in its claims against Udio — now settled with a first-of-its-kind partnership — is also representing competitors Sony and Warner as they continue to sue that company. Ditto for Suno, which is defended by the same team of attorneys as Udio, which just agreed to sign a licensing deal that’s antithetical to Suno’s core argument that no such deals are needed.

But such situations are par for the course for cases like these, where industry rivals team up for a legal case, and each company on both sides almost certainly signed agreements waiving any legal right to argue that their lawyers have a conflict of interest.

The case against Suno, on the other hand, looks more likely to keep going. All three majors are still suing that company, and Suno has long been seen in industry circles as more the more combative of the two. One can’t imagine that Suno’s will to fight will be reduced by the Udio deal; if anything, it has a clearer runway to AI music dominance now that its largest text-to-audio rival has effectively left the space to cultivate its own walled-off garden.

The Suno lawsuit remains at the earliest stage, where a defendant will file a motion to dismiss a case, which is typically the first big ruling in a civil litigation. If both sides decide to fight it out, the case and resulting appeals could go on for years into the future. But the key battle lines of the litigation are already clear.

The multi-million-dollar question is whether training AI platforms like Suno on millions of unlicensed copyrighted songs counts as “fair use,” a legal doctrine that allows for the reuse of protected works in certain circumstances. That issue is also at the heart of dozens of other lawsuits filed against booming AI firms by book authors, news outlets, movie studios, comedians and visual artists — meaning it might really be more of a trillion-dollar question.

Can Suno prevail on that point, making Udio look silly for settling so early? The proverbial jury is very much still out.

One federal judge, ruling on a major case against Anthropic, sided resoundingly with AI firms, saying that unlicensed training was clearly a fair use because it was no different than a human writer taking inspiration from copyrighted books they had read. But another judge ruled that such training would be illegal “in many circumstances” and that AI firms expected to generate “trillions” in profits “will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders.”

A separate, emerging flashpoint in the case is whether Suno broke the law by “stream-ripping” its training songs from YouTube. That’s a key issue in the wake of a court ruling this summer that said AI training on copyrighted works itself is fair use, but that using illegally-obtained works to do so could lead to billions in damages for AI firms.

In the wake of this week’s Udio settlement, the record labels likely see that deal as setting a helpful precedent: “See, AI companies do need licenses to train their models — Udio just took one.” And in that same vein, when it comes to that all-important courtroom battle over fair use, those same music companies likely view this week’s Udio deal as potential legal ammo.

A key factor in the fair-use analysis is whether exploiting a copyrighted work for free caused market harm — whether it hurt the ability of the original author to monetize their own creative output. A major licensing deal with a direct competitor would seem to be a very obvious market that would be harmed by the conduct of Suno, which says it can build its AI models without such deals.

But that argument has already been rejected in both of those earlier fair-use rulings. Even for the judge who said AI training would be illegal in most circumstances, that kind of argument would be “circular” — since essentially any copyright owner could argue that the specific thing they’re suing over is a lost market opportunity. That means the Udio deal might help the labels in the business world and the court of public opinion, but likely not in actual court. For now, time will tell.

For deeper reading, go check out the full lawsuits against Suno and Udio, and go read the responses from Suno and Udio. And stick with Billboard for updates as the cases move ahead.

A$AP Rocky once again has people wondering if he’s put a ring on it. In a new cover story interview with Perfect magazine, the rapper made a provocative claim about his longtime love Rihanna, with whom he shares three young children. When asked to describe the times when he’s felt the greatest satisfaction and happiness, Rocky, 37, said, “I think peace really makes me happy. Being a father and a partner and a loving husband in my family is what makes me really, really happy.”

Did you catch that “loving husband” bit?

The romantic comment came despite the couple never publicly confirming or denying their marital status. At press time spokespeople for both artists had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment.

“That’s what honestly does get me going: being able to express myself creatively, being able to be a family man and being able to be an artisan,” Rocky continued in the interview. “It doesn’t matter what hat I wear that day, it’s just about being able to give it my all and do these things,” he added, with the magazine noting that the original interview time had to be rescheduled because Rocky was busy preparing for one of his children’s birthday parties.

It’s not the first time Rocky has made it seem like the longtime couple might be more official than we thought. Speaking to Elle in September, he teased, “How you know I’m not already a husband?,” before again muddying the waters by adding “I’m still not gonna confirm it.” During a DJ set in Paris during the Cannes Lions festival in June, Rocky dedicated his 2022 song “D.M.B.” — also known as “DAT$ MAH B!*$H” — to his “’beautiful wife in the f—ing building. I love her.’” Again, no confirmation that the couple — who began dating in 2020 — have made it official, but the video for “D.M.B.” appears to end with Rocky and a red-veiled Rihanna getting married, with red flower petals showering the happy couple.

