Suno is facing yet another copyright infringement lawsuit – this time from a two-person ambient music act that says the AI music generator trained on their catalog and devastated their livelihood in the process.
Poseidon Wave Media LLC, the entity behind instrumental post-rock duo The American Dollar, filed the complaint in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York last week (May 12).
The lawsuit, which you can read in full here, covers 236 sound recordings and compositions across 164 US Copyright Registrations.
It claims that Suno copied and ingested the band’s copyrighted tracks to train its AI model without permission – and that the resulting flood of AI-generated music has reduced the duo’s licensing revenue by nearly 80% since Suno launched its service.
“In fact, there is a clear line of demarcation in revenue fall-off dated from the public launch of Suno’s AI service,” the complaint states.
The suit names John Emanuele and Richard Cupolo – the only two members of Poseidon Wave Media – as the artists behind The American Dollar, a band they formed in 2005 while in college.
For over two decades, the pair has made a living from licensing and streaming their purely instrumental recordings, which they describe as layered cinematic and ambient music with no lyrics.
“The decades it has taken for plaintiff to develop and refine their process and methods of music creation, and the weeks to months spent by plaintiff in developing each single original musical piece, has been co-opted by defendant and used to supplant plaintiff’s original musical works in the marketplace,” the complaint states.
“Defendant’s Suno AI product, however, has acted as a major disrupter in the sector, and plaintiff’s licensing revenue has been nearly eliminated since the first version of Suno AI was made available to the public.”
Poseidon Wave Media’s complaint
According to the complaint, those recordings have been licensed by Warner Brothers, Activision (for Spider-Man 2), Apple, Colgate, Sony, PBS, MLB Network, and the American Heart Association, among others.
Their music has also appeared in TV programs including CSI: Miami, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, 30 for 30, and 16 and Pregnant.
“Defendant’s Suno AI product, however, has acted as a major disrupter in the sector, and plaintiff’s licensing revenue has been nearly eliminated since the first version of Suno AI was made available to the public,” according to the lawsuit.
The complaint states that the band’s tracks are “in the top 1% on music streaming services, like Spotify.”
“Plaintiff is the most vulnerable group that has been [preyed] on by defendant,” the filing states.
“Plaintiff is comprised of two independent musicians who have made a living from the revenue generated from their Copyrighted Tracks.
“Worst of all, defendant utilized plaintiff’s decades of work to destroy the very market plaintiff has developed.”
Poseidon Wave Media’s complaint
“A living that has now been completely undermined by defendant.
“Worst of all, defendant utilized plaintiff’s decades of work to destroy the very market plaintiff has developed.”
The complaint details a testing methodology in which Emanuele signed up for a Suno Pro membership in September 2024 and prompted the AI with queries such as: “Create a song that sounds like [track title] by the band The American Dollar.”
According to the filing, Suno‘s AI repeatedly generated outputs with what the complaint calls “indisputable similarities” to the original recordings.
When prompted with the track Age of Wonder, for example, Suno generated a recording titled Echoes of Wonder in both v1 and v2 of its service.
The complaint claims both outputs replicated the “rhythmic structure, production, and delay-based temporal architecture” of the original.
Queries referencing Anything You Synthesize – described in the suit as the most frequently licensed and streamed track in the band’s catalog – produced recordings titled Endless Sky, which the complaint says shared the same “rhythmic structure, temporal framework, and rhythmic subdivision framework” as the original.
The complaint alleges that the outputs “co-opt the very musical architecture and design the members of plaintiff have spent decades developing.”
“The pervasive replication of key elements in the Copyrighted Tracks by Suno AI can only be explained by defendant’s ingestion of plaintiff’s Copyrighted Tracks without license or authority,” the filing states.
“If left unmoored from established and longstanding legal constraints, such products will supplant, rather than support, genuine human creativity.”
Poseidon Wave Media’s complaint
The suit notes that the complaint is not currently alleging that the outputs themselves infringe the copyrighted tracks – unless discovery reveals otherwise – but rather that they serve as evidence Suno copied the recordings into its training data.
