Warner Music Group has announced a partnership with AI tech company Suno, which it sued last year – find out more below.
Last year, Warner and fellow major music labels Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group filed lawsuits against Suno and another AI company Udio for copyright violations of “an almost unimaginable scale”.
Suno is a company based in Massachusetts, which emerged in 2023 and claimed last year that over 10million people had already used it to create AI-assisted music. It operates on a subscription basis declared it raised $125million (£98.4m) from investors.
Per a Pitchfork report, Warner has signed a new licensing deal with Suno, which settles last year’s lawsuit. Additionally, Suno has now acquired concert listing platform Songkick from Warner as part of the deal.
The deal has reportedly been designed to introduce a licensed model into Suno’s offerings, making it such that users can pay to download songs that were made using AI. Pitchfork also reports that the deal ensures artists and songwriters who opt into AI deals with Warner and Suno will be compensated fairly, and will retain “full control” of their music, likeness and other copyright details, while also overseeing how AI uses their likeness.
As a result, Suno’s current liberal models are being phased out in favour of “new, more advanced and licensed models”. Meanwhile, UMG’s and SME’s litigations against Suno and Udio will proceed.
The partnership comes shortly after all three major labels signed a licensing deal with AI startup platform Klay, making it the first AI brand to be utilised by all three industry giants. The newly signed agreements “establish terms on which Klay will help further evolve music experiences for fans, leveraging the potential of AI, while fully respecting the rights of artists, songwriters, and rightsholders”.
The AI music startup also claims that it “is not a prompt-based meme generation engine,” but instead operates as a “new subscription product that will uplift great artists and celebrate their craft” and seeks to “enhance human creativity” rather than replace it.
Earlier this month, it was reported that a new study found that 97 per cent of people “can’t tell the difference” between real and AI music. A “first-of-its-kind” survey asked around 9,000 people from eight different countries around the world, to listen to three tracks to determine which was fully AI-generated.
The stats come during a period of continued controversy for AI technology in the music industry, with a recent study sharing the stark warning that people working in music are likely to lose a quarter of their income to Artificial Intelligence over the next four years.
In September, Spotify confirmed that it was cracking down on AI by removing 75million “spammy tracks” and targeting impersonators. This followed a report claiming that AI-generated songs were being uploaded to dead musicians’ Spotify profiles without permission.