Udio makes good sounding music from a text prompt, and for a while it was one of the two names that mattered in the category. The help centre is modest, around fifty articles across nine collections, with song creation the largest at a dozen and the rest covering subscriptions, credits, editing, account and troubleshooting. The song creation material is the useful part, covering prompt structure, genre and style direction and extending a track, and the credit mechanics are documented clearly, with a free tier giving ten daily credits, Standard at ten dollars a month for two thousand four hundred and Pro at thirty for six thousand, none of which roll over. As documentation of how the buttons work, it is adequate.
What it does not document is the situation the product is actually in, and that situation is the only thing a prospective user should care about. Udio was sued in June 2024 by Universal, Sony, Warner and the RIAA. Universal settled in October 2025 with a licensing arrangement for a jointly built platform, Warner followed in November, Merlin in January 2026, Kobalt in April and an industry wide publishing deal with the NMPA in June. On the day the Universal settlement was announced, downloads were disabled.
Users who had generated music, in some cases a great deal of it, lost the ability to export their own work, and the backlash was severe enough that the company opened a forty eight hour download window in early November 2025 before closing it again. The replacement licensed platform, stream only with no export, was slated for 2026 and I could not confirm that it has launched. Sit with what that means. This is a creative tool where you can currently make music and cannot take it with you.
Anyone who built a workflow on this, or used it in a project, or simply assumed that what they made was theirs to keep, discovered otherwise with essentially no notice. It is the clearest illustration available of the difference between using a tool and depending on one, and the help centre presents credits and subscriptions as though none of it happened. Sony has not settled. The original case over three hundred and thirty three works is in discovery with trial expected in late 2026, the court declined to let Sony add tens of thousands of further recordings to it, and Sony filed a separate suit in July 2026 asserting those recordings independently.
The commercial rights position for anything you generate is therefore genuinely unsettled, and the help centre offers no clear guidance on what you may do with your output. For anybody considering using this in something that earns money, that is a serious and unaddressed risk. Two point three. Adequate documentation of a product whose fundamental proposition changed underneath its users, marked down heavily because the help centre is silent on the export loss and the unresolved litigation that should drive every decision about using it.