Two out of three major labels are still suing AI-music giant Suno, but the company is partnering with the fourth-largest music company, BMG, on new models

Thanks to a new settlement, AI-music generator Suno can draw from BMG-owned music in upcoming new models

Leading AI-music generator Suno, which was sued by three major labels in 2024 over its use of copyrighted music in its training data, is whittling down its list of potential enemies. After settling with one of those labels, Warner Music Group, last November, Suno announced a partnership and preemptive settlement Wednesday with the fourth-largest music company, BMG, which had yet to launch a lawsuit against it. The deal covers both sides of BMG’s business, recorded music and publishing, and feeds into what Suno is touting as new, superior models built in partnership with the music industry, due soon.

The deal settles any claims over Suno’s prior use of BMG’s music in training data. A press release from both companies suggests that artists and songwriters on BMG’s roster have to opt in to future uses, and will get paid when they do so. Artists on BMG’s label end include Jelly Roll, Jason Aldean, Lainey Wilson, and its publishing side includes Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Bruno Mars, Diane Warren, and John Legend. The company also controls rights tied to Tina Turner, Paul Simon, and Mötley Crüe, among many others.

Warner’s deal with Suno appears to also require at least some degree of artist opt-in, and in general, convincing artists and managers may prove to be a challenge. Madonna‘s manager, Guy Oseary, recently told Tim Ferriss that his client (whose catalog is controlled by Warner) will never do it. “Madonna does not want her music trained on,” he said. “Don’t care what you want to pay her. She’s very clear: ‘I do not want my music to be trained on. I want my music to be its own thing.’ So take her off. It’s okay. You’ll still do fine. Take her off. You don’t have to have her music.

Celine Joshua, BMG’s executive vice president of global marketing and streaming, said in a press release that the future of AI in music “will be defined by whether artists and songwriters remain at the center of the opportunity and share in the value it creates. Choice is the guiding principle.”

“We believe the future of music will be more participatory, creating entirely new ways for artists and fans to connect,” Suno co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman said in a statement. “Building that future responsibly means working directly with the people who make music and the companies that represent them.”

Universal settled with Suno rival Udio last October, but is plunging ahead with the Suno case, expanding the lawsuit and fighting to uncover the terms of Suno’s Warner deal. On another front, last month, a German court gave collection society GEMA a landmark win, finding Suno in breach of German and U.S. copyright law for training on from GEMA’s repertoire, and ordering the company to pay damages.

In addition to the settlements, Suno is making conciliatory efforts towards labels. Earlier this month, the company promised to provide a means to detect songs made with its tech, and announced a rollout of download caps aimed at slowing the flood of AI songs onto streaming services. It’s also placing emphasis on its Suno Studio offering, which allows musicians deep control over the service’s output.

Voletta Wallace and Faith Evans at the screening of A&E's “Biggie: The Life of Notorious B.I.G.”

One of the Notorious B.I.G.’s former managers has won a legal battle against the late rapper’s widow, R&B singer Faith Evans, in the first of two lawsuits over proceeds from the sale of a stake in Biggie’s music catalog and management of his intellectual property assets.

A Delaware Chancery Court judge has sided with manager Wayne Barrow in a new ruling, finding that Evans had no right to withhold payments owed to a trust established by Voletta Wallace, the late mother of the music icon born Christopher Wallace. Barrow is the sole trustee of the trust and executor of Voletta’s estate.

After Voletta died in February 2025 at age 78, Evans rejected the trust’s request for payment, even though she and Voletta co-owned Notorious B.I.G. LLC, the company that controlled Biggie’s music catalog and likeness before it entered into a 50-50 partnership with Primary Wave in a landmark deal signed in March 2025.

Under the company’s operating agreement, Voletta and Evans each transferred half of their rights to company distributions to Biggie’s children, Ty’anna Wallace and Christopher Jordan “CJ” Wallace. That left Voletta, Evans, Ty’anna, and CJ each entitled to 25 percent of the company’s payouts.

The judge’s new ruling means Barrow, as trustee of Voletta’s trust, is entitled to receive her 25 percent share of distributions from the Primary Wave deal. According to court documents, the trust’s interest in the LLC will ultimately be distributed to the Christopher Wallace Memorial Foundation, the community nonprofit that Barrow helps lead as a board member.

