Suno Launches Licensed AI Music Models With WMG, BMG, and Believe
- Martina
- 15 September 2026, Tuesday
Almost a year after settling the copyright lawsuit with Warner Music Group, generative AI music platform Suno has launched a new suite of models developed in partnership with WMG, BMG, and Believe.
The new v6 generation marks an important shift for the company, with the models trained from scratch using new data, including music licensed by its industry partners.
Suno Brings New “Licensed” Models in 2026
One might say that Suno’s licensed models took a long time to arrive. Yet, given the company’s many developments on several fronts – including numerous copyright claims, lawsuits, and licensing negotiations – it managed to deliver them relatively quickly.
The company first “promised” to introduce new, license-based models in November 2025, the same month it settled the WMG copyright lawsuit and struck its first licensing deal with a major record company.
In the 10 months since, the company has signed further licensing agreements, first with BMG in August this year and more recently with Believe.
The global launch of Suno’s new v6 models is therefore the result of development with what the company calls its “industry partners, including Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe.”
As the company has emphasized, v6 “was trained entirely from scratch,” meaning it uses different data from its previous models. Notably, the new models do not include any data from Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, both of which remain involved in ongoing litigation against Suno.
“It’s a combination of data that’s been licensed from these partners, user data, but most importantly, it is the accumulation of the team’s learnings from what users are looking for in these models, and other technical breakthroughs and R&D that have led to more capable and higher quality music models,” stated Suno’s Chief Product Officer Jack Brody.
As Suno underlined, the “user data” Brody refers to here concerns user preferences between generated outputs rather than audio uploaded to the platform.
According to Brody, all of Suno’s previous models will be retired as v6 rolls out. Although the model suite officially launched on September 9, the company is rolling out in phases, so the main Suno Pricing page may not yet be fully updated for everyone.
“v6 is designed to expand what is creatively possible and lay the foundation to launch new products that open up revenue opportunities across the music ecosystem,” said CEO Mikey Shulman in a blog post.
Three Models, Different Approaches
The v6 generation consists of three models.
The standard v6 serves as Suno’s flagship model for Pro and Premier subscribers. According to the company, it’s designed to be reliable and precise and to “consistently deliver polished music across every genre and style.”
Meanwhile, v6-wild, also available to Pro and Premier subscribers, is built more for exploration. Suno describes it as “less predictable and more varied,” aimed at producing unexpected ideas that creators can develop further.
Finally, v6-mini is available to all creators, and Suno says it “delivers better, faster results than any free model on any music creation platform.”
More Than a Licensing Deal
Beyond improvements in music generation itself, v6 also introduces more extensive creation and editing tools. Users can edit individual parts of existing songs using natural-language instructions, combine elements from multiple tracks, isolate and sample parts of a song, and generate music using text, audio, images, and video as inputs.
While there is – naturally – a lot of discourse around Suno’s industry partners in terms of training data, the company wants to make it clear that these collaborations go beyond licensing music for AI training.
“I think the wrong way to think about these partnerships is to think about them as acquiring the data to train our models,” Brody argued. “It really is about establishing partnerships that allow us to build net new product experiences in partnership with the industry and the artists who have made it what it is.”
He also emphasized that training data is only one factor determining the quality of the models. “It is the R&D, the breakthroughs and the technical innovations that go into how these models are architected, how they are shaped, how we tune them based on preferences, and all of that,” he highlighted.
There’s a financial component to the partnerships, too. According to Brody, Suno started sharing a portion of its revenue with its industry partners on the launch date, with the relevant rights holders responsible for determining how that money is distributed.
What Comes Next for Suno?
The launch of v6 is only the first phase of Suno’s plans with its music industry partners.
The company says it is developing opt-in experiences centered around individual artists. Participating artists would be able to choose whether to take part and receive compensation, while fans could use new AI-powered ways to interact with their music.
This is particularly significant given the criticism Suno has faced over consent and compensation since its rise to popularity. While its new licensing agreements do not resolve the broader debate around generative AI and copyright, v6 represents a clear shift in how the company is approaching major rights holders in the music industry.
It’s also important to note that the company has publicly committed to using audio watermarking and fingerprinting technology designed to make Suno-generated music identifiable when it’s shared on other platforms and, in turn, help distribution services combat fraud and misuse.
Of course, Suno continues to walk a path scattered with legal challenges, including disputes with Sony Music Entertainment, UMG, and, most recently, Round Hill Music. With several copyright disputes still unresolved, its move toward licensing and industry partnerships marks an important change in direction – but whether it will be enough to reshape Suno’s relationship with the wider music industry remains to be seen.
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Martina is a Berlin-based music writer and digital content specialist. She started playing the violin at age six and spent ten years immersed in classical music. Today, she writes about all things music, with a particular interest in the complexities of the music business, streaming, and artist fairness.
