Back in August, Suno got a slap on the wrist for its unlawful AI training practices, with German courts ruling that it had used protected songs without permission. Then, at the start of September, Suno came clean in the US District Court of Massachusetts, admitting in court documents that “audio data was obtained from YouTube for use as training” its software.

As the ongoing legal proceedings unfold, Suno’s latest iteration, v6, aims to “strengthen safeguards” across the industry and “create a healthier” musical ecosystem. Developed in partnership with the likes of Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, it seems like Suno’s way of addressing the elephant in the room, perhaps by throwing out unlawful datasets and retraining Suno from the ground up… and users aren’t very impressed.

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Taking to Reddit, one unhappy Suno user brands the latest update as “the death of Suno”, calling it “unusable” with poor quality tracks. “Every song comes out flat, the voices are muddy, the sound is abysmal,” the user writes. “[Suno] claims we can still use the 5.5 voices – not true – they sound nothing like in v5.5. The songs come out so bad [that] I won’t be able to use Suno at all.”

Words like “muddy” and “muffled” crops up time and time again across r/SunoAI. One satirical parody post even ‘leaks’ the next update, which will involve “muffle maker” software to capture the same quality as v6. “If you accidentally create something that sounds good, you can use it to bring the sound quality down to the classic v6 level,” the fake ‘update leak’ reads.

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The post even namedrops a number of companies suing Suno over its alleged copyright infringement. “[The new update comes with] your own personal representatives,” the post reads. “After Suno’s latest settlement, representatives from Sony, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group will watch your screen live whenever you start writing a prompt. if they see anything they don’t approve of, your account will be suspended.”

Many posters seem to scowl at any mention of the lawsuits at hand. When one user mourns how “awful” v6 is, noting with annoyance that Suno has even removed some of its “best models”, 4.5+ and 5, a commenter notes: “it’s called complying to a lawsuit”. It’s a reminder that has users branding the companies as “dickheads”, while also dog-pile downvoting any attempts to explain that training on content without permission is “still theft”.

No matter how many years of loyalty users seem to have under their belt, there seems to be a unanimous sentiment: v6 isn’t up to scratch. However, as users debate jumping ship and cancelling their subscriptions, as least the companies pursuing lawsuits are happy… right?

Not quite. According to Variety, as of 18 September, Sony and Universal Music Group have filed a new 45-page lawsuit. It comes as yet another lawsuit against Suno, with the labels first pursuing legal action over Suno’s “unimaginable scales” of copyright infringement in 2024.

The new lawsuit alleges that Suno’s latest model, the infamously “unusable” and “muddy” v6, still infringes on copyrighted work across Sony and UMG’s catalogue. The companies argue that v6, if v6 was trained on its previous models or any of Suno’s previous output, then it would still be utilising Sony and UMG’s copyrighted works – as training off of copyright infringing content may dilute the source material, but it was still created unlawfully.

“Training a ‘new’ model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it,” the labels claim [via Variety]. “V6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree.”

So, with users and the industry still unsatisfied, Suno is between a rock and a hard place here. It begs the question: what does the future hold for Suno and generative AI in music?

The post “The death of Suno”: Reddit users have turned against Suno after v6 model update appeared first on MusicTech.