Whose Vibe Is It Anyway? Jason Isbell’s AI Lawsuit Against Suno

Jason Isbell has a distinctive sound. But does he have a legal right to stop an AI from learning what makes him sound like Jason Isbell?

That is the question at the center of a new proposed class action filed in the District of Massachusetts by Isbell and fellow musicians David Lowery, Guy Forsyth, and Dr. Eduardo Calle against Suno, the company behind a popular generative-AI music platform. The Complaint alleges that Suno does more than train on copyrighted recordings: it extracts and stores the identifying characteristics of individual musicians and then allows users to call up those characteristics by invoking a musician’s name. The plaintiffs describe Suno as, in effect, a “name-indexed” music-generation system.

The Complaint includes some colorful demonstrations. According to the plaintiffs, entering “Jason Isbell” caused Suno to generate a song featuring what they describe as Isbell-like male vocals, country twang, fingerpicked acoustic guitar, and even accompanying imagery evoking his persona. In other words, the allegation is not simply that Suno learned how to make Americana music—it learned how to generate Jason Isbell’s particular vibe. The plaintiffs allege similar results for musicians ranging from Buddy Guy and Carly Simon to Tom Waits and Taylor Swift.

What makes the lawsuit particularly interesting is what the plaintiffs are not claiming. They expressly say that they do not own country music, Americana, blues, or any other musical style and cannot prevent others from making music in those styles. Instead, they characterize the case as protecting musicians’ identities rather than copyrighted works.

To make that theory work, the 84-page Complaint gets creative. It asserts 17 counts under a patchwork of state laws, including Illinois’ Right of Publicity Act and Biometric Information Privacy Act, California common-law publicity rights, New York’s statutory protections for living and deceased performers, and publicity-right laws spanning Tennessee, Florida, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Michigan, Georgia, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii.

The proposed classes are similarly ambitious, covering musicians whose names were allegedly accepted as Suno prompts and, in Illinois, musicians whose alleged “voiceprints” were captured or stored.

The case therefore presents a fascinating question for the AI era: Can an AI legally copy your vibe without copying your songs? The answer may depend less on copyright law than on an increasingly important—and highly state-specific—body of law governing who owns your identity.