I guess many of you already heard about Suno, a powerful generative artificial intelligence platform that creates complete songs from simple text prompts.

What is SUNO

Suno is accessible through a website or mobile app that works in a similar way to other LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Midjourney etc: you simply type a description of the song you want, including the genre, mood, theme, and topic, and the AI composes a full track, complete with instrumentation, musical arrangements, and synthesized vocals with lyrics.

The platform always created controversy about how it was trained, and many artists and labels hate it because they claim it "stole" existing music without a specific author's consent: they allege that Suno built its AI model by illegally copying and exploiting millions of copyrighted sound recordings from the internet, often via "stream-ripping" from platforms like YouTube, without permission or payment. They call this mass unauthorized use "theft" and a threat to artists' rights and commercial survival.
Suno acknowledges that its training data included copyrighted music found on the net, but they argue this use falls under "fair use", a legal concept that permits limited use of copyrighted material without permission. Suno claims its AI is like a human musician learning from listening to a genre, and its output is completely new and "transformative," not just a copied sample.

As a musician myself, I'm very skeptical about this fair use claim, and even though I tried Suno to brainstorm some ideas or to arrange and expand drafts I created myself, I agree that creating a full track with one click (and maybe using it on monetized Youtube channels or on streaming platforms as Spotify) is a bit unethical towards who spent years in learning how to play instruments and probably contributed in creating the training data for the platform.

The deal

In the last week, a disruptive news has created panic among users: Suno and Warner Music Group (WMG) have partnered, leading WMG to drop its copyright lawsuit against the AI music platform. Basically, WMG stopped suing Suno and decided to partner up instead.

Instead of fighting, WMG is now letting Suno use its massive library of music, and artists like Ed Sheeran and Dua Lipa can choose to let the AI use their voice and name in new songs. If they opt-in, it creates a brand-new way for them to make money from the AI stuff. Suno would now use all this legit WMG music to train its AI, meaning better songs are coming! Plus, if you want to actually download the tracks the AI makes, you'll have to start paying for a subscription, while before this any user, even with the free-tier, was able to download all their creation with no limits.

Users are obviously upset about this deal, especially because Suno announced that they will remove all the existing models, letting only a new "legal" model to be used, probably using much less training data, resulting in a lower quality and variations in the future generations.

In the next weeks and months we'll see if this change will send users to other platforms, maybe open-source ones that will try to take the place of Suno (and other ones like Udio, which made a similar decision just a few weeks ago). In any case, this whole thing shows that the big record companies are done trying to shut down AI and are now trying to figure out how to work with it and get paid.