Suno's users make about 7 million songs a day. That is a Spotify catalogue's worth of new music every fortnight, coming out of an app many business owners have still never heard of.

Suno turns a typed description into a finished song, with instruments, structure and a singer. In September it began replacing every model it runs with a new family called v6, built with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe. When people use v6, the music industry gets paid.

At Mashed Avocado we use Suno for ads and podcasts, and we have been testing v6. It is fast. It also sounds flat, it crams too much in, and it has added work at our end.

The track arrives faster. Getting it ready to use takes longer.

What Suno is and how it writes a whole song

Suno is an American start-up, founded in 2021 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and open to the public since 2023. You type what you want in plain English: a genre, a mood, some lyrics, the kind of voice. It returns a complete track. Paying subscribers can download what they make. Free users can play it and share it.

The scale is what most people miss. More than 100 million people have used Suno and over 2 million pay for it, according to the company's own figures from early 2026. Investors have noticed.

Here is why that matters if you have never opened it. The music under a radio spot, a podcast intro or a product reel used to come from a composer or a stock library. It can now come from a prompt box at subscription prices. That makes professional-sounding music cheaper for a small business.

Why Suno now pays the record labels

In 2024 the three major record labels, Universal, Sony and Warner, sued Suno, alleging it had used their recordings, unlicensed, to train its models. Warner settled in November 2025. Part of that deal was a commitment from Suno to build licensed models and retire the old ones. v6 is that commitment arriving.

Two more partners have joined since. BMG, the label and publisher owned by Bertelsmann, signed in August. Believe, which owns the distributor TuneCore, came in the day before launch.

The money works like this. Suno pays the labels and publishers when v6 is used, and they decide how to share it with their artists and songwriters, Suno's chief product officer Jack Brody told Bloomberg. Suno keeps the rate private. Warner's chief executive Robert Kyncl told Bloomberg earlier this year that Suno would pay Warner more per user than Spotify and the other streaming services do. Prompts that name a real artist are blocked.

Two big questions sit over all of this. Universal and Sony, the two largest labels in the world, are still suing. And Suno has named its partners while keeping the training details to itself. Brody told Music Business Worldwide that the new training data leaves out Universal and Sony recordings, and argued that a model's quality owes more to research and tuning than to the catalogue behind it.

What we found testing Suno v6 on ads and podcasts

Reason one to like v6 is speed. It is quicker, and you notice it the moment you use it. Suno has also added tools that matter for production work: editing one section of a song in plain language, changing a single lyric, isolating one instrument, and starting a track from audio, an image or a video.

Now the problems. The first is the sound. Suno describes its flagship model as delivering "polished music across every genre and style". Polished is Suno's word. Ours is flat. On a short ad, the music has a few seconds to create a feeling, and flat music wastes them.

The second is density. v6 throws everything in. Each generation comes back with more going on than the brief asked for, and every extra layer is something we have to strip out, especially where a voiceover has to sit on top.

That is a real change in how we work. With earlier versions, we would give Suno a base note, a starting idea, and let it improvise around it. What came back had room in it, and we built from there. With v6, we get a crowded arrangement and spend our time cleaning it up. Generation is quicker. The edit is slower. Overall, it is more work.

Why? Our read is a guess, and we are flagging it as one. Suno built v6 to respond to more of the language musicians use, from instrumentation and structure to mood and references. A model tuned to respond to more of your prompt may simply give you more of everything. Whether the smaller licensed catalogue plays a part, only Suno can say.

The time we save generating a track, we now spend cleaning it up.

The direction of travel is clear all the same. The labels that sued Suno are becoming its partners. Songs made on Suno can become eligible for release through Believe and TuneCore, into the same stores as any other track. The argument has moved from whether AI music should exist to how it gets paid for. This is where the industry is heading.

Three things to do before you use Suno on your next ad

Pay before you generate. Songs made on Suno's free plan belong to Suno and are licensed for personal, non-commercial use. Commercial rights attach to tracks made while you hold a Pro or Premier subscription, and they date from the moment the track was made, so upgrading later leaves your free-plan songs where they were. Suno's help pages also note that fully AI-generated music may fall outside US copyright protection. The Australian position is a question for your lawyer. Until you know, treat a generated jingle as something you can use and a competitor could possibly copy.

Brief it on what to leave out. v6 fills every gap it is given, so write restraint into the prompt. Name the instruments you want, ask for a sparse arrangement, and say which sections should drop back to a single instrument. When one section is wrong, use the new section editing to fix that part and keep the rest. Then budget your time for the edit, because that is where our hours now go.

Use v6-wild for ideas and v6 for the finish. If the flagship sounds flat to you too, Suno positions v6-wild as its less predictable model, built to produce ideas you then refine in v6. On paper, that loop is the nearest thing in the new line-up to the improvising we used to get from a base note. Both need a paid plan, which you should have anyway for commercial work.

Suno writes the first draft instantly. A person still has to decide what to cut.