Suno v6 Arrives: Retrained on Warner and BMG Catalogs, Old Models Retired, Universal and Sony Still Suing
After two years of getting sued by record labels, Suno ripped out the whole engine and installed one with a license.
Three key facts
On September 9, Suno launched its third-generation v6 lineup in three flavors: v6, v6-wild and v6-mini. v6 is the controlled, polished one and v6-wild the experimental one, both reserved for Pro and Premier subscribers; the lighter v6-mini is open to free users. The models generate songs up to eight minutes long, edit sections of a track with natural-language instructions, mash up multiple sources, and isolate and sample audio, with prompts in text, audio, images or video.
The training data is now licensed: Warner Music Group, BMG, Believe and its TuneCore arm are partners. Suno says v6 was trained from the ground up on licensed partner data, user data and accumulated learnings, and every previous model will be retired as v6 rolls out, though existing songs stay accessible. The company has more than 2 million paying subscribers and says a portion of revenue is already flowing to its licensing partners, without disclosing the split.
The old copyright bill isn't settled. Universal Music Group and Sony Music recordings are not in the training data, and both companies' lawsuits over Suno's earlier training practices continue. Suno has previously acknowledged pulling YouTube audio with the YT-DLP tool. Paid users own what they generate; free users are limited to noncommercial use.
WangDou's Take
This is the restaurant that got caught, gutted the kitchen, hung three suppliers' certificates by the door and announced that every dish is now made with legitimately sourced ingredients. The catch: only one of the three major labels showed up. The other two are still lined up outside the courthouse.
The most telling line is "we will retire our previous models." Call it a product upgrade if you like. Put plainly, the very models the lawsuits keep asking about are closing for business. As for those 2 million paying subscribers, they signed up for results from the old models and the old data. Will the licensed recipe taste the same? Their ears get to decide that, not the press release.
And note the words "split not disclosed." In the music business, when the percentage isn't printed, it usually means it hasn't reached a number that makes artists happy. The labels get a revenue share, Suno gets legitimacy, and the songwriters get, per the announcement, a plan for what comes next.
Source: The Next Web · Digital Music News · ecoustics