Suno Switches Off Old Models and Launches v6 on Licensed Catalogs

Suno spent two years being sued for how it learned music. On Wednesday it tried to change the subject by changing the model.The Cambridge company launched Suno v6, a family of generators it says was built with licensed data from Warner Music Group, BMG, and distributor Believe. Previous models are being retired the same day. Chief product officer Jack Brody said the company is moving entirely onto the v6 generation.That retirement was not a product whim. When Warner settled its piece of the 2024 major-label suit in November 2025, the deal required Suno to ship licensed models and kill the old ones within a year. Wednesday is that deadline coming due.v6 is not one model. Paying Pro and Premier users get a base v6 described as steerable and reliable, plus v6-wild for stranger drafts. Everyone gets v6-mini. Suno says the new stack handles partial edits, mashups, isolation, sampling, and prompts from text, audio, images, or video. It also says musical key and stem quality are tighter than before.Brody was explicit about what is not in the training set: no Universal Music Group catalog, no Sony Music Entertainment catalog. Those two majors are still plaintiffs in the Boston case that Warner left.The Cases That Did Not EndThe original 2024 complaint from Sony, Universal, and Warner accused Suno of training on copyrighted recordings pulled from YouTube and elsewhere without a license. The labels said the service could flood the market and substitute for human work. Suno has argued that training is fair use. That fight is still live for the two holdouts.Fact discovery in Massachusetts closes September 30. The labels recently added a claim that Suno circumvented YouTube access controls. In a filing this week, Suno admitted it obtained YouTube audio for training — including with common download tools — while arguing the remaining plaintiffs lack standing on that circumvention theory. A judge earlier refused to let the labels pile more than 61,000 extra recordings into the same suit.That admission landed a day before the v6 party. Licensed future, contested past. Both can be true in the same week.Artists have their own docket. Jason Isbell, David Lowery, Guy Forsyth, and Eduardo Calle filed a proposed class action in late August over names, voices, and identities. Other indie actions have survived early motions to dismiss. Round Hill Music sued in California. Germany’s GEMA won a first-instance copyright ruling in Munich in July. Denmark’s Koda and Canada’s SOCAN have filed. Jamendo sued and then dropped its case without prejudice.A new model does not erase those files. It is Suno’s attempt to look like a licensee going forward while the old weights remain evidence of how the company got big.How the Partnerships WorkWarner’s settlement last year also included a commercial partnership and Suno’s purchase of concert platform Songkick. The companies have talked about a future product in which Warner artists can opt into remix-style features. That product is not v6 itself. Labels get paid from the licensed-training structure now; some artist-facing tools are still promised rather than shipping.BMG signed in August, covering recorded music and publishing, with an opt-in path for artists and writers, and a settlement of Suno’s prior use of that catalog. BMG had not been a plaintiff in the 2024 RIAA-coordinated case.Believe’s deal was announced Tuesday, a day before v6. Believe had spent months blocking distribution of Suno-made tracks. The new pact covers participating repertoire from Believe and TuneCore. Independents who want in can join. Independents who do not stay out — at least on paper.Suno has also promised watermarking and fingerprinting and has capped monthly downloads: 20 for Pro, 60 for Premier, 7 for free users as of early September. Those caps are both anti-scraping and a reminder that the company is trying to look like a rights-aware vendor, not an open firehose.Will v6 Sound Worse?That is the user question Warner cannot answer in a press release.Licensed catalogs are large. They are not “essentially all music files of reasonable quality on the open internet,” the kind of sweep Suno has been accused of using before. If v6 is trained on Warner, BMG, Believe, and whatever else is under contract, it may be cleaner legally and narrower musically. Fans of the old model’s weirdness may prefer v6-wild. Professionals who need a specific artist’s feel that lives on Sony or Universal may notice the hole.Suno says the new models win on every internal metric and on fidelity. Internal metrics are not a listening test. The next month of subscriber complaints will be the review.Retiring old models also means old songs in user libraries sit on a platform that no longer generates that way. Download caps already limit how those files leave the house. The commercial loop — generate, download, distribute — is tighter than it was when Suno was growing on unlicensed weights.The Business BetSuno has said it passed 2 million paid subscribers and $300 million in annual recurring revenue earlier this year, with more than 100 million people having used the product. A June Series D valued the company around $5.4 billion. Those numbers were built on a generator the majors called theft.v6 is the attempt to keep the user base while paying some of the industry. Warner and BMG get a cut and a partner. Sony and Universal get a courtroom. Artists without a deal get a class action or a collecting-society case in Europe.Fair use for training is still the core U.S. question. Shipping a licensed model does not decide whether the old training was legal. It does make the next version harder to describe as a pirate photocopier. That is the political point of Wednesday, as much as any stem-separation demo.What to WatchWhether paying users stay after the old models die. Whether Universal and Sony treat v6 as irrelevant to damages for past copying. Whether Warner’s promised artist opt-in product actually ships. Whether GEMA’s German win becomes a European pattern.