Only six months ago, GenAI music platform Suno announced a $250m Series-C funding round. That valued the company at $2.45bn and took its total funding (post seed and Series A rounds) to $375M. Now, Billboard reports, Suno is looking for another round of funding – that’s Series-D for those of you keeping track – and is looking to raise even more money than last time. That new round would apparently value it at over $5bn: for a very rough comparison point, WMG’s market capitalisation is just over $14.5B.
One possibly juicy detail in the Billboard piece is the suggestion that “multiple” music industry investors have been investing in Suno in each round so far, and will be involved in the new one too – whilst publicly keeping their support of the platform a secret. Who are they? Well, some are not so secretive: we already know that Hallwood Media, which counts Neil Jacobson (ex-President of Geffen Records) Chuck Ciongoli (former CFO of Universal Music Group) and Mike Biggane (former EVP at Universal and ex-head of global curation at Spotify) amongst its team, is a key investor, and one that is bullish on the future of AI music, having signed AI artists like Xania Monet.
Nearly 50% of the hundreds of millions hoped to be raised are earmarked for keeping the operation functional: 30% would go on computing power (that’s new processors and servers) and 15% would be spent on data (presumably the music and metadata used to train the models in the first place.) That latter figure of 15% (plus a further 5% slated for “partnerships”) will be of interest to the music industry – because assuming Suno raises at least the same amount of money as the last Series-C round, that 15% would mean that Suno values the data it needs to keep growing its music-making model at around $40m. The question is: is that a lot of money, or not very much in the scheme of things?
A few weeks ago, Deezer revealed that 75,000 AI generated tracks are uploaded to its platform (and, likely, other DSPs) each day. That’s 44% of all tracks. The 50% barrier – the one that makes human music uploads a minority – is looming large. So, here’s a snapshot of streaming in 2026: tracks generated by AI are flooding the platforms that hundreds of millions pay to listen to music – and that the music industry relies on for income.
Some of the key questions, as ever, are: who wants this AI generated music, in which ways do they want it delivered to listeners, and why do they want it to exist? From a traditional music industry perspective, these answers are knotty, multi-dimensional, and existentially philosophical – although it it’s clear that some in the music biz are feeding money into the very AI machine that poses those questions. It’s easier to answer them from a Suno perspective, though: the platform has over 2m paying subscribers, giving the platform $300m in annual recurring revenues.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source musically.com ’
