Sound designers, recordists, mixers, and sound effects library companies have launched the Professional Sound Alliance, a coalition formed to fight the unlicensed use of professional sound in media production and AI.
The group, which launched on Thursday (September 24), says it will push for fair licensing of sound design and sound effects across film, television, games, and AI training.
“Music has its protectors. Voice has its protectors. Now sound will have protection of our own,” said Douglas Price, a founding member of the Alliance and the Founder and CEO of Pro Sound Effects.
The Alliance says it was formed in response to two forms of unauthorized use, which it calls Data Piracy and Sync Piracy.
The Alliance describes the first as “the scraping of sound libraries into commercial AI models without permission or compensation,” and the second as “the use of sounds and libraries in film, television, and games without a license.”
Both, the Alliance says, “bypass years of field recording, editing, expert human curation, classification, and metadata creation” behind professional sound libraries.
That process is the product. Pro Sound Effects sells an AI training dataset of 1.27 million sounds that it describes as “rights-cleared” and “human-tagged,” running to more than 5,000 hours of audio.
Pro Sound Effects says an in-house team annotates every file using a professional taxonomy, and that the dataset is “never crowdsourced or synthetic.”
The company lists Google, Sony AI, and Dolby among the “industry leading teams” on the page where it markets that data.
Sony AI has separately said the sound libraries behind Similar Sound Search, the tool it developed with Audiokinetic for the Wwise middleware, were supplied by Pro Sound Effects and Boom Library.
On the sync side, Pro Sound Effects set out in a 2022 post on its own blog what unlicensed use looks like in practice.
A freelancer’s licensed files left behind on a company server after a job ends do not carry over to that company’s next project, the company says.
Nor does sharing an editor’s library password with someone outside a multi-user agreement extend the license to them. Work made that way is unlicensed.
Professional sound, as the Alliance defines it, is everything heard in a film, game, or TV show that is neither music nor voice – “every explosion, ambience, footstep, and door slam.”
The Alliance says its founding members are Price; Jeremy Siegel; Pierre Langer, CEO of Boom Library; Sotwo und Ideas Vice President Craig Nimens; Karol Urban, an Emmy-nominated re-recording mixer and former Cinema Audio Society President; and Mark Mangini, a two-time Academy Award winner.
The Alliance told MBW that it has no officer roles, and that it expects the group of founding members to excpand over time.
Siegel is Director of Licensing and Business Development at Pro Sound Effects, where Price is Founder and CEO.
“It’s time professional sound received the same respect and protection every other audio field has earned, for the lifetimes of work our industry has collectively built.”
Douglas Price, Professional Sound Alliance / Pro Sound Effects
“It’s time professional sound received the same respect and protection every other audio field has earned, for the lifetimes of work our industry has collectively built,” said Price.
Price added: “If you’ve helped to shape this craft, add your name and stand with us.”
“Sound effects are not a commodity,” said Mangini, whose credits include Mad Max: Fury Road, Dune, and Blade Runner 2049. “They are the product of human expertise, human experience, and human artistry.
“Sound effects are not a commodity. They are the product of human expertise, human experience, and human artistry.”
Mark Mangini, Professional Sound Alliance
“They deserve the same protection as any other creative work.”
The Alliance‘s data piracy complaint tracks the case the major record companies have spent more than two years making against generative AI firms.
The three majors sued Suno and Udio in June 2024, in cases coordinated by the RIAA that alleged “mass infringement” of copyright.
The labels later expanded those claims, alleging the companies had ripped recordings from YouTube and circumvented the platform’s protections.
Sound libraries turned up in the same material. Hacked source code from Suno, reported by 404 Media in July, named Freesound and the stock library Pond5 among the sources it drew training data from.
The datasets logged 62,117 hours from Pond5, which is owned by Shutterstock, according to that report.
The majors then moved from litigation to licensing, but not uniformly.
Universal Music Group settled with Udio in October 2025 and signed licensing deals for a new AI music service. It has not settled with Suno, and is still litigating that case alongside Sony Music.
Warner Music Group settled with Udio in November 2025, then became the first major to settle with Suno days later.
Sony Music has settled with neither. In July it filed a second suit against Udio, over a further 30,117 recordings.
Those deals have since drawn their own lawsuit, with the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) suing Universal, Warner Records, and Atlantic over the licensing of members’ recordings to the two AI companies without paying or crediting them. The labels have moved to dismiss, with briefing closed on September 11.
Sound effects generation is already a shipping product for AI developers such as Stability AI.
Stability AI‘s Stable Audio 3.0 family, released in May 2026, includes a model called Small SFX built for sound effects generation on phones and laptops.
Small SFX is open-weight and free to download, with an enterprise license required only of companies above USD $1 million in annual revenue.
According to a research paper published alongside that launch, the family is trained on licensed audio from production library AudioSparx, plus Creative Commons recordings from Freesound – the same repository named in Suno‘s hacked code, on different terms.
Licensing a library is not the end of the argument. In December 2025, musician Anders Manga sued Stability AI and AudioSparx, alleging his recordings were used to train Stable Audio in breach of a licensing agreement that predated generative AI. A judge dismissed the claim against AudioSparx in March, finding that the licensing agreement between the two covered the use in question.
The line between searching a library and generating from one is not fixed, and it runs through Pro Sound Effects‘ own customer list.
Also in May 2026, Sony AI released Woosh, a foundation model built specifically for sound effects, which generates audio from text prompts and from video.
Sony AI said it trained a private version of the model on licensed professional libraries “including Pro Sound Effects and BOOM,” and released a public version, trained on openly available data, under a non-commercial license.
“There’s no model that really is specific to sound effects,” said Hakim Missoum, Strategy & Partnerships Manager at Sony AI. “And in order to get good quality output, you need good quality input.”
