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Suno

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Suno
DevelopersSuno, Inc.
ReleaseDecember 20, 2023
(2 years ago) (2023-12-20)
Stable release
Suno v6 /
September 9, 2026; 4 days ago (2026-09-09)
Suno Studio 2.0 /
August 13, 2026; 31 days ago (2026-08-13)
TypeGenerative artificial intelligence
Music generation
Websitesuno.com
"Two Planets"
Example of a two-minute song generated by Suno AI; its lyrics were generated by ChatGPT. The Style of Music prompt was "Calm, psychedelic rock".
Problems playing this file? See media help.

Suno is a generative artificial intelligence music creation platform. It is designed to generate music that can include vocals and instrumentation. The platform was initially developed by Suno, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Suno has been widely available since December 20, 2023, after the launch of a web application and a partnership with Microsoft, which included Suno as a plugin in Microsoft Copilot.[1]

The program operates by producing songs based on prompts provided by its users, which can include text, audio, images, and video.[2][3] In September 2026, Suno replaced its earlier models with the v6 family, which it said was developed with industry partners including Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe.[4]

The company has been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright infringement.[5] As of September 2026, it had settled with Warner Music Group and BMG and signed licensing deals with both, as well as with Believe, while Universal Music Group and Sony Music remained plaintiffs.[4] A 2026 hack of the company revealed that it had scraped content from YouTube Music, Genius, Deezer and several other music and audio services, as well as podcasts, for use as training data.[6]

History

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Suno, Inc., was founded by four people: Mikey Shulman, Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho, and Keenan Freyberg. They all worked for Kensho, an AI startup, before starting their own company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[7]

In April 2023, Suno released their open-source text-to-speech and audio model called "Bark" on GitHub.[8] On March 21, 2024, Suno released its V3 version for all users.[9] The new version allowed users to create a limited number of four-minute songs using a free account.[10] Users can pay for more features.[10] In April 2024, a sentimental ballad was generated with Suno based on the text of the MIT License.[11]

In June 2024, a lawsuit, led by the Recording Industry Association of America, was filed against Suno and Udio alleging widespread infringement of copyrighted sound recordings. The lawsuit sought to bar the companies from training on copyrighted music, as well as damages of up to $150,000 per work from infringements that have already taken place.[12][13] On July 1, 2024, a mobile app for Suno was released.[14]

In October 2024, one day after thousands of musicians including Thom Yorke and ABBA's Björn Ulvaeus signed a letter calling for Suno to stop training its model on copyrighted music, Timbaland endorsed Suno in a video on the company's YouTube channel.[15][16][17] On November 19, 2024, Suno upgraded its AI song model program to v4.[18][19]

In January 2025, Mikey Shulman remarked on the 20VC podcast, "I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music",[20][15] a comment of which he later said, "I really wish I had chosen different words."[21] In May 2025, Suno released v4.5.[22]

In July 2025, Suno user imoliver signed a record deal with Hallwood Media, which became the first instance of a traditional music label signing an AI-based creator.[23] The AI-artist Xania Monet later signed with Hallwood for US$3 million.[24] Monet's songs were generated by Suno AI by poet Telisha Jones.[25]

In September 2025, Suno released its v5 model and launched Suno Studio, a browser-based generative audio workstation offered in beta to Premier subscribers, which lets users generate and arrange stems on a multitrack timeline and export them as audio or MIDI.[26][27] In October 2025, Suno released v4.5-all as a free model for all users.[28]

In November 2025, Suno settled Warner Music Group's copyright claims against it and signed a licensing deal with the company. Under the agreement, WMG artists and songwriters can opt in to have their names, images, likenesses, voices, and compositions used in AI-generated music on Suno, and are compensated for taking part. Suno said it would launch new, licensed models during 2026.[4] As part of the settlement, Suno also acquired the concert discovery platform Songkick from WMG.[29][30][31]

On March 26, 2026, Suno released v5.5, which introduced three features. Voices let Pro and Premier subscribers record or upload their own singing to use on generated tracks, and custom models let them train a personalized version of v5.5 on at least six tracks from their own catalog, up to three models each. My Taste, a personalization feature, was available to all users.[32][33]

In August 2026, Suno signed a global licensing deal with BMG Rights Management covering BMG's recorded music and publishing catalogs, which BMG described as a "global alliance" and which also settled Suno's past use of the company's recordings and songs.[34][35]

On August 13, 2026, Suno released Studio 2.0, which added MIDI editing, a chat-based assistant, audio effects, automation and updated stem separation to Suno Studio.[36] On September 3, 2026, ahead of the v6 launch, Suno introduced monthly download limits of 20 songs for Pro subscribers and 60 for Premier subscribers, with no limit for Premier subscribers exporting from Suno Studio, a policy Suno said was designed to limit the mass distribution of songs on streaming platforms.[37][36][38] Free users who joined before that date received up to seven lifetime trial downloads.[37]

