Suno launched V6, its latest batch of AI music models on Wednesday (Sept. 9) — its first “in partnership with the music industry,” as the company says. Suno, which was recently valued at $5.4 billion, also announced that in the future it will be launching products to provide AI-enabled remixing, sampling and other derivative features for music from participating partners. The news comes just hours after Suno inked its latest music partnership with French giant Believe.
Alongside Warner Music Group and BMG, Suno’s two other music industry allies, Believe’s participating music will train the V6 models, along with what’s called “user inputs.” On a special bonus episode of Billboard On the Record, Mikey Shulman, CEO and co-founder of Suno, explains the training process and how user input plays into it.
“When users make a song, they will implicitly tell us whether it is good or bad — or more accurately, [Suno] will give users two songs and they will implicitly tell us one of those is better than the other,” Shulman says. “We are able to take that signal and learn from it what makes a song particularly catchy, particularly good and use that information about these differences between songs to steer our models toward making music better.”
Jack Dolby, chief product officer at Suno, clarifies that while Suno’s music industry partners will receive a revenue share for their contributions to Suno, it’s not in exchange for training. “We consider this [the] partnership launching, and that’s why the payment starts,” Dolby says. “But it’s not because of the training data or the way that we built the model itself. It’s actually everything else the part the partnership enables in the future… I think the wrong way to think about these deals is that these deals are about making our models better. It’s not really about the data.”
According to Suno, there are three products within this new roll out — V6, V6 Wild and V6 Mini — all of which are said to be the fastest and highest audio quality of any of their models to date. Suno will also retire its previous models, and as of Sept. 3, the company has significantly limited downloads of its music — all of which were first promised in Suno’s partnership with WMG in late 2025.
A blog post about V6 details some of the new features available, including editing part of an existing song using plain language, building a mashup from multiple sources in one request, generating music from text, audio, images and video and more.
Despite Suno’s growing number of deals with music companies like BMG, WMG and Believe, Suno is being sued by a number of players in the music industry. This includes Universal Music Group (UMG) and Sony Music’s lawsuit against the company, filed in 2024, accusing the AI company of copyright infringement; a recent class action lawsuit led by country star Jason Isbell which claimed that Suno designed its AI music generator to evoke artists’ identifying characteristics; a Mexican label, Gerencia 360 Music, which claimed that Suno’s AI models were trained on unlicensed regional Mexican hits; and a copyright infringement suit from Round Hill Music, accusing Suno of infringing on tens of thousands of songs.
To watch Shulman’s exclusive podcast interview with Billboard On the Record, check out the YouTube video below or click here for more viewing and listening options. An edited and condensed excerpt of the conversation can also be found below.
Tell me about v6 Wild — that seems to be a brand-new product line for Suno.
It is. It’s the first time we’re actually releasing something like this. Let me take a step back. I won’t just give you the answer of ‘it’s for everybody,’ even though it is… I think V6 Wild will make some of the most interesting stuff that you will ever hear, but when compared to V6 — if you’re just comparing the songs apples to apples — V6 Wild is going to take more liberties, and that is going to ultimately mean it doesn’t always give you the thing that you were looking for. So, if there’s a thing that you are looking for, V6 Wild may not be the right thing for you. However, if you are looking for peak creativity, the most interesting sounds, even if it’s not going to be the quote-unquote “perfect” thing, then V6 Wild is the model that you want to use.
Given you’re saying this is in partnership with the music industry, is there compensation flowing to Warner, BMG [and Believe], the [three] partners that you guys have announced?
It’s a little bit hard to get into the specifics here, but this is — and will be — a really important new line of business for all of our partners going forward. It will get easier as time goes on, especially as the products themselves get more and more defined, to actually say exactly how these new lines of business will develop.
Got it. I spoke with your chief product officer before this call just to kind of get a lay of the land of V6, and he was mentioning that this is a revenue share with your partners. Is that correct?
That’s right.