In her new ruling obtained by Rolling Stone, the judge said Evans appeared to have been angered by Voletta’s decision, just weeks before her death, to amend her trust and remove CJ as a co-trustee. CJ is the son of Evans and Biggie.

“Presumably angered by the affront to her son, the defendant-widow took the position that the LLC agreement prohibited the transfer of membership units to the trust and refused to make distributions to the trust,” Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick wrote. She said that after reviewing the company’s operating agreement, she determined Voletta’s trustee was entitled to “any and all rights and obligations held by Ms. Wallace under the [company] agreement.”

A separate lawsuit filed by CJ in Pennsylvania challenges Barrow’s underlying authority as trustee and executor of Voletta’s estate. It alleges Barrow improperly influenced Voletta to place him in those roles shortly before her death. That case, filed on Feb. 20, 2026, remains pending.

“Wayne is feeling vindicated. We obtained a total victory in a dispute that never should have happened,” Barrow’s lawyer Jay W. Freiberg tells Rolling Stone, referring to Judge McCormick’s Aug. 7 opinion. “Wayne goes back with the family for decades, and Mama Wallace wanted Wayne to steward the legacy of the Notorious B.I.G. after she was gone, and he now will be able to do that. He knows it’s a very important task, and he’s looking forward to fulfilling Mama Wallace’s wishes in that regard.”

Freiberg and his co-counsel, Yelena Rapoport, declined to comment on the Pennsylvania-based lawsuit, saying it was still “in the early stages.” They did, however, accuse CJ of filing the Pennsylvania complaint to put the Delaware LLC dispute on hold. “That gambit failed,” Freiberg said.

Lawyers and representatives for Evans and CJ did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.

In her 16-page ruling, Judge McCormick quoted from Biggie’s 1997 song, “Ten Crack Commandments,” which was included on his posthumously released album, Life After Death.

“Christopher Wallace presciently cautioned: ‘Keep your family and business completely separated,’” she wrote. “After Wallace’s tragic death, however, his mother and widow did exactly the opposite — forming Notorious B.I.G., LLC under Delaware law to manage the late rapper’s intellectual property. This litigation was perhaps the inevitable result.”

When Barrow initially sued Evans in July 2025, he said it was Voletta who negotiated and approved the “transformative deal” with Primary Wave that closed in March 2025, shortly after her death. According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal valued Biggie’s personal estate at $200 million.

Even before the Primary Wave deal was announced, interest in Biggie’s music remained steady for decades. Greatest Hits, a compilation released a decade after his murder in 1997, has now spent 401 weeks on the Billboard album chart.

As AI-generated music becomes harder to separate from the human-made variety, Spotify is taking aim at the trend.

The streaming giant announced Tuesday that it will begin rolling out an AI persona badge in mid-September, identifying artist profiles who appear to be generated by AI. The label will show up on artist pages, in search results and alongside tracks in playlists, giving listeners a clearer indication of who, or what, is supposedly behind the music.

This first step is mostly to give listeners control over what they listen to. An AI-generated song is one thing, but discovering that the artist attached to it does not actually exist as presented can make the entire listening experience feel deceptive.

Artists will be able to voluntarily identify themselves as AI Personas through the Spotify for Artists portal. Spotify will also conduct its own reviews, first focusing on profiles that have reached certain audience thresholds. If the platform determines that an artists' profiles appear to be 'photorealistic AI-generated identities', it can apply the badge itself. Artists will then have the opportunity to disclose their status or appeal the decision.

The notable thing, though, is that the badge does not indicate that a song was made with AI. It specifically concerns the identity being presented as the artist. Spotify already has AI Credits for creators who want to disclose how artificial intelligence was used during the making of their music.

The good news, however, is that by default, Spotify says AI Personas will be excluded from its editorial and algorithmic recommendations. They can still be found and streamed, particularly by listeners who actively follow them, but they will not receive the same automatic push toward new audiences.

The Ramones in Santa Monica in 1976 (from left): Johnny Ramone, Tommy Ramone, Joey Ramone, Dee Dee Ramone

By the time the Ramones traveled to Los Angeles in August 1976 to play their very first West Coast concerts, they’d already established themselves as the vanguard act of the thriving New York City punk scene, signed a deal with Sire Records, released their groundbreaking debut album, gigged up and down the East Coast, and even played a couple of landmark gigs in London a month earlier that had a seismic impact on the burgeoning underground rock scene that had recently birthed the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Damned, and many others.

