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AI Music Licensing for Film, TV, Ads? Sync Requires Copyright

I’ve been clearing music for indie films, pitching tracks to supervisors, and testing AI music generators over licensing scenarios for the past two years. That’s why when people ask me whether AI music can be licensed for film, TV, and ads, my answer is usually unexpected. Technology is not the issue. Licensing is.

Here’s a quick overview of the situation, and what follows is the discussion of where there are gaps, cracks, and opportunities in the wall created by the lack of copyright.

First of all, let’s remember the basics of sync deals. As explained in the Bridge.audio guide on how to get your music placed in film, TV, and games, you have to obtain two licenses: one is for the master rights owner – the entity holding the actual recording of the music and another one is for the publishing rights owner – the entity controlling the musical composition.

Usually these are different entities, that is why clearing syncs takes time and involves considerable expenses. Sync fees range from a few hundreds of dollars for small indie projects up to tens of thousands of dollars for a nationwide ad campaign, and beyond that for major artists.

Apart from the upfront sync fee, performance royalties are generated any time the media is aired publicly. These royalties are collected through performing rights organizations such as ASCAP and BMI.

And now take note of the assumptions in each piece of the licensing machine described above: someone has composed the musical work; someone owns the recording; someone has registered with PROs; someone can sign a contract warranting that there is no infringement of the third parties’ rights in the music. All these assumptions fail when it comes to AI generated music.

The official statement about the copyrightability of generative AI outputs is provided in Part 2 of the US Copyright Office report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, published on January 29, 2025. According to this report, generative AI outputs are copyrightable only in cases where sufficient expressive elements have been determined by a human author.

Skadden lawyers analyze the Copyright Office report on copyrightability and their conclusions on the matter are important for understanding the issue of music licensing: first of all, AI generated works without human authorship are not copyrightable; second, prompting alone is not the act of authorship, no matter how complex; and third, when an output consists of human and AI generated elements, the former are copyrightable only.

The court rulings are on the same page. In March 2025, DC Circuit Court decided in Thaler v. Perlmutter that AI system cannot be considered the author in accordance with the Copyright Act. The Copyright Office also requires the disclosure and disclaimer of AI generated works in the course of registration. The review of recent copyright registrations by Center for Art Law gives an insight into how the Copyright Office deals with it. Therefore, there is no uncertainty regarding copyrightability of the works in question.

There is a little nuance I want to mention. Different countries consider AI generated material differently. For example, in the UK there is a specific provision crediting the computer generated works to the person responsible for their creation. However, sync licensing is a global industry led by the US market. As Aaron Davison states in his article about AI music licensing for TV and film, a work that cannot be copyrighted in the US is unlikely to be licensable elsewhere.

Why Sync Supervisors Will Not Touch Uncopyrighted AI Tracks

Supervisors are the key people in the sync business. Their job involves risk management and every film and TV production provides the distributor, studio, or streaming platform with a rights package: the chain of title, licenses, cue sheets, publishing splits, and warranties that nothing infringes the rights of the third parties. “Chain of title” here means the documentation of who had owned the rights along the way.

AI generated track invalidates the chain of title. An excellent Hypebot piece explains the situation: the supervisor will be unable to specify the origin of the output, the recordings used to train it, or who has to be paid in case of the third-party claim. Unlike the sample, it is not possible to identify the content and clear it.

Insurance is the next crucial aspect, and this is where the theory meets reality. Every production obtains errors and omissions (E&O) insurance, sometimes referred to as production liability insurance. E&O policy is required for the distribution in order to protect the production from the third-party claims and distributors usually do not accept productions without it.

Research House, a Canadian production consulting firm, states in its latest post on production insurance for AI generated material that the production containing AI generated content may not be insurable due to the fact that the material is not copyrightable in most countries and cannot be traced by the underwriters. I cannot emphasize enough how much people underestimate this issue. They ask themselves the wrong question: “Will I get sued?”, but the right one is “Will my insurer issue me the policy?”.

And there is one more issue to add – the problem of training datasets. Universal Music Group filed a lawsuit against Udio and Suno in June 2024, claiming that both platforms trained AI on the copyrights recordings without any permission at large scale. No matter how safe your AI output is, the tool used to produce it is allegedly infringing the rights in most countries. This cloud hangs over every track produced by the contemporary AI models.

The Settlements that Transformed the Landscape

This situation has changed dramatically in the last year and if you read any articles on AI music licensing prior to the end of 2025, please, throw them away. Universal Music Group and Udio have agreed on the settlement in October 2025. Warner Music Group reached a settlement with Udio in mid-November 2025, and soon became the first major company reaching a settlement with Suno. According to the report in Music Business Worldwide, Warner’s settlement allows Suno to launch new licensed AI models in 2026 replacing the current ones. And the company made this step after raising 250 millions at 2.45 billions valuation.