Despite an epic year in which he acted in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest and Mary Bronstein’s psychological drama If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, as well as prepping his fourth studio album, in a recent interview with Complex the rapper said his newborn daughter with Rih is his favorite project so far. After saying he’s done “a whole lot” this year, Rocky admitted, “My daughter. That’s my favorite thing I created this year. Shout out to Rocki Irish, man,” he said about the daughter the couple welcomed on Sept. 13. Rocki joined their other two children, three-year-old son RZA and two-year-old baby Riot Rose.

Sold-out concerts have a certain timelessness. Fans rush the merchandise booth, crews tune guitars, and promoters pace the lobby while managers huddle with their artists in the greenroom. But beneath that familiar surface, the live-music business is being rewired. The systems guiding who gets through security fastest, how merch is stocked, which shows get routed where and how lights sync to the beat are no longer governed by human instinct alone. Increasingly, they’re powered by artificial intelligence — and the emerging technology’s impact will only deepen in the decade ahead.

“Live music has always been a people business, but in the next five to 10 years, it will also become a much more sophisticated data business,” explains Tash Singh, ­founder of Fusible.ai, one of several startups helping major music companies develop AI strategies for the future.

Billboard‘s Live Music Summit will be held Nov. 3 in Los Angeles. For tickets and more information, click here.

“The shift won’t erase human roles, but it will fundamentally change them,” Singh continues, noting that soon, decisions once made solely with human knowledge and instinct will increasingly be guided in real time by algorithms. The transformation is already visible in today’s biggest tours — and it’s a preview of what’s to come across the entire ecosystem of live entertainment.

From booking agents and promoters to ticketing and marketing, AI is reshaping how concerts are planned, sold, secured and experienced. The concert business has always adapted to new technologies — from radio spots to MTV to streaming. AI represents the next leap forward. And, its proponents say, AI in the touring sector won’t make it less human; if anything, it could make concerts feel more personal, efficient and accessible. If the industry gets this transition right, the future of live music won’t feel robotic — it’ll feel smoother, smarter and more alive.

Mastering Reality

A major frontier in this era is how AI can help discern between human ticket buyers and fraudulent ones. Bots and fake accounts continue to plague ticketing, scooping up seats before fans do and inflating ticket prices. Recently, the Federal Trade Commission sued a Florida-based ticket broker for paying employees to operate multiple accounts. The agency also targeted Ticketmaster for failing to enforce its own rules surrounding bots.

“Fundamentally, the internet never built a way to prove someone is a real human,” says Adrian Ludwig, chief trust officer at Tools for Humanity. The company is behind World ID, a privately held, anonymous proof-of-humanness system designed to stop individuals from creating hundreds of fake accounts. “That gap has allowed bots to flourish across industries, from online gaming and dating to concert ticketing.”

World ID works by having users visit one of its “orbs,” chrome-like cameras located at places like shopping centers and office buildings that scan a person’s face and iris to confirm they’re a unique, living human. That biometric signature generates a digital ID stored privately on the user’s phone, which can then verify the user’s identity online without revealing personal information. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman co-founded Tools for Humanity and serves as its chairman.)

Meanwhile, in South Korea, ticketing platform Event Pop is piloting AI-driven technology to curb scalping and bot-driven hoarding. Ludwig, whose company powers Event Pop, says discussions are underway with major global ticketing firms to deploy the tech in other regions, including the United States. “The goal is simple: one person, one account, one ticket,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Green Day playing the Fillmore or a massive stadium show — fans should trust that tickets go to real people first, not bots.”

To meet that challenge, companies like Ticketmaster are increasingly turning to AI to safeguard ticket sales. Traditional defenses like CAPTCHA tests or IP blocking can’t keep up with modern automation. Instead, AI-driven behavioral analysis tracks users’ real-time interactions with a site: how a mouse hovers, how quickly a user types, the hesitation before clicking “buy.” “Bots execute commands with mechanical precision and inhuman speed, leaving behind a digital fingerprint that machine learning models can easily flag,” says Jason Webb, co-founder of Tixel, a Los Angeles-based fan-to-fan marketplace that is developing AI tools to prevent fraud.