But punk hadn’t quite made its way out to California at this point, even though the Runaways had formed, and the press was still quite skeptical of the Ramones and the entire movement they represented. “The album cover photo [of their debut] — which looks as if taken from a post office wanted poster — shows four young toughs wearing black leather jackets and old, wrinkled jeans,” wrote the noted Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn on Aug. 1, 1976, just 10 days before the Ramones made their L.A. debut at the Roxy. “Two of the guys are wearing dark glasses and smirking in the slightly perverse way that would make even the sadistic gang from A Clockwork Orange consider crossing the street to avoid a confrontation.”

Hilburn continued by pointing out that their songs contain references to street hustlers, drug use, and even Nazism. “The Ramones would have faced much resistance in 1956,” he wrote. “The question facing us now is whether the group is acceptable even in 1976. If not, the reasons for rejection will be vastly different. Whereas the Ramones may have been too much of a threat to parents in the 1950s, the group may be too much of a joke now.”

He ultimately concluded they lack the “imagination” of Patti Smith, the “art” of Bruce Springsteen, the “musical affection” of Dr. Feelgood, and the “fury and growl” of Aerosmith. “As long as the group sticks so religiously to the punk-rock mold, the Ramones music (and image) is easy to like, but difficult to believe,” he writes. “And authenticity has always been a crucial fact in rock.”

In some ways, Hilburn was correct. Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, and Aerosmith all had much brighter futures in the world of popular music. (Dr. Feelgood are largely a tiny footnote in America.) But he was wrong, and he’d probably be the first to admit it today, when he said that the Ramones lacked authenticity. They may have given themselves fake names, but Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy Ramone all had a deep and genuine love for the stripped-down music they were making, and real disdain for the mainstream rock of the day. (Frampton Comes Alive! topped the Billboard 200 when the Ramones touched down in L.A., “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee was on top of the Hot 100, and Yes were headlining stadiums.)

The Ramones played back-to-back shows at the Roxy on Aug. 11 and 12, 1976. The Los Angeles Times listed those dates in tiny print on their calendar page near upcoming public lectures like “Practical Applications of Self-Hypnosis,” “Who Killed John Kennedy,” and “How Relationships and Sexual Enhancement Really Happen.”

On the club scene, there was Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter at Golden Bear, jazz pianist Mose Allison at Lighthouse, and jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard at Starwood. The were all dwarfed that month by major events like Jethro Tull and Robin Trower at the L.A. Coliseum; Kiss with Ted Nugent, Montrose, and Bob Seger at Anaheim Stadium; and Aerosmith with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jeff Beck, Rick Derringer, and Starz, also at Anaheim Stadium.

The Roxy seats about one percent as many people as the Angels’ ballpark. But it sounded pretty full when the Ramones took the stage for the Aug. 12 show and Joey Ramone blared out, “Good evening, we’re the Ramones, and if you’re a loudmouth, baby, you better shut up.” (Unlike night one, this show survives on tape.) Over the next 33 minutes, they played 13 of the 14 songs from their debut at breakneck speed, leaving out only “I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement,” along with “I Remember You” and “Glad to See You Go,” from their upcoming album Leave Home.

“The New York street rockers’ extreme primitivism, posited as a love-’em-or-hate-’em proposition, is marked by a pure, authentic inanity and a genuine inescapable energy that burrows beneath the foundations of current rock’s pretensions and contrivances,” reads a review in The Los Angeles Times by Richard Cromelin. “Its deadpan, wimpy delivery is endearing, and its repetition is allayed by its incredible rapid-fire pace. Each number begins with an obsessive ‘one-two-three-fah!’ (once they got all the way up to seven), some songs, contrary to detractors’ accusations, have as many as five chords, and while there’s a bit of variation in tempo and structure, it’s not enough to mollify the relentless assault.”

Cromelin’s focus on the “pure, authentic inanity” of the Ramones seems like a direct response to Hilburn’s assertion earlier in the month that the Ramones were inauthentic. But Cromelin had the benefit of experiencing the Ramones live in the flesh at the Roxy. Hilburn was going only on the album, and the relentless hype coming out of New York, which was easy to dismiss because the New York Dolls, the most direct antecedent to the Ramones, had flamed out after just two records.