The terms of these settlements show us where the industry is going. Udio, after the settlements, disabled audio, stem, and video downloads entirely and turned into a walled garden working on fully licensed platform reportedly to be named Starstruck, which will allow fans to create covers and remixes of the opted in artists. Suno implemented its own restrictions: free tier tracks become playable and sharable in-app but not downloadable, while the paying users receive the download limits. Majors are not only solving their claims through settlements. They are controlling the tracks coming out from the AI platforms.

There are two unfinished issues to mention. Neither of the companies reached a settlement with Sony Music, and Suno faces a summary judgment hearing in the ongoing litigation in mid 2026 after the fingerprints analysis allegedly detected copyrighted recordings in its training dataset. At the same time, the American Federation of Musicians filed a suit against Universal and Warner, stating that licensing the recordings of its members to the AI companies triggers the payment obligation. As Virginie Berger explains in her Forbes’ piece, the settle and license strategy resolves the issue for the majors, but leaves thousands of rightsholders in the training data uncompensated. The legal war goes on, it just changed its genre.

As for the sync licensing, my take is the following: the appearance of the licensed AI models in 2026 will be the first truly credible path to the AI tracks acceptable to the cautious E&O underwriters, because the training data issue is solved. However, we are not there yet and nothing generated by current AI models inherits this cleanliness retroactively.

The Current Licensing Situation of Each Platform

I will review the AI music generators people usually ask me about, their current prices and the real situation with the licensing. Please, verify the prices on the official webpages before spending money, as the prices may change.

Suno is the most popular generator and the one I’m usually asked about. Pro plan costs 10 dollars a month (or 8 dollars per month billed annually) and grants 2,500 credits, while Premier plan runs 30 dollars a month (10,000 credits plus the Suno Studio DAW). Both paid plans give commercial rights to the songs produced during the subscription (free tier songs are personal use only, and upgrading later does not turn them into the commercial ones, which is a common pitfall), but they only mean that Suno will not pursue you. They do not create the copyright in the purely AI generated track in the US and they definitely do not resolve the chain of title issues for the supervisors.

Please, beware with Udio. It’s really impressing, but after the settlement Udio has disabled the audio, stem, and video downloads entirely, so as of this moment you are not able to export the Udio track to license it. This is a preview of the future, not the tool for the use today. Check the current status before spending money on the subscription for professional purposes.

Soundraw is a completely different platform and I think that this approach is underrated for precisely this use case. Its models are trained exclusively on the music created by in-house producers, therefore the scraped data problem is nonexistent. According to Soundraw license terms, creator plans, starting from 11 dollars a month, cover YouTube, client work, product videos, and even TV and radio uses, with worldwide perpetual license, which will stay in force after the cancellation of the subscription. You don’t acquire the copyright in the output, but hold the license of the company owning the entire training dataset, which is a much easier story to tell to the supervisor. For the background music for an advertisement or a corporate film this licensing scheme works today.

AIVA is the platform I advise composers for films and games. It specializes in orchestral and cinematic compositions, exports the MIDI so that you can use it for composing in your DAW and its Pro plan (approximately 33 dollars a month billed annually or 49 euros monthly subscription) transfers the full copyright ownership of the output to you in accordance with its terms. MakerStack in its review of AIVA says that its licensing terms are rather safe for the commercial use and I agree with the remark that contractual assignment from AIVA and a registrable US copyright are still two different things in case of no human authorship in the track. Use AIVA as a source of ideas and compose on top of them.

Traditional royalty free libraries are the sleeper choice that many people forget about. Epidemic Sound controls its entire catalog and currently prohibits AI generated music in it, which is the reason for its safe license for broadcasting and advertisements. Personal plans start from 17 to 18 dollars a month. Artlist combines music with stock footage and AI tools in its catalog under a single universal license at a similar price point. If what you need is the safe and decent background music for commercial project, the yearly subscription in one of these libraries (200 to 300 dollars a year) with indemnification is often smarter than any generator. Indemnification means that the library will stand behind the license in case of the claim, which is exactly what AI generators do not provide.

If you are trying to pitch AI assisted tracks from the other side of the table, please, remember that the platforms are also divided into categories. The survey of which sync platforms accept AI music by Dynamoi shows that Songtradr takes AI tracks on a case-by-case basis depending on quality and rights, AudioSparx is notable accepting AI content, and premium curated libraries such as Epidemic Sound are basically closed to it. Target your pitches accordingly and disclose everything to avoid losing sync opportunities forever.

