The 10 Biggest AI Music Stories of 2025: Suno & Udio Settlements, AI on the Charts & More

For the last few years, to the average music professional, generative AI music was treated like a fad — or at least a strange new force still a few years away from true impact. Now, in 2025, it is impossible to ignore. 

Whether its Xania Monet getting a multi-million dollar record deal, viral AI songs like “Walk My Walk” by Breaking Rust topping smaller Billboard charts, or Suno raising hundreds of millions in funding to “verticalize” its operations, AI music is now clearly part of the mainstream conversation in music and it is competing in the marketplace with human-made works.  

People in the music business are now picking sides. For some, like Hallwood Media CEO Neil Jacobson, producer Timbaland or former Atlantic Records general manager Paul Sinclair (who became Suno’s chief music officer this year), the future of AI seems more thrilling than scary, and they’re no longer waiting to jump in. For others, like iHeartRadio’s chief programming officer Tom Poleman or Deezer’s chief innovation officer Aurelien Herault, it’s time to take action to stop AI’s unmitigated spread across music platforms. 

But it’s not all been divisive this year — Suno and Udio have come to the table with the major music companies to start resolving their differences and create a structure so that music can be properly licensed for training their models moving forward. The $500 million lawsuits the majors filed against the two AI firms in the summer of 2024 are still not all resolved, but each shows signs of progress ahead. 

In 2026, the question will now be how all these licenses play out, and what the music industry looks like when it actually embraces generative AI. It also will be about which of these licensed AI music companies will come out on top, and if the AI bubble will inevitably burst, thinning out the field of startups.