But Hilburn and other doubters would have plenty more chances to change their minds in the two decades that followed. The Roxy was the first of 180 shows the Ramones would play in California before splitting up in 1996. They filmed concert scenes for their 1979 movie Rock and Roll High School back at the Roxy, hit just about every club on the Sunset Strip several times over, performed the Greek Theater on a stacked bill in 1990 that included Debbie Harry, the Tom Tom Club, and Jerry Harrison, and even played the 2,263rd and final show of their career at L.A.’s Palace Theater on Aug. 6, 1996. It was a marathon set that included guest appearances by Eddie Vedder, Lemmy Kilmister, Chris Cornell, and Dee Dee Ramone, who had left the band seven years earlier.

It seemed odd that maybe the most quintessential New York band in rock history, rivaled only by the Velvet Underground, would wrap up their career in Los Angeles. But it was their second home by that point. Johnny Ramone moved there right after the Ramones broke up. Dee Dee Ramone died there in 2002, and is buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, not far from a monument to Johnny that draws fans from all over the world. (Joey is buried back east in New Jersey, and Tommy’s final resting place is on Long Island.)

To commemorate the 50-year anniversary of the first Ramones record, a one-time-only supergroup featuring Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, blink-182’s Travis Barker, Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, and C.J. Ramone (Dee Dee’s replacement) are playing a concert on Aug. 30 of this year. With every member of the original lineup now dead, it’s about as close to an actual Ramones concert as we’re going to get these days. But it’s not taking place at the former CBGB site, which is now a John Varvatos store that holds occasional concerts, or anywhere else in New York City. They’re staging it at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, just four miles from the Roxy, where the entire saga of the Ramones in L.A. began.

Travis Barker

Travis Barker‘s near-death experience in a plane crash in 2008 is at the center of the trailer for upcoming documentary, Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear. Co-directed by Justin Krook and Michael Dwyer, the film reflects on the Blink-182 drummer’s life and career, including how he battled “pain, grief and the thin line between survival and surrender.”

Louder Than Fear debuted at the Tribeca Festival in New York earlier this year and will arrive on Hulu and Disney+ on Aug. 13. It features appearances from late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, Barker’s bandmates Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge, and Barker’s wife, Kourtney Kardashian.

In the clip, Barker recalls becoming hooked on painkillers due to the non-stop touring schedule. “I was taking so many pills that I had a security guard whose only job was to watch me sleep and make sure I was breathing,” he says.

Barker’s assistant Chris ‘Lil Chris’ Baker and bodyguard Charles “Che” Still were killed in the plane crash, along with the pilot and co-pilot. Barker and Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein survived, however Goldstein died a year later from an accidental drug overdose.

“Che and Chris were like brothers to me,” Barker says in the trailer. “And then AM passing away a year later… why am I here, when everyone else isn’t? I had to ask myself who I was gonna be after this accident.”

On Monday, Barker appeared on the podcast On Purpose With Jay Shetty to discuss the documentary. He told host Jay Shetty that he knew something wasn’t right on the day of the crash. “All the signs were there,” he said. “Where now, older me would just say, ‘I’m not going to get on the plane.'”

He said that his daughter, Alabama Barker, also seemed to have a premonition. “When I leave and I say bye to Bama, she also calls it,” he recalled. “She’s young at the time, she’s three or four years old, she’s bawling. She doesn’t usually do that. She’s like, ‘The roof is gonna come off! The roof’s gonna come off!’ I’m like, ‘What’s she talking about?’”

Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny in a split image

Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny are both major superstars — and they’ve shared some parallels in their careers and discographies for several years. Now, they’re even using the same playbook to deal with taunts and baiting from Donald Trump and the White House’s social media teams.

Since Trump took office during his second term, he and his administration have been using social media as part of their communication strategy. The propaganda-like, rage-bait-style clips often lean into internet culture and use popular music to make light of Trump’s most egregious actions, like his immigration policy and war-hungry foreign policy.

Olivia Rodrigo, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, and Noah Kahan are just some of the artists who have had their music used in these videos without their permission — and vehemently spoken out against these actions and against the president. In the past couple of weeks, the Trump administration seems to have wanted to provoke a response from two of the world’s biggest superstars: Bad Bunny and Swift.

