Photo Credit: Logan Voss
The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) is doubling down on its opposition to Udio’s (and Suno’s) streaming-data subpoena, claiming that complying with the demand “would require approximately two to three weeks of staff time” at a staggering hourly rate of between $150 and $315 per employee.
The MLC recently fired back against Udio’s subpoena and related motion to compel, which we exclusively broke down last month. But just to recap, the subpoenas as well as motions to quash and compel are flying in the major labels’ Udio and Suno lawsuits.
(Technically, Sony Music is still suing Udio despite the company’s settlements with Universal Music and Warner Music; the latter is the lone major that’s settled with and licensed Suno.)
On the plaintiffs’ end, this includes subpoenas targeting DistroKid and multiple Suno investors. Meanwhile, Udio and Suno (both repped by The Campbell Firm’s Chris Campbell) are demanding that the Mechanical Licensing Collective turn over troves of label-specific stream-volume data dating back to 2021.
That refers specifically to documents “sufficient to show Performance Data for all Labels in Your Database on a monthly basis for the period 2021 to present,” per the subpoena text.
Furthermore, DSPs are likewise facing subpoenas – see Apple’s motion to quash – and the AI music platforms are adamant that the information is highly relevant from the perspective of their central fair use and copyright misuse defenses.
Also as exclusively reported by DMN, while the involved parties aren’t exactly impartial, evidence does suggest that the MLC might have been inclined to turn over the data until contacting the affected DSPs.
“We got one heavily caveated estimate from a vendor of approx $5k in services and $100+/TB/mo AWS hosting,” Pryor Cashman’s Benjamin Semel wrote to Campbell on behalf of the MLC in July. “No guarantees that this is the actual figure as this is not a standard ediscovery service and we don’t have final data details as this has never been done before.”
But certain DSPs (including Pandora and Apple Music) proceeded to push back against the data demand, and it seems safe to say that much has changed since the above email was sent.
Returning to the MLC’s opposition to Udio’s subpoena, then, the non-profit still believes that the “request rests on its fundamental misunderstanding of The MLC’s role.”
“The MLC administers royalties for musical works, not sound recordings,” the entity reiterated. “Moreover, The MLC does not generate the data Udio.com seeks—it receives copies of monthly usage reports submitted by digital service providers (‘DSPs’), which include duplicated information already possessed by the DSPs themselves, including any reported label information.”
As some will recognize from our prior coverage, the argument isn’t new. Nor is the position that the request poses a “substantial” burden to the MLC – generally and because the information is purportedly more readily available via different sources.
“Thus, to the extent Udio.com needs data that reflects each Plaintiff record label’s relative share of the sound recording market from before Udio.com began operating in 2024 through the start of operations, Udio.com appears to already have that data—from the Plaintiffs themselves,” the MLC summed up.
“To the extent Udio.com needs data that reflects its own presence in the sound recording market, Udio.com appears to already have (or have access to) that data—from the DSPs,” the entity proceeded.
Regarding what is new, the MLC, citing an estimate from its “information technology employees,” now says compiling the info would require the initially mentioned “two to three weeks of staff time.”
“The hourly pay rate of the staff who would be tasked to work on such a project ranges from $150 to $315 per hour,” the MLC continued. “Of course, in addition to the time that staff would need to dedicate to this project, that same staff would be diverted from their regular duties at The MLC.”
Factoring based on the MLC’s latest compensation data and the standard work year’s total hours, the high end of the range presumably means the project would require direct oversight from London-based CTO Richard Thompson.
Time will tell whether said project moves forward, though to reiterate the obvious, a long list of ugly subpoena clashes definitely won’t expedite the overarching legal battles. Moreover, under a newly approved joint scheduling motion in the older of the non-Warner majors’ Suno lawsuits, the case now has pre-trial deadlines teed up well into June 2027.