Suno has released its next-generation model family, v6, and announced that every previous model is being retired as the entire platform moves onto this generation. In its announcement, the company said v6 was “developed together with industry partners,” naming Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe.
The lineup splits into three tiers. v6 is aimed at Pro and Premier subscribers, with Suno describing it as reliable, controllable and polished enough to be a finished track. v6-wild also targets paying users but is pitched as more exploratory, with less predictable output meant for finding inspiration. v6-mini is open to everyone and runs faster — it's what free-tier users get.
The most concrete item on the feature list is editing
Among the new capabilities in the announcement, several have less to do with generation and more with post-production.
First is localized rewriting: a natural-language instruction can change a single word or line in the lyrics while leaving the rest of the song untouched, without regenerating the whole track. Second is sampling and stem separation: pull one instrument out of a piece of material and build a new beat around it. Third is multi-source remixing, combining elements from different tracks.
Input has also been widened to four types: text, audio, image and video. A voice memo, a photo or a video clip can all serve as the starting point for a song. Suno's own description of the model is that v6 better understands the language and building blocks musicians actually use — from vocals and instrumentation to structure and mood.
The announcement gives no specifics on the training dataset, model parameters or length limits, nor does it lay out a retirement timeline for the older models.
A list of licensing deals, and a list of holdouts
Set against the backdrop of Suno's copyright litigation, the weight of this release falls on one word: licensing.
What's settled: Warner Music reached an agreement last year, BMG settled last month, and Believe has a licensing deal in hand. What's still open: the lawsuits from major labels Sony Music and Universal Music haven't concluded, country singer Jason Isbell's individual suit is still active, and a separate user class action accuses Suno of neglecting security safeguards during a data breach.
Chief product officer Jack Brody framed the explanation in commercial terms: the music ecosystem and its partners have been looking for ways to generate more revenue for rights holders and artists. That explains why the labels came to the table, but it doesn't explain the revenue-split terms, license duration or scope — none of those terms have been made public, so there's no way for outsiders to verify how much of v6's training data is actually licensed.
The company has raised more than $819 million to date. Money at that scale is, in part, meant to fund deals like these.
Seen from China, the path looks different
The AI music products Chinese-speaking users have had access to over the past two years took a very different route from Suno's.
Alibaba's AI music product Kuaile Xiami and ByteDance's integration of its Gege feature into its own distribution system are products that grew up inside a platform from day one: the song library, distribution channels and settlement relationships all sat within the same company, so there was never a step where it got sued first and licensed the music afterward. Suno started as an independent company from outside the industry, building the product first and negotiating licenses later — at the cost of three years of litigation and settlements negotiated label by label.
The two paths also produce different things. The batch of products in China behaves more like a platform feature, with most of what users create staying inside the app. Suno sells subscriptions, and its output is meant to be taken elsewhere and used, so the rights chain has to be sorted out independently. Putting the names of its licensing partners into the release announcement is Suno's way of addressing exactly that — whether the things paying users make can be used commercially is a question that has been hanging unresolved until now.
For users in China, v6-mini being free to use is a direct change, assuming it's accessible. Whether the list of licensing partners keeps growing will likely be signaled first by how the Sony and Universal cases turn out.
Sources: Suno's official announcement, CocoLoop, TechCrunch, Variety; the official announcement was used to verify the scope of the three tiers and the feature list, while media reports were used to verify the list of settled and unsettled parties and the cumulative funding figure.