So, it’s a revenue share from the V6 models that rolled out today and then down the line, you have these [products] that you’re building toward, which will involve artist works that you can remix, make samples of — all that stuff. I imagine there’s also going to be another revenue stream that appears from that, right? How does that work?
It’s a little too early to say, but I would stress here that there’s going to be a lot of differentiation on the product side going forward. There’s not just going to be one product. There will be a whole bunch of different products, a whole suite of products. They will be different platform to platform. They may be different partner to partner. And so, maybe unfortunately, that means that some of these business models are going to get more complicated in the short term. But actually, the really exciting thing is that as that happens, the differentiation, the depth with which we can pull our users into music more, ultimately, the engagement and excitement and enjoyment that our users get from the platform gets much, much larger. And so, I don’t think anybody has all the answers today of exactly what these models, these business models, will look like. We have I would say good ideas and good guesses, and I’m mostly excited to develop the products with our partners. That has to be the thing that actually informs what the business models look like.
When you start working toward these models, where there are certain songs that you can remix and sample and that kind of thing, do artists get the opportunity to decide whether or not they want their songs to be on Suno, available for users to remix?
Ultimately, some stuff will be different rights holder to rights holder, partner to partner. But we are never going to have songs on platform for users to remix, interact with, otherwise adapt without rights holder consent.
Okay, but sometimes the rights holders means —
Sorry, meaning without the artist’s consent, the creative’s consent.
I was looking back at the press releases that were put out when you guys started these partnerships with BMG and with Warner. I noticed in it that it’s never referred to in either case as a licensing deal. I think that’s how the music industry sees these deals. Instead, with the Warner press release, it refers to it as a partnership. And then in the BMG one it’s a “global alliance that establishes a strategic framework. I’m wondering: are these licensing deals or not? And if so, is this licensing for using their works for training?
I don’t want to speak to how other people may perceive the deal. I’ll tell you how I think of these partnerships, which is what I said before. It’s really geared toward long-term development of things that could not have existed without these two parties coming together. And so, whether that is products that are user facing, whether that are products that are ultimately artist or creative facing and I think this is something I think you and I have discussed previously on this podcast.
In my opinion, there aren’t enough really long term partnerships like this in the music industry, where we’re trying to think about what could the music business look like in 10 years. What is something that we think might actually take five or 10 years to even develop, and why don’t we try to go and be audacious to do that? And there, you need a lot of long term alignment and truly to feel like a partner instead of to feel like a counterparty.
Okay, but is licensing a component of this partnership?
We will be licensing works in order to do the products that we’re building later on, whether that is remixing or sampling or otherwise modifying a piece of content.
I know the music industry is very concerned about how models are trained. That’s been a focus for a lot of companies recently, and has resulted in some litigation. How were the V6 models trained?
Good question. At a very high level, we have our partner data. We also have all of the interactions that are —
Partner data? What does that mean?
For the initial release, it is Warner, [BMG and Believe]. We have all of the interactions that our users give us from the platform. And so I think we’ve discussed this on this on this podcast before. But just to remind the listeners, there’s a lot of usage on platform. There’s a lot of songs made every day. You’ve even reported on some of that. When users make a song, they will implicitly tell us whether it is good or bad or more accurately, will give users two songs and they will implicitly tell us one of those is better than the other. And we are able to take that signal and learn from it what makes a song particularly catchy, particularly good and use that information about these differences between songs to steer our models toward making music better or worse — hopefully better.
Got it. So you have data from Warner, and then you have user inputs — whether they like songs or not, how they’re prompting, that sort of thing. Is there more music beyond that is unlicensed that is used in training V6 models?
All of the data that we have from our partners is licensed. All of the user interactions then go in on top of that, and so that is, in our opinion, what makes for a licensed model.
Okay, so data from partners is licensed. But there are some people who you are not partnered with and their data might be training these models too…
There is there’s no unlicensed partner data.
So, are there no Universal songs or Kobalt songs or something that are training the V6 models?
Correct. No Universal songs. No Kobalt songs. No Sony songs, etc.
