Suno rebuilds its music AI models on licensed data as label suits continue

Suno released a new set of music-generating models on Wednesday, software that writes songs from prompts, and says this version was trained on licensed recordings rather than scraped audio. The company calls the family Suno v6 and says it was developed using licensed data from music labels and distributors including Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe. Suno also says v6 was not trained on the data it used for its earlier models.

The change follows a run of copyright lawsuits. Record labels have accused the startup of training its models on copyrighted recordings without permission. Suno settled with Warner Music Group last year and struck a deal with BMG last month. Rebuilding the model on licensed material is the company’s answer to those claims, though Suno has not published the terms of the label agreements or a way for outside parties to check what went into the training set.

There are three models in the lineup. The base Suno v6 is available to paying users and is described as reliable and steerable for controlled outputs. Suno v6-wild, also for paying users, is an experimental version meant for ideation and unexpected results. Suno v6-mini is faster and open to all users. The company plans to retire its older models. Suno says v6 can edit part of a song from a prompt or a single word in the lyrics, take text, images, or video as references, and pull an instrument out of a sample to build a new beat.

Suno also plans to let users remix songs, but only tracks by artists who opt into a new program it is setting up with labels that lets Suno use their songs for AI-generated features. Jack Brody, Suno’s chief product officer, tied the program to money for rights holders. “I think the music ecosystem and our partners are always looking for ways to create more revenue opportunities for their rights holders and artists,” he told TechCrunch. “So a big part of this release is creating additional revenue streams there.”

Several disputes are unresolved. Suno is still facing lawsuits from Sony and Universal Music Group, from artists including Jason Isbell, and from users who say the company ignored security while chasing profits. The announcement came a day after Suno acknowledged training its models on YouTube videos. Last month the company said it would add a watermark to songs made on its platform and set new download limits tied to account tier.

What to watch is whether Sony and Universal move toward settlements or licensing deals as Warner and BMG did, how many artists sign up for the opt-in remix program once it launches, and whether Suno releases detail on the licensed dataset or the promised watermark. The YouTube admission also sits next to the licensed-data claim, and any court filings on that point will be worth reading.