On September 8, 2026, Suno announced a global partnership with Believe and its self-distribution platform TuneCore, under which music from participating artists and labels would be included in Suno's new models, and tracks made with those models would become eligible for distribution through both services. Believe had begun blocking the distribution of tracks made on unlicensed AI platforms, including Suno, in April 2026.[35]

v6

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On September 9, 2026, Suno launched v6, a family of three models: the flagship v6 and the more experimental v6-wild, both limited to paying Pro and Premier subscribers, and v6-mini, a faster model available to all users.[2][4] Suno retired all of its previous models on the same day.[4][3]

The free v6-mini model replaced v4.5-all, which had been Suno's free model since October 2025.[28][3] Suno describes v6-mini as "a faster, more efficient version" of its premium v6 models, and v6-wild, which is intended for experimentation, as "less predictable and more varied".[2][3]

New capabilities introduced with v6 include editing a single section or lyric of an existing song through plain-language instructions while leaving the rest intact, combining elements of several songs into a mashup in a single request, and sampling and isolating parts of a track to build a new beat. The v6 models also generate music from a mix of text, audio, image, and video inputs.[2]

Suno said v6 was developed with its industry partners Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe. According to chief product officer Jack Brody, a portion of Suno's revenue would be shared with these partners from launch, with the rightsholders responsible for distributing the payments.[4]

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In 2024, Suno, Inc., was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright infringement, and thousands of musicians have signed a letter demanding that the company cease using copyrighted music in their training data.[15][16][12] While Suno refused to disclose the dataset used to train its artificial intelligence, a 2026 hack of the company revealed that content had been scraped from a range of music and audio services.[6] 404 Media reported that the two largest datasets were of YouTube Music audio—labeled "youtube_music" and "ytm_tagged"—at roughly 114,000 and 152,000 hours, with smaller sets drawn from Pond5, the International Music Score Library Project, Genius, Deezer, Jamendo, Freesound and MuseScore, as well as podcasts collected through RSS feeds.[6] YouTube scraping was done through proxies from the company Bright Data.[39]

In August 2026, UMG, Capitol Records and Sony Music amended their complaint to add a claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions, alleging that Suno had circumvented YouTube's anti-downloading technology. In its answer the following month, Suno admitted that it had obtained audio from YouTube for training using yt-dlp, but argued that one or more of the labels lacked standing to bring the new claim. Suno pleaded fair use and, as a second defense, copyright misuse and unclean hands, repeating its allegation from its August 2024 answer that the labels had "engaged in anticompetitive activities that extend an unlawful monopoly over the production and commercialization of music".[40][4]

For v6, according to Brody, the models were trained from scratch on data different from that used for Suno's earlier models, including data licensed from its partners and user data. Suno said the user data was preference data, such as signals about which of two generated versions of a song a user preferred, rather than audio uploaded by users.[4] Brody said the training data did not include data from UMG or Sony Music, which remained plaintiffs in the RIAA-coordinated lawsuit alleging copyright infringement in the training of Suno's earlier models.[4]

As of September 2026, Suno was facing further legal action beyond the RIAA-coordinated suit. On July 31, 2026, a Munich regional court ruled against the company in a case brought by the German collecting society GEMA. The Danish society Koda sued Suno in Copenhagen in November 2025, and SOCAN filed a claim in Canada's Federal Court on September 2, 2026. Round Hill Music sued Suno and Bright Data on August 17, 2026, seeking damages it said could approach or exceed $1 billion, and on September 1, 2026, the musician Jason Isbell and three other artists filed a proposed class action alleging that Suno had commercially exploited their names and likenesses without consent.[4]

