Sony Music Publishing
The world's largest music publisher, representing the songwriting side of the business rather than recordings.
Sony Music Publishing is the publishing arm of Sony Music and the largest music publisher in the world, with a catalogue running into the millions of songs. Publishing is the half of the music business people forget: a record label owns the recording you hear, while a publisher represents the composition itself, the melody and the lyrics, on behalf of the songwriters.
That distinction is why publishers keep showing up in AI copyright cases. Lyrics are text, so they end up in the same scraped or torrented book and web collections used to train language models. In August 2026 Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music sued Anthropic over song lyrics used to train Claude.