There’s little question that SUNO, and products like it, will change the way music is produced at scale. Sure, we can have the discussion about what’s best for music, for listeners, for society, but let’s not imagine AI won’t continue to play a larger and larger role in music production and, for better or worse, generate an increasingly greater share of new music going forward. We can discuss “human-made” certification on music that doesn’t want to support AI-slop. Overall, it’s hard for me, so far at least, not to be excited for those songwriters who lack a vehicle or an outlet, and who perhaps don’t play a dozen instruments like Paul McCartney did on “Maybe I’m Amazed.” Meanwhile, I’ll be far more moved when a great horn player finds the right intonation on the right note at the right time, and less moved when AI does it. But how many inspired people are out there who never got piano lessons but want to write songs and share their ideas? What’s good for that society?
When MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) was introduced, it connected drum machines to synthesizers in a daisy chain so they could play together, with or without a human. The great Joe Zawinul said about MIDI, “Any idiot can pull the trigger now” (or something like that), and the parallels are obvious. More and more music will sound however it does because AI will be central to the creative process. Musicians of all skill levels are going to use it to make masterpieces and just have fun.
Suno gives them wings. Musicologists get questions.
Wrote some lyrics? Suno will produce the finished song. If you wrote both music and lyrics—maybe you play some guitar or piano—Suno will turn that into a polished recording of your song, often well beyond your hopes. Those songwriters, until recently unable to share with friends and family, much less Spotify, suddenly can. Headlines, correctly but misleadingly, blare “no copyright for AI-created works.” So the worried or confused creators reach out to a musicologist. So this is partly for them.
You’re a creator.
Let’s start there. You’re a creator. You still own your songs, or at least the part you wrote and provided to Suno. Whether you registered them with the Copyright Office or not, your work is protected by copyright once it was in fixed form. The cassette from the 80’s, the spiral notebook you wrote the lyrics in, the GarageBand aiff output; they all count. Now’s a good time to clarify that Musicologize is a forensic musicology service, and I am not a lawyer. So, this isn’t legal advice. With that said, nothing in Suno’s terms disturbs your authorship of the underlying compositions. However, what uploading did was grant Suno a license, and it’s a broad one to my eyes. If I were a lawyer… yowsa. It is worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, and sublicensable, and it permits Suno to use your recordings, modify them, build derivative works on them, and use them to improve its models, indefinitely, without payment. There is no mechanism for taking it back.
Suno’s Terms of Service grant the company, over your uploads and everything generated from them:
“a worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid-up, sublicensable (directly and indirectly through multiple tiers), assignable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, store, modify, distribute, create derivative works based on, perform, display, communicate, transmit and otherwise make available any and all Content (in whole or in part)”
Suno Terms of Service
The permitted uses are broad too:
“in connection with the provision, use, monetization, promotion, marketing, and improvement of our products and services, including the Service and the artificial intelligence and machine learning models related to the Service”
Suno Terms of Service
Training? You bet. The terms also have users “irrevocably waive any and all so-called ‘moral rights’.” Moral rights are interesting, but I’m not getting into it here. The point is, they covered themselves well. Canceling a subscription or deleting an account leaves all of this in place.
What do you still own?
The compositions. Your melodies and lyrics remain yours to do with what you want. Because the license is non-exclusive, you can still record your songs, publish them, license them to anyone, and register them with the Copyright Office.
The material Suno layered on top, be that a lot or a little, does not become yours, nor anyone’s at all. The Copyright Office declines to register machine-generated material, so the AI-built arrangement and production layers effectively have no author and aren’t registrable. The registrable work remains the underlying song you wrote, as Musicologize covered in Can I Copyright a Song I Made with AI?
Whether you’ve done some of this already, or are considering it
The free tier will accept uploads of your own audio, up to a minute of it, and your own lyrics. Paid tiers take uploads up to eight minutes. Consider that trade. You grant the perpetual license. Suno claims ownership (not copyright) of the version it makes and limits you to personal, non-commercial use of it, with attribution to Suno, on a recording of your own composition. And then there’s all the training stuff; your upload works for Suno’s model indefinitely. What you get back is a recording to share with friends and family. Again, that’s free, and pretty darned cool.
