The controversial AI music generator Suno just rolled out its latest model on Wednesday. Differing from its previous models, this one was developed in cooperation with music industry giants Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe.
AI music is somehow both very popular and unpopular. AI-generated songs are flooding streamers like Spotify, with some even climbing up the music charts, while many critics are simultaneously denigrating the end products as slop, or worse, theft. A hacker breach revealed recently by a 404 Media report found that Suno’s models train on thousands of hours of music scraped from the internet. The company also recently admitted to using audio data from YouTube. That reputation has led Suno to a heap of lawsuits from labels and musicians themselves. One of the more major of these legal challenges was a joint lawsuit filed by industry giants Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, accusing Suno and fellow AI music generator Udio of using their copyrighted songs without permission to train its models.
But late last year, Warner Music Group announced that it had settled its part of the lawsuit with both Suno and Udio. Sony and Universal’s suit against Suno continues, even though Universal reached a settlement with fellow AI music generator Udio.
Under the Warner-Suno settlement, the two companies also reached an agreement to allow Warner artists and songwriters to lend their music and likenesses to Suno’s platform, if they wish to do so. The first fruits of that partnership, it seems, arrived on Wednesday with Suno’s new model, v6.
With the new model trained on Warner, BMG and Believe content, users will be able to ask the model to edit parts of an existing song, build mashups of multiple songs, or create songs based on videos, photos, journal entries or even vague “vibes,” Suno said in a press release.
Suno’s chief product officer Jack Brody told Bloomberg that, with the new model, Suno will pay labels and publishers for the copyright of the music it trains on, and then the specific labels will find a way to determine how the resulting royalties should be divided among the artists and songwriters. The financials of that deal are not yet determined.
The deal is undoubtedly a huge seal of approval for Suno from the leaders of the music industry, and the new v6 model could represent one of the first major steps in the legitimization of AI music, as it begins to solve the towering copyright issue.
The arrangement provides a framework for Suno to do its part to compensate artists while continuing to train its models on their work. All three labels also hold vast catalogues littered with music industry titans. Warner Music Group artists include the likes of Madonna, Charli XCX and Bruno Mars; BMG is home to artists like Kylie Minogue, Lily Allen and Blondie; meanwhile Believe boasts global stars like Loreen, Inna and Nancy Ajram.
Suno isn’t the only one making strides toward solving the copyright problem. Spotify said that it is partnering with Universal Music Group and digital rights licensing partner Merlin to build a tool that would allow users to create AI-generated remixes and covers of songs from participating artists. On the company’s earnings call last month, Spotify co-CEO Alex Norström described the soon-to-launch paid add-on tool as “the first legal way to partake in this AI tailwind that we see coming for interactive music.”
But even if the copyright issue is resolved, AI music still has a long way to go before it can reach greater acceptance. While some artists, like Dr. Dre, are down with AI’s introduction to music production, others are worried that the tools are being used to displace the jobs of musicians and cut humans out of the creative process, only to create an end product that resembles soulless slop more than it does a piece of art.