songcode and Udio · songcode

Udio launched in April 2024, founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, and became one of the two names in AI song generation alongside Suno. Like Suno, it turns a prompt into a finished recording with vocals.

Its last year is the more instructive story.

What happened

The major labels sued Udio in June 2024, in the same wave of lawsuits that named Suno.

On 29 October 2025, Udio and Universal Music Group announced a settlement and a partnership to build a new licensed platform. Udio’s own post that day included this sentence: “Starting today, downloads from the platform will be unavailable.”

People who had been making music on Udio for a year and a half could no longer export it. A few days later Udio opened a 48 hour window for existing users to download their work. Then the door closed again.

Warner Music Group signed a similar deal on 19 November 2025. Trade press has since reported agreements with the independent label group Merlin and the publisher Kobalt. Sony’s case against Udio is still running.

A year on, reviews from October 2026 report that downloads remain disabled on every plan and that the licensed platform has no launch date. The design Universal has described is a walled garden: you create and share inside the service, and the music stays there.

A fair reading

There is a real argument for what Udio is building. A platform where rights holders opted in and get paid is something the industry asked for. If the garden opens with real artists’ styles available by permission, that is a thing songcode cannot offer and does not try to.

The cost fell on the people who were already there. They had made music with a tool, and one morning the tool’s terms decided they could listen to it but not have it.

Why that cannot happen to a text file

A songcode track is a short program. The moment it is generated, the whole thing is in your browser as text. You can copy it out of the editor, download it as a file, or paste it into a note. There is no second, better copy held back on a server.

	songcode	Udio
what you get	source code, played live	a finished recording
vocals	no	yes
where the track lives	in the text on your screen	on Udio’s servers
export	source, WAV, MP3, one WAV per stem	disabled since 29 October 2025
if the service changes its terms	you still have the source	you have what the terms allow

We could shut songcode down tomorrow and every track you had saved to disk would still be a complete description of the music: every note, every drum hit, every filter setting, readable in any text editor.

That is the practical meaning of getting source. It is yours in the plain sense that nobody needs to keep a server running for you to have it. Playing it does not depend on us either: “open in strudel” hands any track to the editor at strudel.cc, which we do not run.

What Udio does that songcode does not

The comparison only goes so far, because the two tools make different things.

Udio makes songs with singers. Its audio model can produce textures and performances no synthesizer patch will. For a lot of music, that is the whole point.

songcode makes instrumental tracks from synths and drum machine samples, with no vocals. It is a narrower instrument. Within that range it gives you something a recording cannot: every decision in the track, written down where you can change it.

The general lesson

Ask of any tool you make things with: if this company changed its mind tomorrow, what would I still have?

For a recording locked in a web app, the answer depends on the company. For a text file on your disk, it does not. A track is a text file covers the rest of what follows from that.

Sources

Checked 11 November 2026.

Udio’s announcement of 29 October 2025: A New Era of Music. Warner announcement: Udio blog.
Timeline, founders and the 48 hour window: Wikipedia’s Udio article, citing the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times.
State as of October 2026: Loop Fans.
Walled garden design, Merlin, Kobalt and Sony status: Luminate, Chartlex, Stability AI’s comparison.