AFTER RAISING $125M, AI MUSIC GENERATOR SUNO IS NOW PAYING ITS MOST POPULAR CREATORS

In the opinion of many, Suno is one of the two most impressive music-generating AI apps available to the public today (the other one being Udio).

In the eight months since it launched to the public, the AI tool that creates full-length songs from verbal prompts has garnered attention from the likes of Rolling Stone, and attracted to it a considerable amount of investor cash, including a recent Series B funding round that brought in USD $125 million, reportedly valuing the company at $500 million.

Within the music industry, there have been questions about the content used to train Suno’s algorithm, which some suspect includes copyrighted music taken without authorization.

In a recent article for MBW, Ed Newton-Rex, the former VP of Audio at Stability AI and the founder of music AI accreditation non-profit Fairly Trained, carried out a forensic analysis suggesting that Suno’s AI has, indeed, been trained on copyrighted materials, including potentially on music by Eminem, Ed Sheeran and ABBA.

One of Suno’s early investors – Antonio Rodriguez of VC firm Matrix Partners – has all but admitted that Suno has, in fact, been trained without permission on copyrighted materials.

Nonetheless, whatever legal problems the AI company may or may not face ahead, its AI tech and music-making platform are forging ahead. Suno recently said 12 million people have used its platform in the less than a year that it’s been available.