Ticketmaster has confirmed it uses AI-powered “bot mitigation tools” to identify suspicious traffic and employs adaptive firewalls that become smarter with every attempted attack. In October, the company announced former Square executive Saumil Mehta as its new global president; Mehta has recently advised AI startups. “Under his leadership, Ticketmaster will execute AI opportunities across key areas of its business, such as empowering venues, fortifying the ticketing infrastructure against bad actors and enhancing the ticket-buying experience for fans,” Ticketmaster stated in a press release. (The company declined to comment for this story.)

“The next phase,” Webb says, “involves natural language processing to analyze the text of form submissions and search queries. The result is a constantly evolving security layer that learns and adapts faster than static code-based defenses. While no system is foolproof, AI detection represents a major leap forward in protecting fans’ access to face-value tickets.”

Venues Of Change

Inside venues, AI is already reshaping how fans move, spend and experience shows. During Elton John’s recent Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, arenas deployed Evolv’s AI-powered scanners to process fans through security faster. Other venues use WaitTime, which utilizes overhead cameras to predict and prevent long concession lines. Fans might not notice the algorithms — but they’ll notice shorter waits for a drink.

Atlanta’s State Farm Arena, home to the NBA’s Hawks and one of the busiest concert buildings in the Southeast, has become a testing ground for AI-powered venue operations. “We’ve invested in crowd analytics that monitor foot traffic throughout our 17,000-capacity arena,” said Geoffrey Stiles, senior vp of facilities and events for the Hawks, during an online presentation on AI in arenas hosted by Sports Business Journal in October.

By combining video feeds with machine learning, the arena’s system can anticipate bottlenecks at entrances, restrooms and concessions, enabling staff to act before problems arise. Stiles added: “The technology has significantly reduced wait times and improved crowd flow during high-volume events.”

State Farm Arena also uses predictive tools to optimize staffing and concessions, analyzing historical sales and real-time demand to deploy workers and adjust inventory on the fly, resulting in faster service and less waste.

Earlier this year, the arena partnered with spatial intelligence company AiFi and Verizon for Hawks Express Cashierless Checkout, a store that used AiFi’s technology and Verizon’s 5G Edge technology to help fans purchase concessions without waiting in line. State Farm Arena has also partnered with Honeywell, the technology and manufacturing company that is active in both machine learning and AI, on the Arena of the Future Innovation Challenge, which focuses on developing automation and sustainability solutions.

“Large arenas and theaters are complex facilities with massive HVAC, lighting and security systems,” says Dani Stern, senior director of product management for commercial real estate at Honeywell, who also spoke at the Sports Business Journal presentation. “By running AI models on data from sensors across the building, operators can predict when equipment is likely to fail, automatically adjust energy use to crowd levels and reduce costs while improving reliability.” AI-driven lighting systems, he notes, can even brighten or dim areas based on traffic flow, keeping fans safe while saving power.

Stage Meets Screen

The line between live and digital performance is blurring fastest onstage. In London, ABBA Voyage proved a residency can thrive on AI-powered avatars, grossing over $150 million in its first year, according to Bloomberg. KISS is now working with Pophouse Entertainment and Industrial Light & Magic to extend its legacy through digital doubles, signaling that some acts may never truly retire.

Meanwhile, artists like deadmau5 and Eric Prydz are using AI to generate visuals that evolve in real time with the music, and Travis Scott’s 2020 Fortnite concert, attended virtually by 12 million fans, showed what happens when gaming engines and AI-assisted animation meet live performance.

For younger audiences, these hybrid experiences are becoming the norm. A teenager who has seen a virtual reality avatar set won’t blink when a future festival lineup includes an artist’s AI-powered digital counterpart. Today’s youth expect fluidity between screens and stages — where an artist might perform simultaneously in Los Angeles and inside a virtual world, or where fans customize lighting and visuals from their phones in real time. In this new landscape, authenticity isn’t tied to physical presence but to participation: Fans want to shape the moment, not just witness it. It’s a future where an AI-generated encore isn’t a gimmick, but another layer of creativity in a live experience that never really ends.

Smarter Routing

Touring has always been a logistical puzzle. Routing 20 cities for a six-week tour means balancing venue availability, crew schedules and gut instincts about demand. Soon, AI will handle much of that math.

“Imagine an agent planning an arena run in 2030,” Singh says. “We can blend Spotify data, YouTube velocity and past ticket curves with external factors like sports calendars, carbon impact of fan travel — even diesel costs for buses.”

With those inputs, Singh says, “you can model different scenarios: one maximizing gross, another minimizing emissions or one balancing both. Instead of arguing from instinct alone, teams [can] negotiate with real-time data.”

Other startups are offering similar routing and carbon optimization tools, while major promoters are testing predictive demand systems. Over time, Singh believes, these tools will become indispensable — the invisible co-pilots of every tour.

