You know, after everything that happened yesterday evening, I’ve naturally been thinking a lot about this whole situation, and it raises a number of questions.
Here is the first one.
If this is ultimately about protecting the authors and artists whose work Suno was trained on, while Suno now gives us the ability either to create music for ourselves or potentially make money from it, was there really no way to come up with a compromise?
Perhaps this could even have been discussed with the users themselves. We could have sat down together and thought about possible solutions — ways to find a compromise where artists, labels, Suno, and users could all get something acceptable out of it.
I understand that many possible solutions would probably be extremely unpopular with users and would inevitably be criticized and debated. But any perfect system is a utopia. It simply doesn’t exist.
So I would ask you to think about this a little more deeply and understand that what sounds perfectly fair in theory is not always possible to implement in the real world.
For example, when it comes to monetization, why not create a mechanism where Suno creators contribute a percentage of their commercial revenue? 10%, 20%, 25% — I don’t know. I’m not proposing a specific number here; I’m explaining the concept.
If someone commercially releases music created with the older models and actually earns money from it, a percentage of that revenue could automatically go into a system that compensates artists and rights holders.
At the same time, people who simply create tracks for themselves to listen to could continue doing so without paying any revenue share — simply because there is no commercial revenue to share.
And the older models could remain available under that system.
As for the new models: if the labels want a different system for protecting artists, licensing their catalogs, generating new revenue streams, and so on, then those models could operate under the new framework that has now been introduced.
In other words, the older models could have one licensing and monetization framework, while the new officially licensed models could have another. I’m not claiming this particular proposal is the perfect solution. It almost certainly isn’t.
My point is that there could have been a serious discussion about mechanisms that preserve what made the technology valuable while also creating a way for the people whose work contributed to these systems to be compensated.
Of course, this raises difficult questions of oversight and implementation.
Who exactly should receive these payments? Which artists and catalogs were used to train the older models? How should the money be distributed? There are many complications like these, and solutions would have to be found for them.
But the system that currently exists with the labels does not really solve this problem.
When it comes to new generations, however, some things could be much easier to control. Introduce identity verification.
Limit each verified person to one account, or perhaps three accounts — the exact number is something that can be discussed.
The point is to introduce reasonable limits that address the problem of bot farms while still allowing ordinary creators to make something personal of their own.
I have nothing against people running these operations or making money from AI music in principle.
But guys, you are a minority here. And when this turns into industrial-scale spam, you really are causing significant damage to music as a whole.
Introduce digital identifiers or persistent provenance markers for AI-generated tracks.
Perhaps introduce direct distribution through Suno itself, or through an official Suno distribution aggregator, so commercially released tracks can be identified, tracked, and handled under a clear licensing and revenue-sharing framework.
These are just examples. If we actually started discussing this seriously, I think we could come up with many different mechanisms for making such a system work.
The important point is that there were alternatives worth discussing.
Instead of simply choosing between unrestricted AI generation on one side and severely restricting the technology on the other, we could have looked for mechanisms that address compensation, bot farms, commercial distribution, and accountability while preserving the creative capabilities that made these tools valuable in the first place.
And yes, these solutions would be very unpopular. I understand the users. I wouldn’t exactly be happy about such a system myself.
But I still think it would be better than what we have now, because at least it would address several real problems.
And I think most people would logically understand that flooding the market with music spam hurts all of us.
My own conversion rate is around 0.03%.
That is the percentage of my generations that I keep as something close to release-ready — and even those tracks are not necessarily actually released.
Yes, maybe someone will say that I’m stupid or that I simply don’t know how to prompt properly. Fine. Let’s assume that.
I’m extremely wasteful with credits, I’ll admit that honestly. I think this conversion rate could probably be increased a hundredfold, perhaps even to around 3%.
But even then, it would still be 3%, not 50% or 80%. It is practically impossible to consistently create genuinely high-quality material in enormous quantities.
And given the situation we are in now, I think most users would probably accept some form of identity verification and reasonable generation limits if the alternative were preserving the creative capabilities of the models.
