Three models, and a deliberate break with the old ones
Suno released three new music generation models on 9 September: v6, v6-mini and v6-wild. According to Music Ally, v6 is the premium-quality model for paying subscribers, v6-mini is a faster and more efficient version aimed at free users, and v6-wild is an experimental model built for niche genres and artistic exploration.
The more consequential decision is what Suno did to its back catalogue of models. It retired all of them. The company’s stated reason is to establish a clean legal boundary between the legacy generation and the new one.
Trained on catalogue the company licensed
Suno says v6 was retrained from scratch on a new dataset built from music licensed from Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, together with user-generated data and the company’s own accumulated technical work. Revenue sharing with the licensed partners starts immediately rather than at some later milestone.
An opt-in remix feature is also planned, which the company says will let artists earn when their work is remixed on the platform.
The company’s argument about what a licence buys
Suno’s chief product officer Jack Brody made a point of playing down the training data itself. “The wrong way to think about these partnerships is that they are about the data,” he said, arguing that “the vast majority of what makes a model great” is the technical work of the team.
That is a convenient position for a company that spent years training on material it had not licensed, and it is also a real claim about where model quality comes from. Both things can be true. What has changed is that the licence now exists, and the models trained without one have been switched off.
What else is new, and what to watch
The release also brings natural-language editing: instead of adjusting parameters, a user can ask for a change in plain words — Music Ally’s example is “change the chorus so it’s sung by a gospel choir”. v6-wild exists because models tuned on popular music converge on mainstream taste, and the company is offering a less commercially tuned option for work that does not want that.
TechCrunch framed the release against the copyright litigation stacking up around AI music. The thing to watch is what rights holders are actually paid. Suno has not disclosed the rate, and a revenue share with an undisclosed denominator is not yet a market price.
