Hot on the heels of settling its lawsuit against Udio, Warner Music has now likewise settled its legal battle with Suno. Which means the mini-major now has licensing deals in place with the two music AI platforms that have received the most hype and caused the most controversy in the last eighteen months.
“This landmark pact with Suno is a victory for the creative community that benefits everyone”, says Warner Music CEO Robert Kyncl, adding, “with Suno rapidly scaling, both in users and monetisation, we’ve seized this opportunity to shape models that expand revenue and deliver new fan experiences”.
Suno boss Mikey Shulman adds, “Our partnership with Warner Music unlocks a bigger, richer Suno experience for music lovers, and accelerates our mission to change the place of music in the world by making it more valuable to billions of people”.
While the new Suno partnership is likely similar to Warner’s Udio deal, and to the deals Universal and Sony are presumably also negotiating with Suno, this transaction does include one extra unique element.
Suno is getting an extra treat in the form of live music data platform Songkick. Or has agreed to take Songkick off Warner’s hands, depending how you look at it. As part of its ongoing cost cutting measures, Warner previously offloaded its wider media and content division that Songkick once sat within.
Quite how Songkick aligns with Suno’s wider business of churning out computer generated music is not entirely clear, though the deal announcement speaks breathlessly about how the combination of the two businesses will “create new potential to deepen the artist-fan connection”.
Whether that will be by spamming out AI remixes to everyone who has ever expressed interest in a particular artist’s live shows remains to be seen. Songkick is a significant data intermediary and shop front for the live side of artists’ careers, though, and Suno will presumably be hoping to capitalise on that leverage, and the existing relationships Songkick has with artists beyond their record labels.
As for the core licensing deal that has been announced, both Suno and Udio were initially adamant that they didn’t need any such deals from the music industry in order to train their respective generative AI models with the millions of existing tracks that they had diligently scraped off YouTube.
That was mainly based on the argument that AI training is fair use under US copyright law, meaning no permission is required from the creators of that music or the companies in control of the copyrights.
The legal debate in relation to AI and fair use is far from resolved. However, ongoing legal uncertainties which could ultimately lead to AI companies being forced to pay billions if not trillions in damages to copyright owners has forced many of those companies to the negotiating table. Which is why we’ve had a flurry of deals in recent weeks involving AI businesses and the major record companies.
Both Udio - which has already settled legal battles and agreed licensing deals with both Warner and Universal - and Suno have agreed to make changes to their respective platforms in order to address the concerns and meet the commercial objectives of the majors. Both companies will launch revamped versions of their services at some point in 2026.
Since Udio announced the changes it is making to keep the majors sweet, there has been much debate over whether or not the revamped but licensed version of Udio will provide a service anyone wants. Similar scrutiny and criticism of the revamped but legit Suno service is now likely.
The official announcement of the Warner licensing deal includes some details about the impact it will have on the Suno platform. “Downloading audio will require a paid account”, it explains. Music generated on the free tier will be “playable and shareable”, but not available for download. On the paid tier, “users will have limited monthly download caps with the ability to pay for more downloads”.
Seeking to spin all this in a positive light, Shulman says the licensed version of Suno will roll out “more robust features for creation, opportunities to collaborate and interact with some of the most talented musicians in the world, all while continuing to build the biggest music ecosystem possible”.
As with its Udio partnership, Warner says that artist consent will be sought before the new Suno AI includes their voice or likeness in any outputted content, and songwriters will have control over AI remixing of their songs. However, those are the only scenarios where creator consent will be sought.
“AI becomes pro-artist when it adheres to our principles”, Kynl insists in the official blurb that accompanies the Suno deal announcement. And those principles, in case you wondered, are “committing to licensed models, reflecting the value of music on and off platform, and providing artists and songwriters with an opt-in for the use of their name, image, likeness, voice and compositions in new AI songs”.
Though, of course, music creator organisations in the US and the UK - which Kyncl and his counterparts at the other majors are trying really hard to ignore right now - insist that AI only actually becomes “pro-artist” when creators are provided with opt-in for any use of their music by generative AI systems.
The majors are as adamant that that level of creator consent is not required as Suno and Udio once were that no licensing deals were needed. Though, as we’ve seen, nothing is set in stone.