Warner Music Group signed a licensing agreement with AI music company Suno on Tuesday, forming a new partnership that effectively settles the music licensing company’s $500 million copyright infringement lawsuit against the latter.
The lawsuit was initially filed by WMG alongside Universal Music Group and Sony Music last summer. UMG and Sony’s sects of the lawsuit are still ongoing.
The deal aims to bring together Suno’s leading AI music capabilities with WMG’s access to artists and artist development tools. Suno is an AI-powered music generation platform that allows users to create their own songs with text prompts that describe the lyrics and style of the intended final product.
Suno said its primary goal with the WMG partnership is to “build a future where everyone can share in the joy of creating new music.” Suno intends to roll out more features for AI music creation and features for users to interact with real-life musicians themselves.
“This landmark pact with Suno is a victory for the creative community that benefits everyone,” Robert Kyncl, CEO of Warner Music Group, said. “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.”
As part of the partnership, Suno will make several changes to its platform in 2026, including launching new, more advanced and licensed models. Moving forward, downloading audio from Suno will require a paid account and users will have restrictions on downloads. Songs made from the free tier will not be downloadable and will instead just be playable and shareable. Paying users will have limited monthly caps on song downloads.
Suno also acquired WMG’s Songkick, a concert-discovery platform. This collaboration will seek to “deepen the artist-fan connection” and “bring together interactive music with live performance,” according to the platforms.
“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,” Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno, added. “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.”
Suno already has a network of 100 million music makers using the tools on its platform. The WMG collaboration will serve as a means to expand that user base and provide more advanced tools.
This agreement comes just one week after Universal Music Group forged a licensing deal with Udio, who was also sued by the leading music companies in a similar lawsuit. As part of that deal, Udio has shifted its strategy to become a fan-engagement platform where users can play with UMG copyrights whose artists opted into the deal.
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