How to Make Your AI Assisted Track Truly Licensable

And here is the part that matters the most if you are a musician because the door in the wall is human authorship and it’s bigger than you think. The US Copyright Office guidance, as stated in the article on how the copyright rules apply to the music with AI generated material by Rimon Law entertainment attorneys, protects the elements of the hybrid work contributed by humans. Your task is to contribute significantly to the output in expressive way.

Here is my practice of working with AI: I treat it as the idea, never as a finished product. I generate the instrumental idea, import it into my DAW, and then rebuild it: the new melody is written by me, the arrangement is restructured, my instruments and vocals are added, human played substitutes for the key parts, my mixing and production touches applied. After this process, the expressive core of the track is mine and I can show exactly which elements were done by me.

And of course, documentation is the key to success. Preserve your project files, version history, stems, and notes showing the changes you’ve made and the moment you’ve made them. If you’re going to register the work with the US Copyright Office, disclose the AI generated material and describe your contribution honestly, because the registration rules require it and the registration made in violation of this requirement is worse than having nothing. Also keep the proof of your subscription to the commercial tiers to prove that you have used the commercial AI tools.

Perform clearance checks on your own. Run the track through the content identification services like YouTube’s Content ID to detect any similarities with existing recordings that could be missed by the supervisor. Register the track if you can claim it with your PRO so the performance royalties could be collected. And when you pitch, disclose your use of AI and describe your authorship in one sentence, because supervisors are already aware that the AI is everywhere. Deezer reported that AI generated tracks account for approximately 28% of daily uploads to its platform. Nobody expects the pool to be pure anymore. All they want is someone who can stand behind the warranty.

Common advice that needs some reconsideration: that the detailed prompt session is the human authorship. It is not. This exact issue came up at the Copyright Office, which ruled that, regardless of the level of detail, prompts act as instructions to machines, not as authorship of the resulting work. If you created everything you contributed inside a text box, you don’t have anything to license. I know, this hurts. But this is the law.

Where AI Music Is Actually Going Now

Instead of focusing on the ideal world we wish for ourselves, let’s acknowledge where the market is actually going right now. Fully generated tracks appear in low-risk, low-review places like online video, social content, internal corporate media, low-budget indie films that skip E&O, and background music beds where nobody’s reputation rides on the cue. Guest writers at Sync Songwriter identified the same split in their examination of the use of AI music in licensing: top-tier film and prestige TV use humans exclusively, while budget conscious, high volume projects are picking up AI.

For prestige sync, it’s just as stubbornly human for reasons outside of the legalities of copyright. Supervisors are licensing stories as well as songs, and the artist credit in the end credits, the press angle, the authenticity of a real voice in an emotionally charged scene… none of that comes with a piece of music with no author behind it. I’ve seen excellent demos from technically adept AI lose placements to more rudimentary human recordings simply because that demo included a person.

Meanwhile, in ads, things are happening fast. Agencies are cost-conscious, timelines are tight, and a 30-second bed for a regional spot does not care about any backstory. This is where the cleanly licensed AI and adjacent options such as ethically-trained generators and AI-assisted library music are actually winning budget right now. This is also where the licensed platforms from 2026’s deals between labels and AI companies are going to come first, if I had to bet.

Questions to Ask Before Licensing or Pitching Your AI Track

Here are some things to consider if you’re a filmmaker or a brand considering licensing AI music. Who owns the copyright, and can they provide proof of ownership in writing? What training data did they use, and are they willing to indemnify you against any problems with this? Will your E&O insurer cover your cue after you disclose it, and you have to disclose it? Can your provider deliver the warranties your distributor requires? If the answer to any of these is not an unequivocal “yes”, the money you saved on that license fee is going to turn into a loan for a lawyer in the future.

Now, for musicians considering pitching AI-assisted work. Are you able to describe your contribution in one sentence? Do your files provide evidence of this? Did you use a commercial tier of the generator when creating source material? Was your track checked against other tracks for similarity? Is your PRO registration correct for this track? All of these questions answered with an emphatic “yes” and you’re ahead of many others.

Reality Check With No Hedging

Let’s address the main issue without any hedging in its usual place. Can AI music be used for film, TV, and ads licensing now? Fully-generated music, in any situation where copyright, chain of title, and E&O insurance are important, practically no. Not because supervisors are technology-resistant, but because you cannot license what nobody owns. AI-assisted music with proven human authorship, yes, and it’s already being licensed by those who did the work. Ethically trained generators and subscription library music, yes, and it’s doing what it was meant to do.

