Why This Messy Suno/ WMG Deal Is Still a Big Win for Musicians

A company that scraped “essentially all music on the open internet” just got a major-label deal. Is this a good thing?

Nov 30, 2025

Two weeks ago, Warner Music Group, alongside Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Germany’s PRO GEMA, were suing Suno, accusing the AI-music startup of building its models on unlicensed recordings and dodging questions about where its training data came from.

Today, that same Warner has:

Settled and withdrawn its lawsuit
Licensed its catalog to Suno for future models
Agreed to let opt-in artists lend their names, voices, likenesses, and compositions to new AI “creation experiences”
And, in a twist, sold Suno the live-concert discovery platform Songkick as part of the deal

On the surface, it looks like the classic tech-and-music story: steal and scrape first, apologize later, then get rewarded with a giant licensing agreement.

And yet, despite the chatter of many on social media, this is actually a very good day for musicians. It’s a win because (1) Suno is being pushed from scraped to licensed models, (2) artists get an opt-in path to participate and be paid, and (3) the industry finally has a concrete blueprint for monetizing the fan behavior that was already happening in the wild.

This is especially true for major label artists and rights holders; for independents, the picture is more complicated and deserves its own analysis.

Saying vs. Doing

Let’s parse the press release, and see what it really means:

In 2026, Suno will make several changes to the platform, including launching new, more advanced and licensed models. When the new models launch in 2026, the current models will be deprecated.

This mimics the Udio/UMG deal in late October. Suno may have built its audience on the back of scraped training data, but now the new model will be licensed and paid for. Suno gets a high-quality feed of music with correct metadata (I’m sure the engineers are cheering), Warner gets cut in, and users can prompt with the names and likenesses of WMG artists who have opted in.
Full disclosure: I know many of the people at Suno, have spent some time at their home office in Cambridge, and have spoken to them extensively about their company. While opinions in the building vary, many believe their current music model is “OK,” and with better training data and normal advances in inference scale, it can get much better.

Moving forward, downloading audio will require a paid account. Suno will introduce download restrictions in certain scenarios: specifically, in the future, songs made on the free tier will not be downloadable and will instead be playable and shareable. Paid tier users will have limited monthly download caps with the ability to pay for more downloads.

This feels a lot like freemium vs. paid streaming, no? I’m hearing a lot more comparisons with Gen AI and the early days of streaming, and I have to generally agree.

With a goal to continue building with the music community, Suno has also acquired Songkick, the live music, concert-discovery platform, from Warner Music Group, and will continue to run it as a successful fan destination, bringing together the power of interactive music with live performance. The combination of Suno and Songkick will create new potential to deepen the artist-fan connection. Imagine a fan generating a Suno-powered remix using an artist’s licensed likeness, then immediately seeing Songkick prompts for that artist’s upcoming shows.

I’m at a loss with this one. It feels like WMG had an asset they no longer wanted, and this was a way to offload it to a partner who might figure out something to do with it later. WMG had some leverage here, and I’m sure they were able to get more for Songkick in this deal than they would on the open market.

The partnership will build on what 100 million creators love about Suno while allowing artists and songwriters to benefit from new revenue streams, and adding powerful new interactive features that offer opportunities for deeper fan engagement. Artists and songwriters will have full control over whether and how their names, images, likenesses, voices, and compositions are used in new AI-generated music. Together, WMG and Suno are committed to forging a blueprint for a next-generation licensed AI music platform.

Spend a few minutes on TikTok and YouTube and you’ll see thousands of hours of fans using AI tools to rework and mash-up pop songs for their amusement. Now, the industry has a clear way to monetize the behavior that MIDiA has documented extensively.

How the Companies Are Spinning It

How do the companies feel about this? Robert Kyncl, CEO, WMG said:

“This landmark pact with Suno is a victory for the creative community that benefits everyone. With Suno rapidly scaling, both in users and monetization, we’ve seized this opportunity to shape models that expand revenue and deliver new fan experiences. AI becomes pro-artist when it adheres to our principles: 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.”

What is he really saying? In effect: Warner had to do this deal, and had to announce first. They needed to win. Suno’s capital raise and rapid scaling made it too big to ignore, and Warner doesn’t want to repeat its mistakes with file sharing and early streaming. The subtext is: “We’re shaping this before it shapes us - and we just hope our artists come on board.”

Mikey Shulman, CEO, Suno:

“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. Together, we can enhance how music is made, consumed, experienced and shared. This means we’ll be rolling out new, 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.”

What he really means, in practice: litigation was getting expensive and the outcome was increasingly unclear. You also can’t raise that much money and not be a target. Partnering with a major is the price of staying in the game - and unlike Udio, Suno’s product roadmap remains its own.

Unanswered Questions

Like most press releases, this was heavy on spin and light on detail. There are still many outstanding questions they need to answer.

What about attribution and payouts? How does that work?

Despite what some hard-working startups might claim, I haven’t seen any evidence there’s competent tech to track a piece of music throughout the training data backpropagation process (how an initial model is trained), the inference and refinement process (how a model reacts to a prompt), and then all the way to the output. Training data shapes the overall behavior of the model; inference data is more like what the model leans on when it responds in a specific style or voice.

We also haven’t agreed how to value the data throughout the different parts of the process. Data used during the backpropagation process is used differently than data used during the inference and refinement process; generally the latter is considered more valuable for the data in question.

For now, I believe they will follow the ElevenLabs and Merlin/Kobalt model: for the artists that have opted in, they’ll be paid out pro rata based on their streaming share. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good way to divvy up the revenue without a cumbersome, expensive, and ultimately unproven tech stack.

How many Warner artists will opt in?

I’m very curious about this. Will Warner provide pressure to their roster? Will artists on unrecouped royalty deals even have a choice? How will the opt-in/opt-out process even be managed? Streaming was quite controversial when it launched, but there were very few holdouts. I think there will be many more this time.

What will the new Suno look like?

The Udio/UMG deal was somewhat of a PR disaster for Udio. Suno took great care in this press release to articulate how much won’t change. For one, I believe it will be a mistake if they make wholesale changes to Suno Studio - which is now a beloved product by professional artists - but it’s clear the free tier is going to have limited functionality.

I’m also very curious if, on the paid tier, users retain all commercial rights, or whether Warner gets cut in on the outputs: i.e., will Warner get royalties on any streaming revenue of these Suno-generated tracks?

So Why Is This Good for Artists?

Two weeks ago, there were very few ways for artists and rights holders to monetize Gen AI. Now, the largest and most capitalized startup in music since Spotify has a multi-million-dollar deal with a major label. Coupled with the recent Udio/UMG deal and the rumors about Spotify’s new features, we are also seeing a roadmap for how to work with this tech in a way that can benefit artists and rights holders - while giving fans what they want.

In shorthand: lawsuits forced transparency; transparency led to licensing; licensing opens up new, opt-in revenue streams around behavior that was already happening for free.

I admit this is a rosy picture of the current moment. And I am an optimist: partly because AI has been so exponentially beneficial to me in my life, and because I’m encouraged by how much the music industry’s relationship to technology has evolved.

In a future post, I’ll articulate some of the downsides: the problem of “too much music,” the way this puts the independent community at a disadvantage, what happens when there’s no friction between ideation and creation, and the rise of synthetic data.

But for now, we should be encouraged. Because when the cast of SpongeBob sings your favorite K-Pop Demon Hunters song, at least Netflix - and the other rights holders - are now being paid for it.

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