Culture
Suno Sold Commercial Rights to Models It Hasn't Replaced Yet
The WMG settlement required Suno to retire its unlicensed models and ship licensed replacements. Five months later those models have not arrived, Believe says Warner's deal has no bearing on its own licensing requirements, and the two majors still suing Suno are in discovery with no settlement in sight.
JMcozzoli had five submissions flagged and his TuneCore account locked before Believe publicly named Suno as a prohibited platform on April 30. The detection was already running. The announcement formalized a public taxonomy: Suno designated as an unlicensed "pirate studio," ElevenLabs and Udio cleared through separately negotiated deals with Believe, giving every other distributor a named policy framework to adopt or resist. The affected creator class is specific: independent musicians on Suno's paid commercial tier, a $10-per-month subscription that, per Suno's stated terms, grants distribution rights for tracks generated on current models. On the same day, Spotify launched a "Verified by Spotify" badge confirming AI-generated and AI-persona artists are not eligible.
The November 2025 WMG settlement did not clear the models those subscribers are actually using. Suno dropped its fair-use defense and agreed to build replacement models trained on licensed WMG catalog; existing models v3.5, v4, and v5 would be deprecated when those licensed versions shipped. WMG CEO Robert Kyncl announced the deal on November 25, 2025. As of May 2026, those replacements have not arrived, more than five months after the announcement. Subscribers generating tracks today use v5, the unlicensed model the settlement promised to retire.
JMcozzoli, a composer who publishes under the Zombos' Closet catalog, had 23 tracks on TuneCore as a Pro subscriber. Five flagged submissions locked his account weeks before Believe named the policy publicly. He posted to LinkedIn: "After five flagged submissions, you're toast with them (that's out of my 23)." No dashboard path exists to contest a detection; notifications arrive as automated email. He did not disclose stream counts or royalties for the flagged tracks. Spotify's Loud and Clear 2026 report pegs rights-holder yield at roughly $11,000 per million streams; reaching the roughly 9,000 annual streams needed to gross $100 requires months of sustained promotion a blocked track will never get to attempt. His subscription granted commercial rights that his distributor had already declined to honor, five times over.
Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment are still pursuing separate copyright claims against Suno, and neither is close to resolution. As of April 9, settlement talks between UMG and Suno hit a hard impasse; UMG is in active discovery, seeking the terms of Warner's deal as a court filing, with trial expected in late 2026. Sony's fair-use case is on a parallel track, with a precedent-setting ruling anticipated in summer 2026. A WMG-style deal with either major would not satisfy Believe's requirements in any case: ElevenLabs and Udio were each cleared only after signing licensing agreements with Believe directly, independent of any label relationship. Suno has signed nothing with Believe. CEO Denis Ladegaillerie told Music Business Worldwide the WMG deal had "no link at all, honestly" to his company's decision, and told Music Ally that Believe did not understand why other distributors were not blocking tracks "that create real potential liability."
The distribution route most Suno commercial users rely on, DistroKid, which Music Business Worldwide puts at roughly 75% of Suno-distributed releases, remains open as of May 2026. Tracks can still reach Spotify through that channel. Spotify's Verified badge exclusion applies regardless of which distributor submitted them, capping what a Suno-origin release can achieve on the dominant platform however it arrives. Whether DistroKid's current posture holds as the UMG and Sony cases move toward trial is the question Believe's April 30 announcement left unanswered.