Ask me who played bass on my favorite record and I will give you a confident, entirely invented answer.
I have listened to that album most of my adult life and could hum the line on a street corner. I have never once turned the sleeve over to find out whose hands made it. Not a charming quirk — precisely the blind spot this story lives inside.
Somebody did play it. They came in, worked a few hours, took a fee set by a contract they never read, and went home. The record kept earning for decades. They did not.
That recording — along with thousands of others, the musicians' union alleges — has now been licensed to companies that build song-generating machines. Whether the person who played the line gets anything for it is a live question in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, and turns on one verb in a labor agreement.
The clause, the verb, and the records nobody listed
Everything the union says here is an allegation in a live case with a motion to dismiss pending. No court has ruled. I will keep saying that.
On June 5, 2026, the American Federation of Musicians — the union for session players, orchestral musicians and generally the people whose names you cannot recall — sued in the Southern District of New York. Not the AI companies. Its own members' employers. The complaint alleges that two of the largest music companies in the world licensed recordings AFM musicians worked on to two AI firms without compensation or credit, under the provision of federal labor law letting a union enforce a collective bargaining agreement.
The agreement is the Sound Recording Labor Agreement, and the piece that matters is Article 21(a). As reproduced in the complaint:
"if the Company uses a phonograph record … for a purpose not covered by this Agreement, the Company shall pay to those musicians who rendered services in the recording … an amount equal to all payments … that would be required under the AFM agreement that would then be effective"
Both halves are load-bearing. Shall pay — mandatory. Then a cross-reference, elsewhere, for the number.
Provisions like this are old: new use clauses have run through the union's label agreements in one form or another dating back, it says, to as early as the 1940s, and Article 21 took its current shape in 1999, replacing a flat ban on "dubbing." The point, in the union's telling, was that the bargain struck was that the companies would have to compensate musicians for uses nobody had imagined — and licensing for AI training and generation falls squarely under this rule.
There is a second, quieter claim, and I think it is the more interesting one. Article 21(a) does not only require payment; it requires notice — which records, which artists, which release dates, which transfer dates, in a specified form. The union alleges it got none of that. Not a low number. No list at all. It says the agreement covers thousands of the recordings licensed — an estimate, precisely because nobody handed over the ledger.
For scale: the union's published scale card, in force when the contract lapsed, sets a sidemusician's three-hour session at $488.29, plus a 14.09% pension contribution and $30 in health and welfare. That is the whole economic relationship for most people on most records: one afternoon, one payment, no residual, ever.
So far, so good. Here is where the calendar tightens. Judge Edgardo Ramos set the schedule on July 21: moving papers due August 14, opposition due September 4, 2026, and reply due September 11, 2026. Universal filed early, on August 5; Atlantic on the deadline. On August 20 Ramos so-ordered the union's voluntary dismissal of Warner Music Group Corp., without prejudice, leaving Universal Music Group, Inc., Warner Records, Inc. and Atlantic Recording Corp. as defendants. And note: the same parties are simultaneously negotiating the successor agreement, with AI at the center of the talks.
The trigger — briefly, because I have covered the deals themselves before — is that the labels stopped fighting. Warner reached agreements with both Suno and Udio; Universal settled with Udio and is still suing Suno; Sony settled with neither, remains the only major music company yet to reach a licensing agreement with Udio, and sued it again on July 20 over 30,117 tracks found among Udio's training datasets, after Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein refused to let it add them to the original case.
The settling labels do say artists will be paid: under the Universal–Udio arrangement, participating artists and songwriters are to be remunerated, and a source close to the deal told Billboard that this covers both training and outputs — though the details of exactly how that payment will work beyond this are unclear. The union's framing is blunter: the companies built a new revenue stream while the musicians whose work is fed into AI machines for profit got nothing — its president, Tino Gagliardi, says the deals were built on the backs of our members. Advocacy, not a finding. But the songwriter Tiffany Red put the question to NPR's Planet Money in plainer English: if a song she wrote turns up as a line item in somebody's settlement, where's my cut?
Nobody has answered her.
The labels' argument is better than you want it to be
Their position is not "no." It is structural, and strong.
Article 21, Warner argues, merely points to other agreements and does not itself confer legal rights. Universal puts it more sharply: 21(a) sets no price of its own, it imports one from whichever separate AFM agreement governs the new use, and a payment measured by an agreement that does not exist is no payment at all. And no AFM agreement sets a rate for AI training, so where none covers the new medium the clause has nothing to point to.
