Late last year, thieves disguised as construction workers walked into the Louvre in broad daylight, grabbed Napoleon’s crown jewels - worth tens of millions of euros - and disappeared on motorbikes into the Paris traffic. The jewellery has not been recovered, and many suspect the pieces have already been recut, reset and resold.
A coalition of music creator advocacy organisations has borrowed the incident as the starting point for a stinging open letter about Suno, the AI music generation platform that trained its models on copyright protected recordings scraped from the internet without permission.
It is a vivid analogy, and one the letter’s signatories argue fits precisely. Suno, they say, has built its business by scraping the world’s music without permission, then competing against the very artists whose work it took - recutting, remixing and reselling original works of artistry as something new, and doing it in broad daylight.
The letter - signed by the US Music Artists Coalition, the European Composer And Songwriter Alliance, the Trichordist’s David Lowery, artist and Duke University practitioner-in-residence Tift Merritt, producer and ECR Music Group president Blake Morgan, North Music Group’s Abby North, and Chris Castle of the Artist Rights Institute - was published on Music Technology Policy on Sunday, and asks music fans, and the music industry, to “Just say no to Suno”.
One day later, Suno announced the appointment of Jeremy Sirota, former CEO of independent label licensing body Merlin, as its Chief Commercial Officer. The signatories presumably did not know about the Sirota hire when they published. But as a piece of accidental theatre, you couldn’t do much better.
The core argument in their letter is straightforward. Most major innovations in the music business - the phonograph, cassettes, CDs, MP3s, streaming - were ways of reproducing and distributing creative work.
Suno, say the creator organisations, does something very different. It “built its business on our backs, scraping the world’s cultural output without permission, then competing against the very works exploited”. Where previous technologies distributed music, Suno “appropriates and plunders such creative work while undermining the commercial ecosystem for artists”.
Much of the letter directly addresses points made by Paul Sinclair, Suno’s Chief Music Officer, a former EVP at Warner Music’s Atlantic Records Group, who left during Elliot Grainge’s restructure of the label.
In a LinkedIn post published on 2 Feb, Sinclair pushed back against what he called a “growing narrative that the safest future for music is one where new creative tools live inside tightly controlled, ‘walled garden’ environments”.
“If we had tried to lock music into closed systems over the last 25 years”, he argued, “we wouldn’t have streaming as we know it”. The future, he wrote, “should feel like an open studio” that “respect[s] rights, compensate[s] creators, and build[s] sustainable models” while trusting “that giving people real creative agency leads to deeper engagement with music, not less”.
The response of the signatories to Sinclair is blunt. Gardens have walls for a reason, says the letter - “to keep out rabbits, deer, raccoons and wild pigs seeking a free lunch. We cultivate, nurture and protect our gardens precisely because that makes them much more productive over the long run”.
What brought the music industry back from the piracy abyss? “It was the very ‘closed systems’ that Sinclair derides as exclusionary” - streaming platforms with access controls and content management that enable creator compensation. Sinclair’s argument, they say, “is just a tired remix of the old trope that ‘information wants to be free’. What that really means is: ‘We want your music for free’”.
On Suno’s relationship with creators, the characterisation goes further still. Suno, the signatories say, is “not putting technology in the service of artists” but “putting artists in the service of their technology”.
And, even worse, “every time artists’ creations are used by the platform, those creations have just unwittingly been contributed to the creation of endless derivatives of artists’ own work, not to mention AI slop, with limited or no remuneration back to the human creators”.
The Sinclair post - and the response to it - reflect a wider and increasingly public dispute about how AI music platforms should operate. When Universal Music settled its copyright legal battle with Suno’s rival Udio in October last year, the deal explicitly required that any music generated by the next iteration of the Udio AI model be “controlled within a walled garden”.
Sinclair’s former employer, Warner, imposed similar restrictions on Udio when it also signed a licensing deal with the company, but agreed significantly looser terms with Suno when it settled separately in November - paid users can still download AI-generated songs, subject to monthly caps, and distribute them onto streaming platforms.
Universal CEO Lucian Grainge’s annual January memo to his employees warning against firms “validating business models that fail to respect artists’ work” was widely read as a pointed comment directed at that deal.
There is another problem for anyone using Suno to make music. The US Copyright Office has been clear that generative AI outputs are largely ineligible for copyright protection, a position shared by copyright regimes in most countries.
