The Mechanical Licensing Collective, known as The MLC, has told a court it should not be forced to answer a subpoena from Udio. The AI music company, whose parent is Uncharted Labs, wants monthly streaming figures broken down by record label, and the MLC says the demand misreads what it does. The filing, reported around 3 to 4 November 2026, is an opposition to Udio's subpoena and its motion to compel.
Udio's request asks for documents sufficient to show performance data for all labels, month by month, from 2021 to the present. The MLC calls the request substantially identical to the one Suno made, and the same lawyer, Chris Campbell of The Campbell Firm, acts for both AI companies. Suno's version spells out the fields it wants: ISRC, title, label, distributor, play count, type of use, match status and featured acts. After narrowing its August subpoena, Suno still names Amazon, Apple, Deezer, Pandora, SoundCloud, Spotify, Tidal and YouTube.
The MLC's main argument is that it administers royalties for musical works, not sound recordings, and that it does not generate the usage data at all. It only receives copies of the monthly reports the streaming services already hold. It adds that Udio can already get label market-share figures from the plaintiffs suing it, and data on its own presence from the services, so the burden of pulling the rest is not justified. Udio and Suno answer that the data bears on their fair use and copyright misuse defences.
“Udio.com appears to already have that data—from the Plaintiffs themselves”
The MLC, in its opposition brief · digitalmusicnews.com ↗
On cost, the MLC says staff who would do the work are paid between $150 and $315 an hour and would be taken off their regular duties. Mubert's account puts the job at roughly two to three weeks of staff time. In July, the MLC's counsel Benjamin Semel of Pryor Cashman had passed Campbell a vendor estimate of about $5,000 in services plus more than $100 per terabyte per month in hosting, but he heavily caveated it, because nothing like this pull had been done before. Campbell rejected a compromise limited to the plaintiff labels' data, saying it would defeat a central purpose of the request.
The dispute has a history. Digital Music News had already dissected Udio's subpoena and motion to compel in October, and the MLC's reply is the other half of that exchange. Mubert's timeline dates the opposition report to 3 November, while the Digital Music News page went up on 4 November. Because the MLC holds copies of what the streaming services reported rather than any record of its own making, it presents the request as one that reaches well beyond anything it generates or keeps for its own work, and its own counsel noted in July that a pull like this had never been done before.
The MLC is not alone in resisting. Pandora and Apple Music have pushed back on the data demand, and Pandora's counsel wrote that it does not consent to production that includes Pandora's data. Subpoenas, motions to quash and motions to compel are now flying through the majors' cases against Udio and Suno. Plaintiffs have also subpoenaed DistroKid and several Suno investors, among them Lightspeed and Bond Capital, and Apple's separate bid to quash a Suno subpoena was moved by a magistrate judge to Massachusetts on 5 November.
The surrounding litigation is uneven. Sony Music is still suing Udio even though Universal Music and Warner Music have settled with it, and Warner is the only major to have settled with and licensed Suno. A newly approved joint scheduling motion pushes pre-trial deadlines in the older non-Warner majors' Suno case into June 2027.
The same pattern runs through both companies' disputes with the MLC, with each side filing the same kinds of papers in step. The MLC's answer to Udio was due on 30 October under the proposed schedule, and both AI companies keep arguing that the figures bear on their fair use and copyright misuse defences, while the MLC says the burden of producing them is too great to justify.
About The MLC
The Mechanical Licensing Collective, known as The MLC, is the United States non-profit that administers blanket mechanical licences for streaming services and pays the songwriters and publishers whose compositions they stream.
Its dealings with the AI companies' lawyers have shifted over the past months. In July 2026 its counsel at Pryor Cashman gave Udio's lawyer a heavily caveated vendor estimate of about $5,000 in services plus hosting fees of more than $100 per terabyte per month for pulling the requested data. Over roughly four months in spring and summer 2026 it had reportedly agreed to produce several terabytes to Suno at Suno's cost, before reversing course, according to a letter from Suno's lawyer dated 23 September 2026. On 30 October 2026 it agreed with Suno to a schedule that set its opposition due on 2 November.
Under the proposed schedule, Udio's reply is due on 13 November and Suno's reply in its twin dispute on 16 November. No ruling on the motion to compel has been reported yet.
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