Two of the Alliance‘s founding library companies have, in other words, licensed their catalogs for that use.
Pro Sound Effects told MBW that it licenses data for applications including machine learning to improve products and user experience, noise cancellation, sound recognition, and institutional research, and that the Alliance‘s complaint concerns “the unauthorized use of data and scraping” rather than generative AI alone.
The Alliance describes sound as “the third pillar of audio alongside music and voice.” Its website puts the argument as a three-way split: “Audio has three pillars. Two are protected. One isn’t.”
Its launch statement sets out the comparison directly: “Music has the RIAA and its labels. Voice has SAG-AFTRA.”
Those two bodies do different jobs. The RIAA is a trade organization that coordinates litigation and policy for rightsholders.
SAG-AFTRA is a union that bargains contracts, and in 2024 it reached a deal with the major labels requiring an artist’s consent before a recording can use a digital replica of their voice.
Neither of those arrangements is permanent. That SAG-AFTRA agreement expires on December 31 this year, and the AFM and the labels are negotiating their next Sound Recording Labor Agreement with AI at the center of the talks.
Sound is not starting from nothing. The Cinema Audio Society (CAS) was formed in 1964 and the Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE) in 1953.
Both are nonprofit craft bodies built around education, mentorship, and awards rather than rights, and both are professional societies rather than unions.
In 2020, the CAS, MPSE, and the Association of Motion Picture Sound wrote jointly to the industry asking for key sound professionals to be grouped together in film credits and positioned alongside other key roles – a campaign for recognition rather than licensing terms. The CAS President who signed it was Karol Urban, now among the Alliance‘s founding members.
The Professional Sound Alliance launches with a petition and a downloadable seal, not a collective bargaining agreement or a litigation fund.
The Alliance told MBW there is “zero intention to use PSA to litigate or even introduce licensing standards through the PSA,” and that its goal is to raise awareness for a pillar of audio that it says does not get the same recognition as the other two.
Of the petition, the Alliance told MBW: “It is not a legal document, not a commitment to litigation, and not an assignment of any rights. You are saying publicly that you believe professional sound deserves to be fairly compensated.”
Sound professionals, artists, toolmakers, software companies, and studios can add their names at professionalsoundalliance.org, the Alliance said.
Supporters can also download a Professional Sound Alliance seal for their websites, social profiles, and email signatures.Music Business Worldwide
On September 24, 2023, a coalition known as the Professional Sound Alliance was formed by sound designers, recordists, mixers, and sound effects library companies to combat the unauthorized use of professional sound in media production, particularly in film, television, games, and AI training. Douglas Price, a founding member and the CEO of Pro Sound Effects, emphasized the need for sound to have its own protections, similar to what music and voice have. The Alliance aims to advocate for fair licensing of sound design and sound effects, which it argues are often misused in two main ways: Data Piracy and Sync Piracy.
Data Piracy refers to the unauthorized scraping of sound libraries for commercial AI models without consent or compensation. Sync Piracy involves using sounds and libraries in various media without proper licensing. The Alliance argues that both practices undermine the extensive work that goes into creating professional sound libraries, a process that includes field recording, editing, expert human curation, and metadata creation.
Pro Sound Effects, one of the founding members, offers a rights-cleared AI training dataset of 1.27 million sounds that are meticulously annotated by a professional team, ensuring that the dataset is not crowdsourced or synthetic. This dataset has been utilized by industry leaders such as Google, Sony AI, and Dolby. The company also highlights the importance of licensing, stating that unlicensed use can occur if licensed files are left on a company server after a job ends or if passwords to access libraries are shared outside of agreed terms.
The Alliance defines professional sound as all audio elements in a film, game, or TV show that are not music or voice, encompassing everything from explosions to ambient sounds. Founding members include notable figures in the sound industry, such as Jeremy Siegel, Pierre Langer, Craig Nimens, Karol Urban, and Mark Mangini, who collectively advocate for the recognition and protection of professional sound as an essential component of media production.
Price expressed a strong sentiment that professional sound deserves the same respect and safeguarding as other audio fields, highlighting the collective efforts of industry professionals in shaping this craft. Mangini echoed this sentiment, asserting that sound effects are the result of human artistry and should be treated as such.
The Alliance’s concerns regarding data piracy resonate with ongoing legal battles faced by major record companies against generative AI firms. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has coordinated lawsuits against companies like Suno and Udio for alleged copyright infringements. These legal challenges highlight the complexities of copyright and licensing in the era of generative AI, where sound libraries may be used without proper authorization.
Recent developments indicate that sound effects generation is becoming a commercial product for AI developers, such as Stability AI, which offers models capable of generating sound effects using licensed audio. However, the distinction between properly licensed sound libraries and unauthorized scraping remains a contentious issue, as seen in various lawsuits involving prominent music labels and AI companies.
The Professional Sound Alliance seeks to elevate the status of sound as a critical element of audio, positioning it alongside music and voice in terms of protection and recognition. Their approach includes a petition and a downloadable seal for supporters to show their commitment to fair compensation for professional sound. The Alliance has no plans for litigation or collective bargaining; instead, it aims to raise awareness about the importance of professional sound in the media industry.
Historically, organizations like the Cinema Audio Society (CAS) and the Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE) have focused on education and mentorship rather than rights protection. The Professional Sound Alliance’s formation indicates a shift towards advocating for the rights and recognition of sound professionals, mirroring the protective measures that exist for other audio disciplines.
In summary, the Professional Sound Alliance aims to combat unauthorized use of professional sound and promote fair licensing practices within the media production industry. By advocating for sound’s rightful place alongside music and voice, the Alliance represents a significant step towards ensuring that sound professionals receive the respect and recognition they deserve for their creative contributions.