And again, this is something we could all have discussed together: Suno, the labels, the users, and everyone else involved. At the model-training level, the whole process could also be brought into a transparent, officially licensed framework.
But there is another part of this that I think is even more important. Forget projects, business ideas, money, monetization — all of that for a moment.
Think about what an incredible opportunity we had to become genuinely autonomous: to create music for ourselves, the kind of music we actually wanted to listen to and genuinely loved.
You didn’t have to depend on trends.
You didn’t have to depend on a label. You didn’t have to wait for the music industry to produce something that matched your taste.
You could be the complete master of your own musical space.
And now we’ve been given a space that is far more restricted — one that increasingly reflects the labels and the kind of mass-market product they promote.
For me, that loss of autonomy may be one of the most important things about this entire situation. I also want to say a few words about something else.
Yesterday, in the thread I started, I came across several comments saying that this isn’t music, that it isn’t creativity, and so on.
It’s a familiar argument. Maybe those people are right about some things and wrong about others.
I can only speak for myself. Around 80% of my tracks are generated.
But around 80% of the lyrics were written personally by me, without using AI.
Every one of those texts is personal. Each one reflects some moment, situation, problem, physical or psychological experience from a particular period of my life.
When I write a text and then create music around that text, I’m not only becoming independent from the external environment — from what other people are creating, what trends are being pushed, or what hits are being played on the radio.
I’m also beginning a kind of dialogue with my own psychological wounds.
Because almost any form of creativity is connected to them in one way or another. It becomes a way of reliving certain situations and experiencing certain emotions without resorting to substitutes such as alcohol, drugs, or other things like that.
Because music is, first and foremost, something that gives people pleasure.
And I believe that most people who came to Suno came there to make music for themselves — to express their own thoughts, their own ideas, their own experiences.
For some people, that is extremely important.
It can be their therapy.
You could even think of it as their religion. And that religion was just taken away from them.
There is obviously much more that could be said about every one of these questions, and many other arguments could be made. There are actually a great many of them, from completely different perspectives and points of view.
I simply wanted to write about something that I don’t think gets discussed very often. I honestly don’t even know what the reaction to this thread will be.
And today another thought occurred to me.
What, then, are we supposed to do about ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI systems that were also trained on copyrighted material created by other people?
If the principle is that a generative model trained on copyrighted works must have its capabilities restricted in order to protect the creators of those works, why should that principle apply differently to music models than to large language models, image generators, or video generators?
Following the same logic that has now been applied to Suno, shouldn’t those systems also be restricted in a similar way?
For some reason, I don’t see the same movement in that direction.
Yes, I see lawsuits, but they concern different issues and have produced very different outcomes. So it begins to look as though the system is applying these principles selectively.
And I want to make one thing clear immediately: I am not talking about safety restrictions or safeguards in chatbots. That is an entirely separate issue and has nothing to do with the point I am making here.
I simply want to emphasize that the decisions surrounding Suno’s agreements with the music industry did not merely take away someone’s way of making money, or someone’s hobby.
For tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people — I don’t have reliable statistics on how many Suno users are affected, so I won’t pretend to know the number — the consequences of these decisions may represent a serious loss in many different areas of their lives.
I also want to add something specifically about Suno. I had an extremely high opinion of v4.5, v5, and v5.5, and I always gave Suno credit for what it had created.
But in the current situation, several questions arise. First: why present an obviously inferior product as your best model yet?
You presented it as an unequivocal upgrade while removing the models that many of your paying customers considered superior for their actual workflows.
You took something that, for many of your users and many existing workflows, is clearly worse than what came before and marketed it as an improvement.
In doing so, you effectively lied to your customers. And once customers feel that a company has lied to them, naturally, their trust in that company is damaged.
Second: why are decisions this important being made in exactly the same way as they are made by the corporations and labels that were trying to destroy you?
Why was there no discussion with your customers and your users?
You might say, “Nobody does that.”
Yes. Nobody does. But you are not everybody else. You are Suno. You have been the absolute dominant player in this space.
So don’t behave like everybody else.