That is not a dodge. Promise me "the amount specified in Schedule B" when there is no Schedule B, and underlining shall does not fix my problem.
The timing stings too. Warner told the court the suit was "an improper attempt to place a judicial thumb on the negotiation scales," and publicly called it unproductive action amid ongoing negotiations; Universal says it has been at the forefront of protecting artists' rights in the age of AI. A suit filed mid-bargaining reads as leverage.
The fact that cuts hardest comes from the union's own history: in 2024 the AFM ratified a film and television agreement that does carry a concrete AI provision, allowing AI to generate a musical performance with payment to musicians whose work is used to prompt the AI system. Which proves either that the way to get an AI rate is to bargain one, or that the union knows what such a clause looks like and cannot get these employers to sign one.
Its answer to Judge Ramos in July: "shall pay" is an independent obligation, and the cross-reference goes to what, not if. The precedent is video games — when companies first licensed music for games no AFM agreement had set a game rate either, and the parties treated it as a new use anyway.
Both readings are grammatically available. That is why there is a motion, and why I will not tell you how it comes out.
In Germany, this would not be a contract dispute at all
Comparisons like this get lazy, so let me kill the version I expected to write.
The intuitive story is that German law hands performers a statutory payment whenever their recordings are used in a way nobody foresaw, so a session player there would never need to sue. That is wrong, and several summaries state it incorrectly. The Copyright Act does have an "unknown types of use" regime — but it is an authors' right. The statute carries an explicit list of which protections apply accordingly to transfers of rights by performers, and the unknown-use provisions are not on it. A German bass player is not covered by the thing everybody assumes covers them.
What performers there do get is sharper anyway, and it is statute rather than negotiation. If a performer's fee proves disproportionately low in comparison to the proceeds and benefits derived from the use, they can demand the contract be modified — and where the disproportion comes from money made by a third party further down the license chain, that third party is directly liable to them. It is irrelevant whether anyone foresaw the proceeds, and there can be no advance waiver.
Then the part that would have made this American lawsuit unnecessary: where a right of use is granted for payment, at least once a year the contracting party provides the author with information about the extent of the use and the proceeds derived from it. Unprompted. Annually. By law. A parallel provision extends that information claim to third parties in the chain — to the AI company itself — and another makes it compulsory, so it cannot be drafted away. (Two caveats: an exemption applies for a merely "secondary contribution," a live question for a sidemusician, and a collective agreement can set the transparency level instead.)
The money mostly does not travel by lawsuit either. Where a performer signed rights to a producer for a one-time fee, the producer owes an extra 20% of income — non-waivable, and it "may only be asserted by a collecting society," never by the individual. (It bites only from the fifty-first year after publication: a pension, not a paycheck.) GVL, Germany's collecting society for performers, has represented the interests of performers and producers of sound recordings since 1959, for over 180,000 rights holders.
Before you conclude Germany solved it: GVL says plainly that the entire online sector, streaming and media libraries included, sits outside its remit, and that it is unfortunately not possible to receive any remuneration via GVL in this context. A better-designed floor. Not a finished building.
The other difference is temperament. GEMA, the composers' society, did not settle — it sued, saying its members' songs are not free raw material for generative AI business models. On July 31, 2026, the Munich Regional Court largely agreed, prohibiting four acts including reproduction for training in the United States, assessed under US law and found unprotected by fair use. Damages were ordered but not quantified, and — the phrase to keep — the judgment is not yet enforceable. An appeal is available; Suno says the ruling rests on a fundamental mischaracterization of its technology.
Two things must not be blurred. GEMA's claims are focused on compositions, while the label suits are about sound recordings — different rights, different plaintiffs. And in that case no performers' or phonogram producers' rights were asserted at all: no German session musician won anything in Munich. What GEMA did do, in September 2024, was publish a generative-AI licensing model covering training and output, saying a lump-sum buyout for training data is not nearly sufficient to compensate authors. A published tariff, rather than a confidential settlement whose terms the American union says it cannot see.
The real difference is not generosity. It is which direction information flows by default.
Now run it forward to the contract after this one
Say the successor agreement is signed within the year carrying a real AI provision — consent, compensation and credit, the three words the union rallied for in Times Square in March. It will almost certainly be prospective, which leaves everything already recorded — seventy years of sessions, the pool that makes these models sound like music rather than noise — governed by the clause being argued over right now. The back catalog is the asset, and the part with no schedule and no list.