The landscape is changing, and the licensed AI platforms scheduled to appear in 2026 as part of Warner, Universal, Suno, and Udio deals include built-in credit and compensation system. Once this market matures, expect licensing categories specifically developed for sync licensing to emerge, and expect the majors to be selling them. The era when the AI music was completely outside of licensing industry is over. The era when it was cheap and unregulated is coming to an end too.

To Do This Week

Choose your lane and take one concrete step. If you’re a musician, take your best AI assisted track, create an authorship version of it as explained above, and document every step – this track will become your test-case for registering and pitching. If you’re a filmmaker, write your E&O broker in advance of falling in love with any AI track, ask in writing how they handle AI generated music, and budget a library subscription for the comparison. Either way, download and archive anything you’ve created on the current generation models before the next generation licensed replacements appear, and study the terms of any paid platforms, since right now in AI music licensing, the terms are the product.

Sources

Common questions

Why does sync licensing require copyright?

Every sync deal needs two licences, one from the master owner and one from the publishing owner, plus a contract warranting that the music infringes nobody's rights. Each piece of that machine assumes someone composed the work, owns the recording, registered with a PRO and can sign the warranty. When a track has no human author, none of those assumptions hold, so there is nothing to license.

Can a purely AI generated song be copyrighted in the US?

No. The Copyright Office's January 2025 report states that AI outputs are copyrightable only where a human determined sufficient expressive elements, that prompting alone is not authorship no matter how detailed, and that in hybrid works only the human contributed elements are protected. The DC Circuit confirmed in Thaler v. Perlmutter in March 2025 that an AI system cannot be an author.

Why will music supervisors not use AI generated tracks?

Their job is risk management. Every production hands its distributor a rights package with chain of title, licences, cue sheets and warranties, and an AI track breaks that chain because nobody can say where it came from, what it was trained on or who to pay if a claim arrives. Unlike a sample, it cannot be identified and cleared. Supervisors are also licensing a story and an artist credit, which a track with no author cannot provide.

Does AI music affect production insurance?

Yes, and this is the issue people underestimate most. Productions need errors and omissions insurance to get distribution, and a production containing AI generated content may be uninsurable because the material is not copyrightable in most countries and cannot be traced by underwriters. The right question is not whether you will get sued but whether your insurer will issue the policy, so ask your E&O broker in writing before committing to an AI cue.

Do Suno's commercial rights make a track licensable for sync?

No. Suno Pro at $10 a month and Premier at $30 grant commercial rights to songs made while subscribed, and free tier songs stay personal use only even after upgrading. But commercial rights only mean Suno will not pursue you. They do not create a US copyright in a purely generated track and do not solve the chain of title problem for a supervisor.

Can I license Udio music for film or advertising?

Not currently. After its settlements with Universal and Warner, Udio disabled audio, stem and video downloads entirely and is becoming a walled garden platform reportedly named Starstruck for covers and remixes of opted in artists. Since you cannot export a track, you cannot license it elsewhere, so check its status before paying for a subscription for professional use.

Which AI music tools are safe for commercial and broadcast use?

Soundraw trains only on music from its in house producers, and its creator plans from $11 a month include a worldwide perpetual licence covering client work, TV and radio, which is a much easier story to tell a supervisor. AIVA suits cinematic composers, exports MIDI and assigns copyright ownership of the output contractually under its Pro plan, though a contractual assignment is still not a registrable US copyright without human authorship. Libraries like Epidemic Sound and Artlist at roughly $17 to $18 a month add indemnification, which no generator offers.

How do I make an AI assisted track licensable?

Treat the AI output as an idea, not a product. Import it into your DAW, write a new melody, restructure the arrangement, add your own instruments and vocals, replace key parts with human performances and apply your own production. Keep project files, version history, stems and dated notes, register with the Copyright Office while disclosing the AI material, keep proof of your commercial tier subscription, run a similarity check through a service like Content ID, and register with your PRO.

Does a detailed prompt count as human authorship?

No. The Copyright Office ruled that prompts, however detailed, are instructions to a machine rather than authorship of the result. If everything you contributed happened inside a text box, you have nothing to license.

Where is AI music actually being used in sync right now?

In low risk, low review places: online video, social content, internal corporate media, low budget indie films that skip E&O insurance, and background beds where nobody's reputation rides on the cue. Ads are moving fastest because agencies are cost conscious and a 30 second regional bed needs no backstory. Prestige film and TV remain human, and the licensed AI platforms emerging from the 2026 label deals are expected to reach advertising first.