What do you think will happen?

 

Warner Music Signs AI Deal with Suno and Settles Legal Dispute

Warner Music Group has become the first major label to announce a deal with AI company Suno. The agreement covers the licensing of songs for a new Suno model and settles the previous legal dispute between the two parties.

Silas Schwarzkopp, November 26, 2025


Under what both parties describe as a "groundbreaking" agreement, Suno and Warner Music Group (WMG) will collaborate on the "next generation of licensed AI music." They also promise compensation and protection for artists, songwriters, and the creative community.

Artists and songwriters will now have control over whether their names, likenesses, voices, or works can be used in future AI-generated music. According to WMG CEO Robert Kyncl, creators will have an opt-in option. The partnership with Suno will also create a new revenue stream. Documents recently surfaced showing that Suno has spent only $2,000 on training materials to date.

The announcement of the deal also reveals details about Suno's future. The AI company plans to implement several changes to its platform and tools in 2026. Among other things, a new model will be launched, while the current one will be discontinued. Furthermore, downloads would be placed behind a paywall, and even paying users would only have a limited number of downloads available.

In a brief statement, Suno and Warner announced that they had settled their legal dispute, which had been ongoing since June 2024, without disclosing details of the agreement. Therefore, questions regarding the amount of the out-of-court settlement and the recipients or distribution of the sum remain unanswered. Meanwhile, the lawsuits filed by the two other major labels, Universal Music and Sony Music, are (still) ongoing.

In addition, Suno will have to defend itself in court starting in January against a lawsuit filed by GEMA (the German performing rights society).

