# Suno Turns Warner and BMG Into Paid Partners With Its New V6 Models > Source: > Published: 2026-09-09 09:32:20+00:00 *Suno launched three new AI music models built on catalogs from Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe Music, all licensed rather than scraped, while Universal Music Group and Sony Music keep fighting the company in court.* Suno released three new AI music models this week, and for the first time it built them on catalogs it's actually allowed to use. Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe Music all licensed their songs to Suno ahead of the launch of V6, V6-wild, and V6-mini on Tuesday, September 9, taking a cut of the platform's revenue instead of pursuing a courtroom judgment against it. That's the real story behind the Suno V6 Warner BMG licensing deal: two of the three major labels that sued Suno for training on their music without permission have now flipped to getting paid every time someone uses it. It's a fast turn for a company that was, less than a year ago, a defendant in a mass copyright case brought by Warner, Universal, and Sony. Warner broke ranks first, striking a licensing settlement with Suno last November that ended its lawsuit and, as part of the deal, saw Suno acquire Songkick, Warner's concert-discovery platform. BMG followed with its own global licensing agreement in August, according to Music Business Worldwide. Believe Music, the French independent distributor, signed on this week as the third partner, Variety reported. According to Music Ally, the new models were trained specifically on the licensed catalogs from those three companies. V6 is built for consistency, what Suno calls polished, reliable output across genres. V6-wild is looser and less predictable, aimed at users who want something rougher than a chart-ready track. V6-mini is the free tier, the only one of the three available without a Pro or Premier subscription. All three are faster than the models they replace, with Engadget reporting that generated tracks now play back within seconds of a prompt. The update also adds natural-language editing, so a user can ask the model to change a section of a song using plain instructions, plus a mashup feature that pulls vocals from one generated track and drums from another. Warner and BMG have both said songwriters and artists will get a share of the revenue Suno generates from tracks built on their catalogs. Neither company has said how much, or how the money actually gets split - label, publisher, and then whatever's left for the artist whose voice or style shaped the training data. That's not a small gap. It's the whole mechanism. [GEMA Wins Landmark German Court Ruling Against AI Music Startup Suno](https://startupfortune.com/gema-wins-landmark-german-court-ruling-against-ai-music-startup-suno/) A Munich court ruled on July 31, 2026 that Suno broke copyright law by training on GEMA-repertoire songs like "Rasputin" and "Mambo No. 5" and reproducing them in its outputs. It's the second win in nine months for GEMA, which beat OpenAI in a similar case back in November 2025. - [AI music generator copyright lawsuit Germany](https://startupfortune.com/gema-wins-landmark-german-court-ruling-against-ai-music-startup-suno/) - [Suno training data music copyright infringement](https://startupfortune.com/gema-wins-landmark-german-court-ruling-against-ai-music-startup-suno/) Universal Music Group and Sony Music never joined the truce. Their case against Suno, filed in Massachusetts, is still active, and it's gotten uglier, not calmer. In May, the labels moved to add more than 61,000 recordings to the suit after discovery reportedly showed Suno had trained on millions of their copyrighted tracks, according to Music Business Worldwide. Suno pushed back, asking the court to block the expansion and arguing it deserves a timely ruling on whether training on copyrighted music counts as fair use in the first place. Settlement talks between UMG and Suno reportedly broke down in April, per Digital Music News. Under the current scheduling order, fact discovery runs through September 30 this year, with dispositive motions due in April 2027. A ruling on the fair-use question itself is a 2027 event at the earliest. There's a wrinkle even inside the settled camp. The American Federation of Musicians sued both Universal and Warner this year over the terms of their AI settlements, according to the Hollywood Reporter, arguing that session musicians and performers were cut out of deals negotiated between labels and AI companies over music those musicians actually played on. Getting the majors to the table doesn't automatically mean the people who made the records get paid. Here's the pattern worth watching: Suno's copyright liability didn't disappear. It got converted into a licensing fee. That's the model other AI companies are studying closely - image generation, video, code, the lot of them - because it suggests these fights end in a term sheet, not a verdict. Two years of litigation against Suno produced zero rulings on whether training AI on copyrighted music is fair use. It produced a revenue-share agreement instead. Whether UMG and Sony eventually take the same deal, or hold out for a court to settle the fair-use question on their terms, will decide a lot about how the rest of this plays out. For now, they're the only two majors still betting a judge will get them a better outcome than a licensing check. **Also read:** [Jensen Huang Says AGI Has Arrived, and Nvidia Stock Fell Anyway](https://startupfortune.com/jensen-huang-says-agi-has-arrived-and-nvidia-stock-fell-anyway/) • [Brent Crude Breaks Above $100 as US-Iran Tanker Strikes and Houthi Attacks Escalate](https://startupfortune.com/brent-crude-breaks-above-100-as-us-iran-tanker-strikes-and-houthi-attacks-escalate/) • [Brokers Charge Steep Fees for Access to DeepSeek's Funding Round](https://startupfortune.com/brokers-charge-steep-fees-for-access-to-deepseeks-funding-round/) *This article is posted in [AI News](https://startupfortune.com/category/ai/), check it out for more related stories.* [TIDAL becomes the first major streaming platform to strip royalties from fully AI-generated music](https://startupfortune.com/tidal-becomes-the-first-major-streaming-platform-to-strip-royalties-from-fully-ai-generated-music/) TIDAL announced on June 29 that fully AI-generated music will be stripped of all royalties starting July 15, 2026, making it the first major streaming platform to demonetize AI tracks rather than simply label them. The move puts pressure on Suno, Udio, and rival platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, and positions streaming services as the... - [tidal ai generated music royalties](https://startupfortune.com/tidal-becomes-the-first-major-streaming-platform-to-strip-royalties-from-fully-ai-generated-music/) - [streaming platform policy ai tracks](https://startupfortune.com/tidal-becomes-the-first-major-streaming-platform-to-strip-royalties-from-fully-ai-generated-music/) ## Join the discussion [Open in the community →](/community/) Almost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away.