While Live Nation and AEG declined to comment at length for this story, the major promoters both acknowledged that they are in the early stages of developing their AI strategies, primarily focused on ticketing and marketing. But as one powerful agent tells Billboard, even if more ambitious uses of AI remain on the horizon, the technology is already changing how industry professionals approach their work.

“The hope is that AI makes it easier to advance shows, whether that means more quickly reading contracts or negotiating with venues to route a 40-city tour,” the agent says. “Anything that can free up the more mundane tasks that take up hours of my time so I can instead focus on signing and developing new talent is something we’re very interested in exploring further.”

This story appears in the Oct. 25, 2025, issue of Billboard.

Billboard’s Friday Music Guide serves as a handy guide to this Friday’s most essential releases — the key music that everyone will be talking about today, and that will be dominating playlists this weekend and beyond. 

This week: Tricks and treats from Florence + The Machine’s howling latest, an early Mother’s Day gift from Tyler, the Creator and a right-on-time R&B love song from Brent Faiyaz.

Florence + The Machine, Everybody Scream

We all scream for Florence + The Machine’s latest, an appropriately titled album for a Halloween release, certainly. The horrors here are not necessarily of the jump-scare variety, but more the realities of life as both a veteran pop-rock star not always given her due and as a woman facing double-standards in the music industry — one who recently endured a potentially life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, as she detailed in a recent Guardian profile. But regardless, Florence is no Final Girl, and Everybody Scream evinces the mighty strength she’s developed as a singer, artist and person: “Come on, come I can take it/ Gimme everything you got/ What else?” she goads in “Sympathy Magic.” Besides, as she attests in “Witch Dance,” “Your threats and your promises, they don’t scare me/ After all, there’s nobody more monstrous than me.”

Tyler, The Creator, “Mother”

Tyler, the Creator apparently considers his newly released bonus track “Mother” such an important of his CHROMAKOPIA experience that his new CHROMAKOPIA+ sticks it in the middle of the tracklist, not just at the end. A sympathetic song about his mom’s experience having him, raising him and trying to teach him life wisdom, the track even includes an interlude of said matriarch warning him not to get arrested, because she had no intent of bailing him out of jail. He also holds some grace for his father: “Father told me nothin’/ F–k it…. I hold no grudges, I heard he a fan.” The beat and the backing grunts are tense (and intense), but the electric piano is warm and tender.

Brent Faiyaz, “Have To.”

In what’s turning out to be an excellent year for crossover R&B, it’s a perfect time for the return of hitmaker Brent Faiyaz. Especially with a song this irresistible: “Have To.” is an immaculately produced love song about Faiyaz doing whatever has to do to be where he needs to be: “I’m in a race with time to get where I belong/ ‘Cause it feels so right after all these nights alone.” Sweetly urgent but never overly insistent — and winking enough to avoid any undue sweatiness, including multiple vocal tracks of a pitch-altered Faiyaz basically dueting with himself — “Have To.” is another big winner for Faiyaz.

Reneé Rapp, “Lucky”

Frisky, poppy, lightly grungy alt-rock certainly seems to be the musical sweet spot for Reneé Rapp, as evidenced first by her impressive August sophomore LP Bite Me, and now from her new song “Lucky.” Recorded for the Now You See Me: Now You Don’t soundtrack — sure — “Lucky” features Rapp bragging about her charmed life over propulsive guitars and occasional synth flares, even throwing in a little meta-nudge with the bridge’s “It’s almost like I’m Reneé.” Extra points for actually working the film’s title into the lyrics.

Sub Focus feat. Grimes, “Entwined”

Grimes ‘n’ Bass! As the wait continues for the follow-up to 2020’s Miss Anthropocene, Grimes has been busy with one-offs and collabs — most recently teaming up with the U.K. producer Sub Focus for this week’s “Entwined,” whose moaning, growling, frequently shape-shifting beat is the perfect bed for the Canadian alt-pop star to wail over. It might not be explicitly spooky-scary, but if you happen to be one song short on your Halloween playlist for this weekend, it’s unsettling and intense enough to be a fit.

Oklou, Choke Enough (Deluxe)

Speaking of Grimes — rising French electro-pop singer-songwriter Oklou arrived with heavy Claire Boucher vibes earlier this year on shimmering debut album Choke Enough. If that 13-track set understandably left you craving more, the artist born Marylou Vanina Mayniel reissues the set this week with four bonus cuts, including the previously released fka Twigs collab “Viscus,” the gorgeous synth ballad “What’s Good,” and the uncharacteristically acoustic (but still satisfyingly warped) “The Fishsong Unplugged.”