As the letter puts it, “the economic value of the Suno creation lies solely with Suno, not with the artist using it. The only ones gaining empowerment from Suno are Suno themselves”. Users pay the subscription fee. Suno keeps the value.
Suno is also being sued for copyright infringement by Universal, Sony Music and various independent artists, who all claim infringement “at an almost unimaginable scale”. The company, warn the signatories, “is not a platform artists should trust”.
None of which is helped by the streaming fraud problem. Suno generates 7 million tracks a day. Deezer’s January 2026 data found that up to 85% of streams of fully AI-generated tracks on its platform are fraudulent - bot-driven plays designed to siphon royalties from the pools that pay human artists.
Deezer now receives 60,000 AI-generated tracks daily, roughly 39% of all its uploads. JP Morgan analysts have said that Deezer’s data “should be indicative of the broader market” - and Deezer and Spotify largely receive the same deliveries from the same distributors, which suggests the problem is not confined to one platform.
Suno, say the letter’s signatories, has become “a fraud-fodder factory on an industrial scale”. Suno’s own investor pitch deck - obtained by Billboard in November - suggests they may have a point.
The company had spent $32 million on compute - the cost of computer processing used to train its model and generate music using AI - and just $2000 on training data. That second figure is the total Suno has paid for the music it used to train its model: two thousand dollars, for tens of millions of recordings.
Put it another way: the costs of data for training was just 0.00625% - or six thousandths of one percent - of the costs of training and generation. The pitch deck made no mention of licensing plans or the company’s ongoing lawsuits. It projected $1 billion in revenue by 2028.
AI-generated music also “dilutes the royalty pools of legitimate artists”, the letter argues. This is where it gets more complicated - and where the signatories and the major labels may not actually be on the same side.
Fraudulent streams that game the system do dilute pools - that mechanism is straightforward and Deezer’s data confirms it is happening at scale. But the extent to which this actually impacts on any one rightsholder likely depends on the deals they negotiate with the streaming services..
The major labels are in a position to negotiate AI licensing provisions in their streaming deals that carve out their catalogues from any dilutive effect, shielding their own royalty rates while the cost of expanded AI consumption falls disproportionately on artists and labels whose contracts lack those protections - which is to say, exactly the independent artists and smaller rightsholders that this open letter claims to speak for. The risk is real, but it may not be equally distributed the way the letter implies.
The letter is an advocacy document, and necessarily focuses on one side of a more complicated picture. It does not, for example, engage with the fact that Warner has already settled with Suno and signed a licensing deal - effectively accepting the platform’s existence and commercial model.
It does not address the argument, made by Suno and others, that AI-assisted music creation is a genuine consumer product used by millions of people who have no intention of committing streaming fraud. And it does not distinguish between Suno’s current unlicensed model and the licensed model it claims to be building for 2026.
Warner’s deal is worth noting, because it means one of the three companies that originally sued Suno for infringement “at an almost unimaginable scale” has since decided to work with it - on terms more favourable to Suno than the walled-garden restrictions Universal imposed on Udio.
But then, none of this really needs addressing. The core claims - that the training was done without consent, that the output dilutes royalty pools, that the fraud problem is real and growing, and that the copyrightability question leaves users holding nothing while Suno captures the value - are not addressed by Warner’s deal or by any licensing framework currently on the table.
No consent framework retroactively legitimises - at a moral level - the scraping that built the model, though it may forgive past wrongs from a legal point of view. No licensing deal slows the rate at which 7 million tracks a day are being generated. And no streaming platform other than Deezer is currently even identifying how much of its upload volume is AI-generated, let alone doing anything about the fraud.
The letter was presumably written and circulated before Suno announced its latest hire. But the letter landing the day before Suno appointed Merlin’s former CEO - the man who told the UK government that “independent music is not raw material for tech companies to exploit without consent” - as its Chief Commercial Officer tells you something about the state of play.
On one side, a coalition of artist advocates, songwriters and independent operators asking the industry to draw a line. On the other, a $2.45 billion company that built its valuation on unlicensed scraping, systematically hiring people like Sinclair and Sirota who used to draw those lines for a living.
The open letter asks the music community to “say no to Suno”. The music industry’s executives, one by one, appear to be saying “yes”.