Picture the machinery three or four years on. The licensed platforms scale — Suno's chief executive said in February the company had passed two million paid subscribers — and each label runs a portal where featured performers opt in. It knows the artist's name; an artist has a contract, a manager and a royalty account. It does not know who played on the 1979 session, because that lives on a form in a box the union alleges was never handed over.
Then the effect that actually worries me. A model trained on decades of first-call session work no longer needs a first-call session. The date does not get booked. The player who would have sat in that chair is not underpaid — they are simply not called, and the last generation whose work is in the training data turns out to be the last generation paid a session fee at all. Not a collapse; a slow thinning of a calendar, one canceled date at a time, and nobody writes a headline about a call that did not come.
Which is why the notice claim matters more than the payment claim. A rate can be bargained later; a record of who played on what can only be preserved now.
What the people who study this actually argue about
Not a clean left-right fight, which is what makes it interesting.
From the free-market side, the R Street Institute argues that bolting payment obligations onto AI training is impractical: with hundreds of billions of web pages used by large language models, many of them carrying unclear copyright ownership, tracing rights and establishing licenses would not be feasible at scale.
From the opposite premise, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lands in a similar place: overbroad licensing requirements risk entrenching Big Tech's dominance, shutting out small developers and undermining fair use for researchers and artists. Two ideologies, one destination.
The most uncomfortable argument comes from neither flank. A Masaryk University analysis of collective licensing for AI training notes that such schemes reach only rightsholders who know about them and opt in, and that smaller, independent creators — precisely those most at risk from AI market disruption — often lack the capacity to join one at all. Session players are the textbook case.
The scholarly counter-proposal is bigger than a contract clause. Martin Senftleben has argued for a statutory levy with mandatory collective management, funding streams that improve the working and living conditions of flesh-and-blood authors — and note carefully, his levy falls on outputs, not training. Meanwhile a CISAC-commissioned study projects that music creators have 24% of their revenues at risk of loss by 2028 in an unchanged regulatory framework — a projection, about creators specifically, not labels or publishers.
The creator organizations care less about theory. The Music Artists Coalition asked what share of revenue goes to artists versus the label versus the AI company, and observed that participation without fair compensation isn't partnership; it's just permission. In June, thirty-one artist, songwriter and manager groups signed an open letter insisting consent cannot be imposed through default opt-ins — artists are not catalog assets to be licensed over their heads.
So what does this mean for you?
You probably do not play on records. The pattern still finds you: "your employer signed a deal about your past work and did not tell you" is not a music problem.
If you or someone close to you has ever done session work, ask about notice, not just money. Which recordings were licensed, to whom, on what date. Payment follows a list; without one nobody can calculate anything, including the party that owes it.
When a company says "artists will be compensated," ask which artists. Featured performers have contracts and royalty accounts. The people in the back row have a one-time fee and a filing cabinet. Press releases rarely distinguish them.
Read the docket yourself, and watch the contract as well as the case. Federal filings are public and free to search; two pages of a real motion will inoculate you against a month of confident summaries — this one included.
Check your own paperwork for a Schedule B that does not exist. Employment agreements, freelance contracts and IP policies are full of clauses pointing elsewhere for the number. Find out whether the elsewhere was ever written.
Treat credit as a separate demand from cash. Money can be negotiated retroactively. Attribution, once the metadata is gone, cannot be reconstructed.
The lesson, as I see it
What I keep returning to is not the money. It is that a clause written for a future nobody could describe is now read by the parties who wrote it as a pointer aimed at empty space — and that both sides can argue that in good faith, because 1999 could not have named what happened.
That will keep happening, and not only in music. Nearly every contract any of us signs carries a version of "for purposes not covered by this agreement." Whether that phrase means we will work it out fairly when the future arrives or nothing is owed until we agree it is is being settled right now, in a few unglamorous briefs on a labor docket in Manhattan. Germany answered it by refusing to leave it to the contract at all — an annual duty to open the books, a fairness claim reaching whoever profited. Incomplete, as its own society admits, but built on the assumption that whoever did the work is entitled to know what became of it.
My vote? Whatever Judge Ramos decides about Article 21, the list should exist. You cannot pay someone you never counted, and you cannot count them once the session is thirty years gone and the only person still listening is the one who cannot recall the bass player's name.
That would be me.
Somewhere there is a bass player who has no idea a machine has been studying their timing. Send this to the musician in your life — better they hear it from a friend than find themselves as a line item.