The ownership claim reaches only the file Suno produced, to which they have your license, which lets them perform, distribute, and monetize the file with your underlying, and still copyrighted, song included, royalty-free. The derivative-works grant means they can also, if they wanted, make a new recording of your composition, or sublicense someone else to, royalty-free, forever. That’s worth a pause. They hold no copyright in the file. But against them, you might as well not either. Your license lets them remake your song. But think about the word “copyright.” You still have the right to copy, just not exclusively anymore. That underlying composition stays yours on any tier, and you remain free to record and sell the song yourself.
As for that particular Suno-made version, commercial rights come with the paid tiers. If it matters, a track made on the free plan appears to stay non-commercial even if you upgrade later. In short, anyone releasing Suno-assisted work should know which plan was active when each track was made.
Again, I’m not a lawyer, but the license appears to be quite settled. So, before you feed it a finished demo, or another one and another one, consider all that.
Aside, register your works.
I said earlier your creations are copyright protected even if you didn’t register them, but you can’t do much in the way of enforcing that unless you’ve registered them, so here’s a reminder. Your human-authored compositions can be registered, up to twenty at a time for one fee under GRAM. And as for present day AI matters, original recordings, dated, in their original files, establish that the songs preceded these machines, so they are worth preserving and registering exactly as they are.
To boot, if a Suno-assisted version of your song is headed for commercial release and happens to be carrying material that for whatever reason infringes another human’s copyrighted song, well, that is a clearance question better answered before release than after.
What’s their game?
Why on earth would I grant Suno, or any other AI, derivative rights in a song I wrote, royalty-free, in perpetuity? Do I imagine they’ll actually take my upload and build a substantially similar work? No, I don’t. I suspect they’re being prudent against claims more than against an intent to infringe. If my song were a hit, I doubt they would suffer the outrage and brand erosion I’d expect if they were to reproduce it, derive from it, and print money from my established hit. But the fact is, it would appear they can if they want to. I’ve given them Lucid Dreams-type power. (I’m Sting in this scenario.) That’s the nightmare — you create a hit song somehow, say Record Of The Year, and arguably Suno now has the right to create a derivative work from it. They’re effectively claim-proof, because the license leaves nothing to sue over.
I don’t even necessarily expect Suno has thought of that. I’m inclined to think they’re just trying to foreclose on specious claims. But that’s how I read it, a “Lucid Dreams Nightmare Clause.”
So, what do you want to do, songwriter? What do you get and what do you give up? You get a finished version you can put on Spotify and monetize to the moon, or just show your friends and family. You still own your song, so if someone substantially copies it, you can still defend your copyright of the song. You can’t defend the extra-compositional or arrangement elements that Suno added to it, but to the extent that they aren’t substantially tied to your composition, for all sorts of musicological reasons, you probably couldn’t anyway. I’d say you don’t lose much there.
The likelier cost is, I’m inclined to think, far more benign. Your song becomes part of the model’s vocabulary, surfacing in tiny fragments in other people’s outputs, uncompensated and untraceable, but practically undetectable and insignificant.
I’m still not a lawyer.
Bottom line
The songs are still yours. The recordings you uploaded now also live inside Suno’s systems under a license that covers training and cannot be revoked, granted to a company currently in court over what it trains on, to say nothing of the court of public opinion. My benign expectations are not shared universally. And as I consider all of this, I’m trying to imagine a future world, maybe not all that far off, in which 99% of all published music is subject to a lot of these licenses.
It’s August 2026. Lots, including the platform’s terms, may change, so check the current version before relying on any specific clause. Moreover, this is general information, not legal advice for your specific situation.
Need a forensic musicologist?
For clearance on an AI-assisted track before release for example, Musicologize works with songwriters, independent labels, and music attorneys.
Email: brianmcbrearty@gmail.com
Phone: (212) 217-9512
Schedule a consultation: musicologize.com/contact
FAQ
Q: Does Suno own my music if I upload it?
A: No. Your copyright stays with you. But uploading grants Suno a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free license to use, modify, and build on the recording, including for training its models. Copyright of the composition never moves but a lot of what gives it power, against Suno, is licensed away.
Q: Can Suno train its AI on my uploaded songs?
A: Yes. The Terms of Service license covers use of uploaded content for “improvement” of Suno’s services, “including the artificial intelligence and machine learning models related to the Service.”
Q: Can I undo the license by deleting my account?
A: No. The license is perpetual and irrevocable by its terms. Canceling a subscription or deleting an account leaves permissions already granted over uploaded content in place.
Q: Do I own the songs Suno generates from my uploads?
A: The parts you wrote remain registrable. The machine’s contributions are not registrable by anyone. On paid tiers, Suno assigns you some rights around the output audio.
