The open letter I wrote Suno’s Mikey Shulman earlier this month drew quite the reaction.
I meant every word. So… good.
Yet perhaps the most pertinent section of the missive – tackling Suno’s licensing agreement with Warner Music Group – has generated the least conversational heat.
Allow me to reiterate: It’s now been 114 days since Suno and WMG jointly announced that their war was over.
A legal case against the former by the latter was settled. And Suno promised, publicly, that 2026 would see it launch “new, more advanced and licensed models” based on WMG’s content.
“When the new models launch in 2026,” pledged a Suno press release dated November 25, 2025, “[Suno’s] current models will be deprecated.”
We’re now nearly a quarter of the way through 2026. No new models have emerged. Suno V5, an unlicensed model, continues to power the platform.
There’s been no “deprecation” of any kind. Certainly no self-deprecation, judging by Shulman’s latest preening infomercial – a filmed interview with Billboard published earlier this week.
“What we did was legal,” he says with a smirk, referencing Suno’s training process.
Hmm.
What Suno actually ‘did’ was harvest “tens of millions of recordings” without permission – “presumably including” a mass of tracks “whose rights are owned” by the major labels.
Those are Suno’s own words, from a 2024 legal filing.
So when Shulman claims “what we did was legal”, he really means: We’re trying to slip the noose of copyright litigation via a ‘fair use’ smokescreen that absolves mass piracy.
That strategy is now set to be rigorously tested across multiple juridical systems, not least in the United States.
Universal and Sony, of course, continue to sue Suno for copyright infringement, with no abatement in sight.
My sources suggest these two companies are currently significantly closer to “we’ll see you in court” than they are “give us some equity and let’s move on”.
From Suno’s side, the music biz could be argued to be presenting a paradox in this matter.
On the one hand, when attacking gen-AI platforms, the industry argues that copyrighted music is protected under the law.
On the other hand, when hounded by the likes of Richard Busch (the lawyer famed for claiming hit songs have ripped off his clients’ material), it argues there are only 12 musical notes, and inspiration does not constitute infringement.
(Remember Ed Sheeran playing a guitar in a courtroom in 2023, being sued over Thinking Out Loud, to demonstrate how many beloved songs share the same four chords?)
With Suno, though, things are different.
The music industry isn’t arguing that Mikey Shulman’s engineers were inspired by recorded music. It’s arguing that they ingested it — wholesale, without permission, at industrial scale.
There’s a meaningful legal and moral distinction between an artist absorbing influences over a lifetime and a company systematically harvesting tens of millions of specific recordings to build a commercial product.
Which brings us back to the question: where is Suno’s WMG-cleared model?
Where’s V6?
Once again, a scroll through Suno’s own Reddit community tells its own story.
Users expecting the arrival of Suno’s V6 — the licensed, WMG-approved one — are running out of patience. One predicts it will arrive in “mid March or early April”; another fears being creatively neutered; a third has already decided they’ll cancel their subscription on its arrival.
My read?
For Suno, the WMG deal was never primarily about building a better model. It was about buying time — and, more specifically, buying a more sympathetic posture in court.
A signed licensing agreement with one of the three majors doesn’t settle the Universal and Sony litigation. But it does allow Shulman to sit before a camera and imply that the industry has, broadly, moved on.
It hasn’t. And the absence of V6 suggests that even Suno knows the hard part: actually building something that works within licensed constraints is considerably more difficult than announcing it.
That distinction matters. It’s why the WMG settlement doesn’t get Suno off the hook.
One licensing deal doesn’t launder a training dataset. Universal and Sony know it. Their lawyers know it.
Somewhere, I suspect, Mikey Shulman knows it too.
Music Business Worldwide
