The voice is heat. The manufacturing is clear. The lyrics are about eager for one thing simply out of attain, “into the blue” as one music has it, and the entire thing arrives pre-packed, like the concept of a report reasonably than one.
You add it to a playlist. You don’t suppose twice. You weren’t alleged to.
AI-generated music is now flooding streaming platforms at a scale that’s reshaping how music will get found, who will get paid, and what listeners suppose they’re listening to. Suno, one of many most important instruments making it doable, has spent the previous two years constructing a billion-dollar firm on the again of music it by no means licensed.
How It Sounds
Suno tracks within the neo-soul register are inclined to hit the identical place each time: a refrain that arrives precisely the place anticipated, a voice that sits accurately within the combine with out having to struggle for it.
The manufacturing breathes. Nothing is flawed. Nothing prices something both.
What is definitely lacking is more durable to call than folks recommend. It isn’t rawness. Loads of pristine, rigorously managed information are extraordinary.
It’s extra that actual recordings carry the hint of choices made below strain. A vocal take stored as a result of the singer was drained and it sounds that approach. A bass half that sits barely behind the beat as a result of the participant was listening to the equipment and responding to it.
Suno doesn’t have these pressures. The output is what the immediate requested for, which isn’t the identical factor as what the music wanted.
The inform in AI-generated vocals, not less than at the moment, is within the consistency. A human voice over 4 minutes shifts in methods the singer doesn’t select: the slight thinning on a observe held too lengthy, the place the place the consonant arrives barely early as a result of the phrase has been sung forty instances and behavior has crept in.
AI vocals keep stage. They ship. They don’t reveal something about who produced them, as a result of nobody did.
The Authenticity Argument, Which Is Largely a Unhealthy One
The quickest criticism of AI music is that it lacks soul as a result of nobody lived it. That is principally garbage, and the folks deploying it ought to know higher.
Brill Constructing writers within the early Sixties had been churning out teenage heartbreak songs from workplaces in Midtown Manhattan. Carole King was 17. Barry Mann was writing about emotions he was actively manufacturing for industrial sale.
The complete Northern Soul scene ran on American information made by skilled songwriters who had no explicit connection to the individuals who ended up dancing to them in Wigan at 3am.
Ghost-writing has been customary apply in hip-hop for many years, not as a scandal however as an business norm. If authenticity of origin had been the check, the canon would want vital revision.
The place the AI case is genuinely completely different is structural, not ethical. A ghost-writer makes decisions. A canopy model is an argument with the unique.
Take what Al Inexperienced did to “How Can You Mend a Damaged Coronary heart,” which the Bee Gees recorded first and Inexperienced’s model merely dismantled. There may be interpretation occurring, somebody listening to the music and deciding what it really is.
AI-generated lyrics are sample completion at scale. They produce the statistical form of longing. The bridge about discovering your self. The refrain that confirms the verse with out complicating it.
Not dishonest. Simply with out the friction that comes from somebody really attempting to say one thing and discovering it troublesome.
Whether or not that issues is a distinct dialog. The extra urgent downside just isn’t that AI music lacks depth. It’s that it floods a system already struggling to floor something.
What Suno Did and How It Justified It
Suno is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based AI music generator. Kind a immediate, obtain a monitor. By late 2025, it had been utilized by almost 100 million folks and raised $250 million at a valuation of $2.45 billion.
The coaching knowledge that made this doable included, by Suno’s personal admission in authorized filings, “tens of hundreds of thousands of recordings” it didn’t license.
The RIAA sued in 2024 on behalf of main labels. Suno admitted the unlicensed use 9 instances throughout these filings, then argued the outputs had been sufficiently completely different from the inputs to qualify as honest use.
Germany’s GEMA filed its personal swimsuit in January 2025. Denmark’s Koda adopted in November. A category motion from impartial artists launched in June 2025 is ongoing.
Warner Music settled in November 2025: obtain caps, licensed fashions, Suno buying the Songkick live performance discovery platform from Warner in the identical deal. Common and Sony are nonetheless in courtroom.
Paul Sinclair, Suno’s chief music officer and beforehand a two-decade veteran of Warner/Atlantic, posted on LinkedIn after Grammy week 2025 to say he had come away “extra satisfied than ever” that defending artists and empowering new creators weren’t in battle.
He in contrast what Suno had carried out to the rise of the iPod and iTunes. “The connection is usually messy,” he wrote.
The connection, on this framing, is a relationship between equals who had a disagreement. What really occurred is that Suno skilled on tens of hundreds of thousands of recordings with out asking, constructed a two-billion-dollar firm, then settled with the events giant sufficient to power a negotiation.
The impartial artists whose work nearly definitely made up nearly all of these tens of hundreds of thousands of recordings weren’t a part of that settlement. They’re nonetheless suing.
If one thing unhealthy occurs with an output Suno generates for a consumer, the contract makes clear it’s the consumer’s downside.
That is the factor Sinclair’s LinkedIn submit about empathy and pure cycles was written to obscure.
Key Questions About AI Music, Answered
Is Suno authorized?
Presently, sure, although that’s being contested in a number of courts. Suno argues its outputs don’t reproduce the recordings it skilled on and due to this fact don’t infringe copyright. The RIAA, Germany’s GEMA, Denmark’s Koda, and a category motion representing impartial artists all disagree. Warner Music settled with Suno in November 2025. Common and Sony are nonetheless litigating. The US Copyright Workplace’s Could 2025 report questioned whether or not AI coaching on copyrighted music qualifies as honest use, significantly when the outputs compete commercially with the originals.
Is AI music stealing?