On July 30, the official White House TikTok used “La Mudanza” for a particularly tone-deaf video about immigration that celebrated the number of deportations under Trump. A week later, a video with text that said, “mood because it’s August and Donald Trump is your president” set to Swift’s “August” was uploaded by Team Trump, the president’s official campaign account. The caption was an overt provocation: “I’m sure Taylor Swift is going to be super excited we used her song,” it read. Days later, another clip from the same account featured an edited version of Swift’s Red album cover with text that said, “Did you know that Taylor Swift wrote a whole album about the color of the Republican Party?”

Neither musician has released a public statement denouncing the use of their music in Trump’s videos. Instead, two of the world’s biggest superstars quietly removed their songs from videos posted by official accounts linked to the Trump administration. (It’s unclear if there is a TikTok feature that allows selective sound muting on videos or if the respective teams reached out to the social media accounts directly.) The tracks are still available for other TikTok accounts to use in their videos, making their silence a pointed — and smart — approach. Both Bad Bunny and Swift seem to recognize the president and his administration’s tactics for what they are: antagonizing moves that keep the Trump conversation centered on his social media presence, rather than his actual policies and the harm they commit. Why would they add their star power to the conversation and stoke the flames when that’s exactly what the White House appears to want?

Some people argue that celebrities should wield their platform to denounce Trump at any chance if they are truly not politically aligned with his MAGA politics. But because they hold so much influence, these superstars need to be strategic about how they use it.

Benito, in particular, has been incredibly outspoken about his politics. He stood on two of the world’s biggest stages and used them to voice pro-immigration messages, denounce Trump’s policies, and highlight Puerto Rico as it struggles with the effects of U.S. imperialism. “Before I say, ‘Thank God,’ I’m going to say, ‘ICE out,’” the Puerto Rican superstar said at the 2026 Grammys. “We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.” Last summer, Bad Bunny’s music video for “Nuevayol” used a voice that sounds a lot like the president’s to deliver a pro-immigrant message. “I made a mistake. I want to apologize to the immigrants in America. I mean the United States. I know America is the whole continent,” the voice bellows out of a Seventies radio toward the end of the video. “I want to say that this country is nothing without the immigrants.”

Fans were convinced that Benito would speak out against the official White House TikTok account when it used one of his most political songs. But commenting on the video would only blow up the discussion for a wider audience. When Rodrigo, Perry, Grande, and Kahan made public comments, spokespeople for the White House used the opportunity to spread hateful rhetoric. “We’ll say this one last time: what’s actually barbaric, inhumane, and heinous are the criminal illegal aliens who have injured and murdered innocent American citizens,” Abigail Jackson said in a statement to Rolling Stone after Grande spoke out. It’s the antithesis of what Benito said during his Grammys speech this year: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

Swift, on the other hand, has dealt with Trump and the right-wing’s instigations for years, each one crazier than the last. The TikTok videos from the last week aren’t even the first time that the administration has used the singer’s music for social media videos. Last fall, both the official White House TikTok account and Team Trump used songs from Swift’s then-newly released The Life of a Showgirl in separate videos. One plucked the lyrics “pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes” from “The Fate of Ophelia” to celebrate Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and the first and second ladies. The others boasted about Trump by using “Father Figure” and honored Melania Trump’s Patriot of the Year award with “Opalite.” As of Aug. 10, the audio is not available under all of these specific videos.

The pop superstar has not spoken publicly about these instances. But she has made her disdain for Trump clear. Over the years, Swift has criticized Trump’s autocratic leadership. On X, she wrote “we will vote you out” and endorsed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 and 2024 elections, respectively. In 2019, Swift told Rolling Stone, “There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. It’s repulsive. There should be no place for it.”

Even though she’s shared her liberal viewpoints on issues like abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and racial inequality, Swift has still faced ridiculous claims of being MAGA-aligned and folding in right-wing dog whistles to her music — and that’s without ever naming Trump. If Swift were to make a statement about her music being used by the Trump administration, the attention-seeking president would absolutely revel in it. Getting Swift and Bad Bunny to weigh in is exactly the type of headline grabber he would love to draw attention from his remarkably unpopular presidency.