Suno – one of the two music-generating AI companies sued by the major record companies for using copyrighted music without permission to train their models – has unveiled a new version of its AI music tool, which it says marks “a new era of AI music generation.”
The company also recently announced that it has named Jack Brody, the former Head of Product at Snap, as its Chief Product Officer.
While Suno has so far been known for being able to generate entire songs quickly from just a text prompt, the new Suno V4 is being marketed not only to aspiring music creators, but to content creators, game developers, and marketers.
Suno V4 can “create unique background music for videos, podcasts, and social media content,” the company said on a web page introducing the new tool. It can also generate “dynamic soundtracks and sound effects for gaming experiences,” including background music, interactive music, sound effects, and environment sounds.
Finally, for marketers, V4 offers “professional audio solutions for marketing and presentations,” including ad jingles, commercial background music, and music for corporate videos and brand identity.
In other words, from the point of view of the music industry, after Suno bit into the world of recorded music, it’s now competing against synch licensing and production music as well.
However, Suno V4’s greatest achievement may be in artificially generating voices. In recent days, audio clips purportedly generated by V4 have appeared on social media featuring vocals that are indistinguishable from human voices.
According to Christopher Wieduwilt, a Munich-based entrepreneur who runs The AI Musicpreneur, Suno V4 “will shake the music industry to its core.”
Some in the music industry would argue Suno had already done that prior to V4’s release. The company has grown its user base to 12 million people, up from 10 million this past spring when Suno announced it had raised USD $125 million from investors, giving the company a valuation of $500 million.
Suno offers both a free version, with which users can create a limited number of tracks, and a paid version with unlimited tracks that gives users full rights over the music created.
It’s on the issue of rights that the music industry has a bone to pick with Suno. In June, record companies owned by the three music majors – Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group – sued Suno, alongside another Ai music generator, Udio, alleging that the two companies had trained their AI models on copyrighted music without authorization, and that Suno and Udio’s AI tools have created music that essentially copied existing copyrighted music.
In their responses to the lawsuits, Suno and Udio more or less admitted that their AI models may have ingested copyrighted music during training – but they argued that such use of copyrighted materials is “fair use” under US copyright law. That defense – also invoked by some other AI companies that are being sued for copyright infringement – has yet to be tested by the courts.
On Wednesday (November 13), Suno said it had brought Jack Brody on board as its Chief Product Officer. Brody, the former Head of Product at Snapchat maker Snap Inc., will “oversee product and design, as we work to shape the future of music and make it accessible to an increasingly broad audience,” Suno wrote on its blog.
“I couldn’t be more excited to join Suno on this journey to reimagine how the world creates and experiences music.”
Jack Brody, Suno
“I couldn’t be more excited to join Suno on this journey to reimagine how the world creates and experiences music. The team’s creativity and unwavering dedication is inspiring, and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to help bring this vision to life,” Brody said.
Brody’s hiring comes less than a month after Suno announced that Grammy-winning artist and producer Timbaland had joined the company as a strategic advisor. Timbaland teamed up with Suno after what the company said was “months” of him “being a top user of the platform.”
In July, Suno released a mobile app for Apple devices.Music Business Worldwide