Suno admitted in authorized filings that its mannequin skilled on tens of hundreds of thousands of recordings it didn’t license. Whether or not that constitutes theft in a authorized sense relies on how courts rule on honest use. What just isn’t disputed is that the music was used with out permission and with out fee. Unbiased artists whose work fashioned nearly all of that coaching knowledge have obtained nothing.
Does Spotify permit AI music?
Sure. Spotify doesn’t ban AI-generated music and has no obligatory labelling requirement. It has launched a spam filter focusing on mass uploads and fraudulent streams, and encourages voluntary AI disclosure through a credit customary. It eliminated 75 million spammy tracks in 2025 however has not dedicated to excluding absolutely AI-generated content material from suggestions. Deezer, against this, labels AI tracks, excludes them from algorithms, and withholds royalties from them.
Can AI music be monetised on streaming platforms?
Sure, on most platforms together with Spotify. Suno customers on paid plans can obtain and commercially distribute their generated tracks, importing them to streaming companies topic to month-to-month caps. These tracks are eligible for royalty funds by means of customary distribution channels. Deezer is at the moment the one main platform that explicitly withholds royalties from absolutely AI-generated content material.
What Spotify Was Already Doing Earlier than This
Earlier than AI music turned the headline downside, streaming had already developed its personal model of it.
Spotify had been inserting low-cost tracks below pseudonymous artist names into algorithmically curated playlists below the banner of “good match content material,” accumulating streams with out paying out at label charges.
Liz Pelly documented this at size in her 2025 e book Temper Machine, and the apply predates generative AI by years.
The royalty pool mannequin, the place payouts go proportionally to complete streams reasonably than to the followers of particular artists, was already being gamed by content material farms working quick tracks timed to hit the 30-second monetisation threshold.
The purpose just isn’t that AI music broke one thing clear. The purpose is that AI music arrived right into a system already working a model of this logic, and made it sooner and cheaper by an order of magnitude.
The Numbers That Are Truly Unusual
Deezer has confirmed that round 28% of day by day uploads to its platform are absolutely AI-generated. These tracks account for 0.5% of precise streams.
Spotify, which eliminated 75 million “spammy” tracks in 2025 alone, has since introduced a spam filter, voluntary AI disclosure credit, and tightened impersonation insurance policies.
The measures got here after AI songs appeared on the profiles of Right here We Go Magic (inactive since 2015), Sophie (died 2021), and Blaze Foley (died 1989).
A faux AI act known as The Velvet Sunset amassed over 1,000,000 month-to-month listeners earlier than updating its bio to acknowledge it was “an artificial music venture guided by human inventive course.”
Sienna Rose, the neo-soul profile on the centre of the LA Instances story that circulated earlier this 12 months, had 45 songs uploaded in eight weeks, 4 million month-to-month Spotify listeners, and round 7,000 Instagram followers.
Sleep Token has 5.7 million month-to-month listeners and particular person songs sitting between 150 and 288 million performs. The connection between streaming numbers and social presence throughout an actual artist’s profession follows a logic that Sienna Rose doesn’t match.
Spotify’s spam filter will demote reasonably than take away. It is not going to mandate AI labelling, solely encourage voluntary disclosure.
Deezer goes additional: it labels AI-generated tracks, excludes them from editorial and algorithmic suggestions, and withholds royalty funds from them completely. Spotify has not dedicated to any of this.
Considered one of Spotify’s co-CEOs addressed the AI music wave straight, describing a rising catalogue as “at all times excellent for us” and stating that AI-generated music “attracts new customers, drives engagement, and builds fandom.”
The cultural second, the argument went, at all times occurs on Spotify no matter the place the music was made. Greater catalogues, extra customers, extra promoting income.
That may be a enterprise place, not a creative one, and it explains the hole between what Deezer is doing and what Spotify just isn’t.
What the Bio Nonetheless Says
The particular cost towards Suno just isn’t that it makes music. It’s that it constructed a enterprise value billions on recordings it by no means paid for, structured its contracts to move authorized legal responsibility to customers, settled solely with events giant sufficient to power it, and is at the moment describing all of this as business evolution.
There’s a separate query sitting beneath the copyright instances, and it issues Sienna Rose’s bio particularly.
Claiming {that a} non-existent particular person sings “each phrase with a way of reality and wonder” isn’t just unlabelled AI content material. It’s an lively misrepresentation to customers.
Music lawyer Crystal, representing impartial artists within the ongoing class motion towards Suno and Udio, has described this as client fraud: mendacity to the general public about what one thing is and the place it got here from.
The copyright query asks whether or not the coaching was authorized. The patron fraud query asks whether or not the product is being offered actually. These are completely different fights, and the second could also be more durable for the platforms to dismiss.
Guitar educator and YouTube commentator Rick Beato, who has been monitoring the AI music wave carefully, put the transparency argument within the easiest phrases: you need to know what you’re consuming, which is why substances go on packaging. Twizzlers says artificially flavoured. Sienna Rose’s Spotify bio doesn’t.
Beato’s full breakdown of the Sienna Rose case is value watching, as is the detailed examination of Suno’s authorized place and what its chief music officer’s public statements really imply in context.
The music feels like music. It feels like the concept of neo-soul. It feels like an unlimited quantity of recorded longing processed and returned within the form of longing.
The bio for Sienna Rose nonetheless describes her as “a storyteller at coronary heart, singing each phrase with a way of reality and wonder.” She has by no means been in a recording studio. She has by no means been wherever in any respect.
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In case you are an impartial artist whose music might have been used to coach an AI mannequin, IndieAiLawsuit.com is at the moment accepting claims as a part of the continued class motion towards Suno and Udio.
