IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS—Independent artists take on Google over AI music generation, (Mar 13, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

The class action lawsuit takes aim at Lyria 3, the search engine and AI giant’s latest music generation model.

Independent songwriters and musicians “were not at the table” when Google reached out to major record labels and music publishers to discuss possible licensing deals for its artificial intelligence music generator, a new federal lawsuit asserts. The lawsuit, brought on behalf of more than one dozen different classes of independent artists nationwide, levels a wide range of legal claims under both federal and Illinois law against the search engine and artificial intelligence giant (Kogon v. Google, LLC, No. 1:26-cv-02582 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 6, 2026)).

The lawsuit revolves around Lyria 3, the AI music generation model released by Google earlier this year. The AI model is the latest in a series of successive models developed by Google and its subsidiary YouTube that, the class plaintiffs claim, is built on a training corpus of roughly 44 million audiovisual clips totaling approximately 370,000 hours of recorded music—or “more than 42 years of continuous music,” the complaint asserts. Although Google has never identified the specific musical works it used to train its model, the complaint asserts, all of the named plaintiffs had music uploaded to YouTube while Google assembled its training datasets, “and Google disclosed no mechanism by which any artist could have excluded their works from the training pipeline.”

Independent artists are especially vulnerable to the threat that artificially-generated music poses, the lawsuit contends. For one thing, the class plaintiff asserts, Lyria performs “the same creative function as the artists whose work it consumed, in the same markets where those artists earn their livelihoods, at a scale no individual creator can match.” For another, the lawsuit contends, independent artists have been left out of talks between Google and the major labels over licensing rights. Indeed, the complaint asserts, Google waited until it had already trained on copyrighted major-label recordings before reaching out to rights holders. “If that is how Google handled the biggest and most sophisticated players in the industry,” the lawsuit asserts, “independent artists had even less visibility, leverage, or protection.”

The class action lawsuit levels a wide range of claims against Google, each one of which is accompanied by a proposed sub-class of plaintiffs. The various subclasses include, among others, artists whose sound recordings were allegedly used for training the AI model, songwriters whose lyrics or non-lyrical musical elements were allegedly used for training, artists whose works were allegedly stripped of copyright management information during the training process in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, artists whose name, image, or likeness were allegedly exploited in violation of the Lanham Act and Illinois right of publicity law, and those who were the victims of acts allegedly constituting violations of Illinois consumer fraud or unfair trade practice statutes.

The named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, among others, include the songwriter and lead vocalist for R&B band Attack the Sound, four artists who perform as Chicago-based band Directrix, a Los Angeles-based composer, songwriter, and producer who composed the score for the popular BBC shows Death in Paradise and its spinoff Beyond Paradise, and an llinois-based father-and-son songwriting and recording duo that operates under the names The Burjek Collective, Smackin’ Billies, and Pool Deck Duel.

The Case is No. 1:26-cv-02582.

Attorneys: Ross Edward Kimbarovsky (Crowd Spring, LLC) for Sam Kogon.

Companies: Google, LLC

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