“If left unmoored from established and longstanding legal constraints, such products will supplant, rather than support, genuine human creativity,” the filing states.
“This is not hyperbole, but a reflection of what has already happened, and will continue to expand, in the modern music marketplace.”
The complaint also cites remarks attributed to Antonio Rodriguez, a partner at venture capital firm Matrix Partners and one of Suno‘s earliest investors, who told Rolling Stone in 2024 that defending lawsuits from music labels was “the risk we had to underwrite when we invested in the company.”
“Honestly, if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it,” Rodriguez said, according to the complaint.
“I think they needed to make this product without the constraints.”
Poseidon Wave Media is seeking a declaration of willful infringement, a preliminary and permanent injunction, and statutory damages of up to USD $150,000 per work infringed under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c) – or, alternatively, actual damages and Suno‘s profits from infringement.
The plaintiff has demanded a trial by jury.
The Poseidon Wave Media case is the latest in a growing list of copyright actions targeting the AI music company, which was last valued at $2.45 billion and is reportedly raising new funding at a $5 billion valuation.
In June 2024, record labels owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group sued Suno for copyright infringement in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, in a case brought by the RIAA.
That case alleged that Suno had trained its AI models on copyrighted music without authorization.
Suno reached a settlement with Warner Music Group in November 2025 and struck a licensing partnership with the company, which included Suno‘s acquisition of the concert-discovery platform Songkick from WMG.
Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment remain active plaintiffs in the Massachusetts case.
On the same day that the Poseidon Wave Media complaint was filed, MBW reported that Suno is fighting to keep the terms of its Warner Music settlement away from UMG and Sony.
A federal magistrate blocked the two remaining plaintiffs from obtaining Suno‘s settlement agreement with Warner Music in an April 6 discovery ruling.
US Magistrate Judge Paul Levenson said at the time that “the relevance of this information is marginal and the potential for chilling settlements – in this and other cases – is high.”
UMG and Sony objected on April 20, arguing the Warner deal is not merely a backward-looking settlement but “a forward-looking commercial arrangement” that reflects the value Suno places on using copyrighted works to train its AI models.
On May 4, Suno fired back, accusing the labels of attempting to “relitigate a dispute they lost.”
“Requiring Suno to hand the remaining Plaintiffs a blueprint of the terms on which it resolved claims identical to theirs would compromise settlement dynamics and threaten to chill future settlements by similarly situated parties,” Suno‘s lawyers wrote.
In January 2025, GEMA, the German collection society representing around 95,000 members, sued Suno for allegedly processing protected recordings without permission or remuneration.
In June 2025, a class-action lawsuit was filed by independent artist Anthony Justice and 5th Wheel Records, targeting the impact of AI training on the music of independent artists.
Suno has sought to dismiss key claims in that case, arguing that its AI outputs do not “contain anything like a sample” of existing recordings.
In November 2025, Danish rights organization Koda filed suit against Suno in Copenhagen, accusing the company of what it called “the biggest theft in music history.”
Additional class-action complaints from independent artists have followed, including filings by law firm Loevy + Loevy in October 2025.
The lawsuits arrive as Suno continues to scale rapidly.
In November 2025, the company raised USD $250 million in Series C funding at a $2.45 billion post-money valuation, led by Menlo Ventures with participation from NVIDIA’s NVentures, Lightspeed, Matrix, and Neil Jacobson’s Hallwood Media.
As MBW reported on May 5, Suno is expected to close a Series D round in the coming weeks, raising more than USD $250 million at a valuation of USD $5 billion — more than double its Series C valuation just six months earlier.
The Wall Street Journal reported in November that Suno had reached USD $200 million in annual revenue. By February 2026, the company said it had reached USD $300 million in annual recurring revenue with 2 million paid subscribers.
In March 2026, Suno launched v5.5 of its AI model, introducing voice cloning, custom models trained on users’ own catalogs, and a personalization engine called My Taste.
The Poseidon Wave Media complaint cites Suno‘s own claim of over 100 million users generating an estimated 7 million new music files every day.Music Business Worldwide
