Half The Stream Is Slop

According to Music Business Worldwide, Universal Music Group filed a 52-page complaint last Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware alleging "deceptive trade practices and blatant copyright infringement" against DistroKid, the $24.99-a-year unlimited-upload distributor. The suit, framed by Variety as an attack on an "AI-slop pipeline," seeks up to $150 million in statutory damages.

The complaint does its own math, and the math is the snark. DistroKid delivered roughly 12 million tracks to one major streaming service in the past six months. That is more than 50% of every track the service received in that period. More than every other distributor combined. An account called "Lofi Chill" shipped 4,562 unique tracks in 12 months, which the complaint calls "the equivalent of 20-30 full-length albums every month, a pace no human musician could achieve." "Mellow Vibes Radio" is over 98% raw Suno output. "Chill Flow Radio" is over 97%. Of the 1,551 AI tracks submitted to one chart in the first quarter, 90.4% were Suno-made and 75.8% were DistroKid-distributed.

Then there is the footnote, which is the real punchline: "This lawsuit is not about the distribution of AI-generated music when clearly disclosed as such." The sin is not the slop. The sin is the slop that skipped the disclosure form. "These 'artists' are not artists at all," the complaint says. "Their very names are designed only to surface in search results." Lofi Chill is not a name. It is a search term with a cover.

DistroKid, in its statement per Billboard, "strongly disagrees" and is "disappointed" UMG "chose litigation rather than established industry processes." The established process, for the curious, is the IFPI Streaming Integrity Initiative, which launched the day before the complaint. DistroKid, a founding member of the Music Fights Fraud Alliance, did not sign it. The complaint, for its part, says DistroKid "cannot claim ignorance" and has "recording-by-recording knowledge." That is not a legal theory. That is a business plan.

The 1,000 named recordings are "the tip of the iceberg," UMG says. A $24.99-a-year product that returns 12 million tracks in six months is not a feature request. It is a firehose, and someone finally printed the invoice.

YOUR TURN: If more than half a stream is a $24.99 firehose, what exactly is a listener subscribing to?