Leading AI-music-generator Suno, which was sued by the major labels for copyright infringement in 2024, just released a new set of models trained on licensed recordings from Warner Music Group, the first major to settle with the company.
The new v6 models are “trained from the ground up on licensed data provided to us by our partners, user data, and then the accumulation of all the learnings that have gone into it,” Jack Brody, Suno’s chief product officer, tells Rolling Stone. “It’s the first model developed in partnership directly with the industry.”
In a blog post timed to the launch, Mikey Shulman, Suno’s CEO, called it “the beginning of a new chapter for music” and “a blueprint for how AI and the music industry can strengthen one another and build entirely new product experiences for artists, fans, and the broader music community.”
The company didn’t reveal how many songs WMG provided or whether artists opted in to the process, and a WMG spokesperson didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. “The data that was provided by WMG was their own process,” says Brody. “We weren’t involved in deciding what music they handed over to us.” WMG’s vast slate of artists ranges from Don Toliver to Sombr to Miley Cyrus.
The next phase of the WMG partnership will give Suno users the ability to work directly with existing songs, remixing and reimagining them. (Spotify has announced a similar project in the works.) That product, Brody added, will only include artists who opt in. “The wrong way to think about this partnership is to think about it as a desire to license the data for our models,” he says. “This partnership is really about building these new products out in the future.”
The new models — which Suno touts as faster and more capable and creative, with an unpredictable “wild” mode — stem from a deal struck last November, when WMG dropped its infringement suit against Suno in exchange for a licensing partnership with undisclosed financial terms. Universal Music Group and Sony Music are still pursuing their case against Suno, and attempted to force Suno to turn over the details of its WMG contract. Brody says there was “nothing to share at this point” about potential settlement talks with those labels, though he calls today’s announcement “the beginning of a long journey and a long partnership, and hopefully many partnerships to come.”
In court, the company has acknowledged that previous models were trained on essentially any music of usable quality it could find on the open web, defending that method as fair use. Those models are now being switched off, although users will still have access to the songs they made with them, and can use the new model to rework them.
Suno will be adding more authorized music to its training data soon. BMG, which had not sued Suno, signed a licensing deal in August covering both its recordings and its publishing catalog. Believe, which owns the distribution platform TuneCore, partnered with Suno on Tuesday, months after it had begun blocking Suno creations from reaching streaming services. The agreement opens the door for “participating” TuneCore indie artists and labels to be part of the partnership, according to a press release.
In early September, in a gesture of compromise towards the industry, Suno added audio watermarking so its songs can be identified off-platform, and set monthly download caps meant to discourage flooding streaming services with AI tracks. The company raised $400 million in June at a $5.4 billion valuation, more than double what it was worth after its previous round last November, when the company said nearly 100 million people had made music on the platform.
Brody argued that v6 was proof of Suno’s argument that they can expand the existing music business rather than harm it. “People who never made music before start paying for Suno, it’s not like they stop paying for Spotify,” he says. “They’re just paying for two music services now instead of one. And so the pie has been growing, and [today] marks the moment where we start making good on the thing we’ve always been striving toward, which is growing the pie in such a way that everyone benefits.”