"This groundbreaking deal with Suno is a victory for the creative industry, from which everyone benefits. Given Suno's rapid growth—both in terms of user numbers and monetization—we seized this opportunity to develop models that increase revenue and offer fans new experiences," affirmed Robert Kyncl, CEO of WMG.

```` AI will thus become an "ally of artists" if the WMG's principles are followed. "The commitment to licensed models, consideration of the value of music both on and off the platform, and the ability for artists and songwriters to consent to the use of their name, image, likeness, voice, and compositions in new AI-generated songs," Kyncl concluded.

Robert Kyncl had already outlined the principles for AI deals in connection with the recent partnership with Udio: "Our approach is clear: legislate, litigate, license." Kyncl's three Ls.

These principles are: legislate, litigate, license. Suno CEO Mikey Shulman adds: “Our partnership with Warner Music opens up an even bigger and richer Suno experience for music lovers and accelerates our mission to transform the role of music in the world by making it more valuable to billions of people. Together, we can improve the way music is made, consumed, experienced, and shared. This means we will introduce new, more powerful features for music production and create opportunities to collaborate and interact with some of the world’s most talented musicians, while continuing to build the largest possible music ecosystem.”

In addition to the licensing deal for the new AI tool, WMG and Suno also agreed, almost as a side note, that the AI company would acquire the concert platform Songkick, which came under WMG’s umbrella in mid-2017.

Source German Language: www.musikwoche.de/recorded-publishing/warner-music-schliesst-ki-deal-mit-suno-und-legt-rechtsstreit-bei-e40481e9a554789f11b8ffa10e7525c3

 

I think abolition of human artists' rights is the term?

 

Well, looking ahead to 2026, Warner Music Group and Suno are teaming up to drop fresh, licensed AI music models that’ll replace the old ones. Artists get full say on how their voices, names, and tracks get used, making sure they get paid and protected and free users can stream and share tunes, but downloads will need a paid subscription.

Plus, Suno’s grabbed WMG’s Songkick, making it easier for artists to connect with fans by blending AI music with live shows.
It could become a game-changer moving AI music into a legit, artist-friendly, and money-making space.

we will see..

 

Interesting enough: Suno is selling only yearly packages with a discount
(knowing I bet, that they will cancel Suno early in 2026 and bring up a "Suno legit" or sth. leaving their customers in the rain)*
An a**hole is an a**hole is an a**hole against everyone.



*Where I live it's called "Nachtigall ick hör Dir trapsen!"

 

Basically they will replace their model with new "licensed" ones. What does that mean in pratice? Your outputs on Suno will be necessarily copyrighted. If their future models aren't royalty free, you will need to share your profits with the AI model or... BOOM... DMCA.

If it's royalty free, it will be just like a "Splice 'X Artist' Signature Sound Pack" in an AI prompt model.

In any situation, it sucks to deal with copyrighted AI outputs. Suno couldn't claim an output copyright before, even if they stated on their terms to not use free songs on streaming. Because, by law on most countries, AI outputs are not subject of copyright claims. Now they managed to make it copyrighted ;)

I will leave you with this quote.

 

Last edited: Nov 26, 2025 at 9:21 PM

They're just covering their backs, suno is useless if you can't write better stuff than that then use it, otherwise the human brain can do way much better, AI 's good for calcuations, better, weapons, buildings, drugs etc, it'll replace film makers und actors which isn't necessarily all bad, if so, it'll mean we have got something better or else why would we bother, it won't make Art because it has no opinion simple as that, my stuff is all about my opinion, nobody elses, i know best, not so fo AI.

 

True at the moment. But we are in AI development phase 1.0
Those who are not truly gifted artists will have big problems in the future—or rather, they will have even bigger problems earning money from music.

 

I am not quite sure how WMG will get their artists interested in allowing the use of their music for AI. The amount of money they will receive will not be that great, plus they will probably hurt themselves in the long run if AI can produce music that is basically resembling their work. I can't really see how it will benefit the artists.

 

They are laundering of theft into legitimacy.

Is the LAION-5B dataset history repeating again, but now with sound. that dataset which powers Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, Sora,and the rest explicitly warned against commercial use. "Research purposes only,". Every major AI company ignored it and built billion-dollar businesses anyway. When sued, German courts protected LAION's non-profit status while commercial entities feasted on the data. The scam was perfect: create a "research" liability firewall, spend $2,000 scraping the entire internet, then watch corporations monetize it. Scrape first, legitimize later.

Suno already trained on copyrighted music without permission. Got sued. And now they're settling and calling it a "groundbreaking partnership." Except when WMG says "artists will have control," they mean Warner decides if your catalog trains the AI that replaces you. The theft already happened. This is just a retroactive license to legitimize it.

Artists like Benn Jordan are developing adversarial noise techniques to poison training data, but that's individual self-defense against systemic theft. So we need to reorganize around our own industry or we are pretty much done. The labels chose the machines. Streaming platforms are complicit. The legislative game is rigged—Kyncl's "three Ls" say it all: Legislate, Litigate, License. They write the laws, sue us into submission, then offer pennies.

We either build a parallel music economy outside their control: direct platforms, decentralized distribution, cooperative ownership, etc, or we accept becoming training data for our own obsolescence. But I think our generation are totally unprepared to win this one cause we have been socialiced into individuality and uncoperative approachs to almost anything. Maybe my son's gen will see how they crush us and react in time, maybe...

 

Through pressure...

 

They are running in circle. After 5 years only of public AI, the AI bubble is already too big :
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/20/stock-markets-ai-nvidia

The whole system is plagued by his own nature.
And it will end sooner than later.

And frankly ... i'm waiting for this day since i'm 10 years old.
And i'm 50.
I hate lies, it is my nature.

Humanity is creating for millenaries.
It is not going to end.

But "the market" ...

 

It doesn't even need to be a real artist, but for the 'best' of the scenarios, let's imagine the WMG artists allow Suno to train on their data:

1- The data is already trained. It will just be under an artist name now. That's cool for WMG and Suno because a real artist will work as marketing to bring people to the service while they can copyright the outputs, impersonating them into prompts. This will work well for those artists and both of the companies. But the user of the output... Well, they don't care if you will be sued later or not for that use, but now they have legal points to claim it.

2 - They can potentially put irregular trained data (on the same way they did before) on an especific artist just to give it a face and claim it as legit. And this will be a nightmare for small artists that may sound like an WMG trained artist, because they can argue those artists sound too similar to the model and steal your work. Simple as that.

Just to be clear: legally, there's no way this deal can be good to the artist comunity overall. They can polish their words with acid, try to make hard for the end user to understand, but there's no win for anyone but the parties of the deal.

Soundwise, they can enhance the output's musical quality. Especially to grab new customers. But who cares about that if the whole deal is a legal trap for the end user?

 

Have you seen the company called Sound Patrol, and others like it? They are trying to develop technology which can detect material stolen from original artists and then used to train models; which in turn could be used in scenarios like the Marvin Gaye estate/Pharell lawsuit. If infringing material (accidental or not) can be detected, that is the start of negotiations or litigation. But this adds a new spin to that; because why even stop there? Instead of manufacturing their pop stars like they do now (K-pop etc); all they will need is people to say they are the artists behind the work. Why have a bidding war between labels to pay for an AI Artist like "Xania Monet" a few million dollars when they could just manufacture one for themselves? Making money from art is too important to leave up to artists. Here is my graphic take on this new model:

 

I don't like this at all. Warner P.R. makes it sound good in terms of better protection of artist's rights, but in the end it seems like they're just cementing their own gateway into the Suno/AI battering of music artists. Warner wants their piece of the AI pie, and they had the legal muscle to insure that they get it out of Suno, but the underlying threat to real music talent will continue and probably grow more intense with a major label conglomerate joining in the mix. IMO, this is just more bad news.

Fingers crossed the other lawsuits continue and leave Suno in the dust altogether.

 

Really liked the scheme. It's a good translation on how the business works today. And today it's already a mess. But after this deal, the fourth step will come first (as an avatar to the database) and will be replaced by another human performer (the service's customer). To this point there's already a lot of legal layers. Imagine after distribution? The last step will grab incomes as never before.

 

Well, with all of the artists catalogs being fed into the AI as training data; they do not need to do much "Sound Patrolling" to find out who is already paying into the kitty and who is not. As that stupid Blurred Lines lawsuit and verdict should serve to show, if you want to take a song and dissect it and claim something about it is infringing on others' copyrights; it's not too much of a strain to see they can claim you took something from someone. No independent artist or label can afford anything close to that kind of litigation costs. So maybe this is just factored in as another cost of doing business for artists; much like having services like Spotify, Distrokid, CD Baby, and whoever else picking your pockets all along the way.

The idea of my proposed scam model for them is to allow AI to steal from everyone who has authorized it. People above saying that pressure and other reasons not in artists' interests might be true; but we are talking about music that is already done. These people will license their music for commercial use simultaneously to competing brands of beer if they will make another penny. So all the training data will already be there, and authorized for use by those who can afford it.

I go back to this whole Xania Monet thing, because it is one that I am actually aware of; but also because she freely admits not being able to sing a note. People are claiming she shortcut all of the work, labels bidding and paid her 3M to sign a contract, and the end result is people buying her music and either not knowing it is AI or not caring it is not even her music anyway. So instead of the old record label tactics of "lets' make a band", or boy band or k-pop supergroup and dorm them, feed them, train them; they can just crank this stuff out and find some person such as an actor, influencer, model, whatever; and get them to say they made the music for a stupidly low amount of money. All you have to do is look on Instagram to see if you couldn't find yourself a new Milli Vanilli to dance for nickels. Your inbox would be full in an hour.

When they see something that could possibly democratize music even further, their instinct is to buy it and control it. They have no intention of allowing another industry changing technology used to shrink their position even further than they already did. If you cannot stamp out a competitor outright, you buy it or "merger" it out of existence. Just a prediction

 

Scenario 1: The AI company goes bankrupt if investors pull out due to insufficient profits. There's plenty of money available, but investors always expect a return on their investment. If the AI company doesn't generate profits, it's a bad investment for the investor.

Without money and massive legal costs, the AI company won't survive. Since there's already an AI bubble, some of these AI companies will go bankrupt and disappear from the market.

Scenario 2: The AI company acquires a large number of paying customers and operates at a loss for several years. After a few years, it finally becomes profitable and repays its loans or investors. Will the AI company have a convincing profitability concept?

Conclusion: The AI hype and the market aren't developing as positively as expected.
We'll see which AI companies can make it through.

 

There's no such thing as gifted artists, there's a reason for everything and i know exactly why I'm good at it, i know i'm ok cos all reviews always mention the production too, which in some ways is harder than the writing.

You all forget one thing, AI is a product and they big it up cos they wanna con you into thinking it can make better Art than humans, it won't, it can't, cos it can't listen and it has no opinion, my stuff is all about my opinion, what i deem to be great music, i do a bit, i listen, i rearrange and produce as i listen, listen again then repeat ad fin 'til finished, then on to next one.

The nature of musical composition is highly predictable, there's always a next best interval to be chosen out of a posible couple or few, depending on your position in the scale, it's all very logical so AI could excel at that, but you have to make the riff satisfy your opinion of what constitutes a great riff, AI has no opinion

So LISTEN UP, AI can't listen or offer an opinion it will only offer an alternative, i challenge the might of all the AI apps to write und produce a better track than me, they won't take the bet cos they know it's impossible to do if you got no ears eh.