What Warner Music's Suno Deal Actually Means for Independent Artists

In November 2025, Warner Music Group settled its lawsuit against Suno and announced a partnership with the AI music platform. The press releases called it a landmark. A victory for the creative community. A new era. Nobody explained what it means for the artists who aren't on Warner's roster — which is most artists. We'll try to do that here.

The short answer: it's complicated, and the complexity cuts in opposite directions depending on where you're standing. If you're a signed Warner artist, there's a version of this that works in your favour. If you're independent — self-releasing, no label, building your own catalogue — the picture is different. Not catastrophic, but different. And worth understanding clearly.

What actually happened

In June 2024, the RIAA filed copyright infringement lawsuits against both Suno and Udio on behalf of the major labels, alleging that both platforms had trained their AI models on vast amounts of copyrighted recordings without permission. Suno's defence was, essentially, fair use. The labels disagreed strongly.

By November 2025, Warner had settled with both platforms. The Suno deal in particular was framed as a partnership — not just a legal resolution. Suno would retire the old models trained on unlicensed data and replace them with licensed alternatives, built using Warner's catalogue. Warner artists would get an opt-in mechanism: the choice to allow their voice, name, likeness, and compositions to be used in AI-generated music, in exchange for compensation. Suno also acquired Songkick from Warner as part of the deal. Universal and Sony remain in litigation with Suno as of the time of writing.

The financial terms were not disclosed. They never are. Which is one of the first things to notice.

Who this actually protects

The deal protects Warner's artists. It creates an opt-in framework for them — meaningful control, the right to say yes or no, and presumably some form of revenue when their voice or style is used. That's not nothing. For a major artist whose catalogue is commercially valuable, this matters.

But the deal was negotiated by Warner, for Warner's catalogue. It does not extend to the hundreds of thousands of independent artists whose music was also, almost certainly, part of Suno's original training data. Class action lawsuits from independent musicians were filed separately in late 2025, seeking to represent artists with registered copyrights whose work was used without permission. Those cases are still live. That fight isn't over.

Independent musicians and smaller labels who aren't covered by this agreement still face the reality that their work may have already been used to train previous models. The opt-in framework that Warner secured applies to new, licensed models going forward — not what came before.

There's also the question of the free tier. One of the structural changes that came out of the deal: Suno's free users can no longer download their creations. Paid users get download caps. Songs made on a free account cannot be monetised, even if you later upgrade. These aren't incidental details — they represent a tightening of the platform that reflects label priorities more than creator priorities.

The Kyncl argument — and why it's worth taking seriously

Robert Kyncl, Warner's CEO, made a more substantive case than the press releases suggested. Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference in early 2026, he argued that AI-driven music creation will ultimately shift royalties from a market-share model — where value is distributed proportionally based on total streams — to an attribution model, where value accrues based on which specific works influenced an AI output.

In a market-share world, streaming revenue is divided by how much of total listening you account for. In an attribution world, if your song is the thing that shaped a generation of AI outputs, you get paid accordingly. Kyncl's argument is that this rewards quality and cultural weight — and that major label catalogues, being the most recognisable and iconic, would benefit most.

He's probably right about the mechanism. Where he's less forthcoming is about what that means for the artists who built that iconic catalogue — and whether the labels' variable licensing deals actually flow down to them in a meaningful way. The structure of the deals is variable revenue-share, not flat fee. When Suno grows, Warner grows. When Warner grows, artists and shareholders grow. That chain has a lot of links in it, and not all of them pay equally.

What this means if you're building your own catalogue now

Here's where we have a genuine stake in this question, and we'll be straight about it. We run FARA Records. We use Suno to produce music. We are exactly the kind of entity this industry is arguing about. So let's be clear about where we stand.

The Warner deal signals that the major labels have decided to work with AI platforms rather than fight them to the end. That's a significant shift. It means the legal landscape is moving toward licensing frameworks, not bans. For anyone building a catalogue using these tools, that's broadly good news — it suggests the tools themselves will continue to exist and develop, rather than being legislated out of existence.

What it doesn't resolve is the question of creative rights on the output side. Suno's updated terms confirm that the platform retains what it describes as ultimate responsibility for the music generated. You get commercial rights as a paid user. You probably don't hold copyright in the traditional sense. That distinction — between the right to monetise and the right to own — is one that will play out in courts and contracts for years.

For us, this isn't a deterrent. The creative authorship — the concepts, the lyrics, the direction, the story, the decision about what to say and how to say it — that's ours. The instrument changed. The authorship didn't. We've been saying this since we started, and nothing in the Warner-Suno deal changes it.

The thing Kyncl got right that nobody's talking about

There was one line in his Morgan Stanley remarks that we keep coming back to. He talked about discoverability — the problem of an era where anyone can release music, and the result is a world of what he called "unlimited noise." Democratised distribution gives everyone a voice. The same voices get lost in the volume.

He was making this point to argue for the continued relevance of major labels and their infrastructure. We take a different conclusion from it. The answer to noise is not a gatekeeper deciding who gets heard. The answer is identity — a sonic fingerprint that is specific, differentiated, and genuinely yours. Something that stands out because it has something to say, not because a label bought it onto a playlist.

That's what we're building with SPATIALx Media, and what we're teaching through the Synthetic Artist Programme. The tools to make music are now available to everyone. The harder question — and the more important one — is what you have to say with them.

The Warner-Suno deal is the beginning of a legal framework, not the end of a question. Independent artists still have cases in court. The attribution model Kyncl describes is theoretical — the infrastructure to implement it doesn't exist yet. And the most significant creative questions — who owns what you make, what counts as authorship, what makes a song real — remain entirely open.

We're watching all of it. And we're making music anyway.

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