See also

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References

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  1. ↑ "Microsoft's Copilot and Suno AI team up to create a music generator extension". The Verge. Vox Media. December 19, 2023. Retrieved January 4, 2024.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Introducing v6". Suno. September 9, 2026. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "v6 FAQ". Suno Help. September 9, 2026. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Stassen, Murray (September 9, 2026). "Suno launches v6 AI music models in partnership with WMG, BMG, and Believe". Music Business Worldwide. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  5. ↑ Stassen, Murray (2026-07-13). "Suno, sued by major labels, says 'transparency is important' as record industry proposes AI labeling system". Music Business Worldwide. Retrieved 2026-09-03.
  6. 1 2 3 Koebler, Jason (July 15, 2026). "Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius". 404 Media. Retrieved July 15, 2026.
  7. ↑ King, Hope (2023-12-20). "Generative AI startup Suno wants to make songwriting as easy as taking iPhone photos". Axios. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  8. ↑ Bastian, Matthias (2023-04-24). "With "Bark" you can make AI voices laugh, cry and even sing". The decoder. Retrieved 2025-10-05.
  9. ↑ Hiatt, Brian (2024-03-22). "Our AI-Generated Blues Song Went Viral -- and Sparked Controversy". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  10. 1 2 Wilson, Mark (2024-03-23). "What is Suno? The viral AI song generator explained – and how to use it for free". TechRadar. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  11. ↑ Edwards, Benj (2024-04-08). "MIT License text becomes viral "sad girl" piano ballad generated by AI". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2024-09-23.
  12. 1 2 Sato, Mia (2024-06-24). "Major record labels sue AI company behind "BBL Drizzy"". The Verge. Retrieved 2024-06-24.
  13. ↑ Robinson, Kristin (2024-06-24). "Major Labels Sue AI Firms Suno and Udio for Alleged Copyright Infringement". Billboard. Retrieved 2024-06-24.
  14. ↑ Coombes, Lloyd (July 2, 2024). "Suno launches iPhone app — now you can make AI music on the go". Tom's Guide. Future US. Retrieved July 7, 2024.
  15. 1 2 3 Griffiths, Daniel (17 January 2025). ""It's not really enjoyable to make music now," says the CEO of an AI music-making platform, but don't worry - he's here to help". MusicRadar. Retrieved 22 May 2025.
  16. 1 2 Mullen, Matt (23 October 2024). ""This is not something to be afraid of - this is something that we need to use": Timbaland says he spends 10 hours a day using controversial AI music generator Suno". MusicRadar. Retrieved 22 May 2025.
  17. ↑ "Timbaland Shows Support For Music AI Creation Tool Suno Despite It Being Sued By Major Labels For Copyright Infringement". Afrotech. 2025-03-28. Retrieved 2025-05-10 – via Yahoo Tech.
  18. ↑ Hiatt, Brian (November 19, 2024). "AI Music Is More Realistic Than Ever: Meet Suno's New Model". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 2024-11-20.
  19. ↑ Tencer, Daniel (November 19, 2024). "Suno, after being sued by the majors for copyright infringement, preps launch of v4, claimed to mark 'a new era of AI music generation'". Music Business Worldwide. Retrieved 2024-11-20.
  20. ↑ Maiberg, Emanuel (January 13, 2025). "CEO of AI Music Company Says People Don't Like Making Music". 404 Media. Retrieved January 13, 2025.
  21. ↑ Robinson, Kristin (March 11, 2026). "Is Suno the Music Industry's Biggest Nightmare — or Greatest Hope?". Billboard. Retrieved 2026-09-11.
  22. ↑ "Introducing v4.5". Suno. May 1, 2025. Retrieved 2026-09-11.
  23. ↑ Robinson, Kristin (24 July 2025). "Hallwood Signs 'AI Music Designer' imoliver to Record Deal, a First for the Music Business". Billboard.
  24. ↑ Karp, Hannah (September 16, 2025). "AI Artist Xania Monet Climbs the Charts — And Signs a Multimillion-Dollar Record Deal". Billboard. Retrieved 2025-11-03.
  25. ↑ Zellner, Xander (October 28, 2025). "How Many AI Artists Have Debuted on Billboard's Charts?". Billboard. Retrieved 2025-11-03.
  26. ↑ Dalugdug, Mandy (September 25, 2025). "Suno just launched its own DAW, after introducing its 'most powerful' AI music model yet". Music Business Worldwide. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  27. ↑ "Introducing Suno Studio". Suno. September 25, 2025. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  28. 1 2 "v4.5-all: A new free model for everyone". Suno. October 21, 2025. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  29. ↑ Stassen, Murray (2025-11-26). "As WMG sells Songkick to Suno, has the AI music generator just become a very different kind of superfan app?". Music Business Worldwide. Retrieved 2026-05-17.
  30. ↑ Hanley, James (2025-11-27). "AI music company Suno acquires Songkick from WMG". IQ Magazine. Retrieved 2026-05-17.
  31. ↑ Roth, Emma (25 November 2025). "Warner Music Group partners with Suno to offer AI likenesses of its artists". Theverge. Retrieved 25 November 2025.
  32. ↑ Dalugdug, Mandy (March 30, 2026). "Suno launches v5.5 AI model with voice cloning tool: 'The best music starts with a human.'". Music Business Worldwide. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  33. ↑ "Introducing v5.5: Voices, Custom Models, and My Taste". Suno. March 26, 2026. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  34. ↑ Ingham, Tim (August 12, 2026). "Suno inks global licensing deal with BMG, ahead of launching new music model". Music Business Worldwide. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
  35. 1 2 Stassen, Murray (September 8, 2026). "Suno inks global licensing deal with Believe". Music Business Worldwide. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  36. 1 2 Ingham, Tim (August 13, 2026). "Suno launches Studio 2.0 with MIDI support, an AI chat bar… and no download limit". Music Business Worldwide. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  37. 1 2 "An update to our downloads policy and Terms of Service". Suno. August 10, 2026. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  38. ↑ Shulman, Mikey (August 6, 2026). "How We're Building the Future of Music Responsibly". Suno. Retrieved 2026-09-11.
  39. ↑ Weatherbed, Jess (July 15, 2026). "Suno snatched millions of songs from YouTube, Genius, and Deezer". The Verge. Retrieved July 16, 2026.
  40. ↑ Stassen, Murray (September 8, 2026). "Suno admits it obtained YouTube audio to train its AI – but challenges UMG and Sony's standing to bring 'stream ripping' claim". Music Business Worldwide. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
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