They Didn’t Own the Music Used to Create the Platform
You Don’t Own the Music You Create with the Platform
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PCAM Committee member Chris Green has recently written an article on important issues concerning rights and ownership when using the Suno platform. Chris’s findings and views are essential reading for composers working in advertising media, so we are sharing his article with you in this Newsflash.
The PCAM Committee
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They Didn’t Own the Music Used to Create the Platform
Let’s go over the basics of the AI Music platform everyone is talking about: Suno.
Billboard recently reported that Suno spent $32 million on compute fees and a mere $2,000 on training “data”, data in this case being the intellectual property of musicians.
Think about that for a moment: Suno built a multi-billion dollar company off your music without your permission, and for which they never paid you a single penny in training royalties.*
Technology frequently outpaces ethics, moving faster than regulatory frameworks can manage. Every subscription and click validates and enables these unethical practices.
That is why it is more important than ever for creators to form a united front to ensure that ethics are defined by how we use technology, not just by what the technology can do.
Licensing is possible! Suno decided against it!
You Don’t Own the Music You Create with the Platform
Suno might appear to be “technological progress” and an inevitable evolution of the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). However, in truth, it is extracting and eating away the value of music, which leads to the devaluation and destruction of the music industry.
Suno’s ownership rules are essentially a “pay-to-use”, not “pay-to-own” system.
Their terms say your rights depend entirely on which subscription plan you were using at the exact moment you clicked “Create”:
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Free Plan: Songs remain non-commercial forever. You cannot monetise them, and they are not copyrightable.
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Pro & Premier Plans: You are granted a commercial license to monetise, but the work is still largely not copyrightable.
Their updated 2026 terms of use attempt to assign ownership of AI-generated output to Pro and Premier subscribers. However, this assignment is legally meaningless in practice. Copyright law does not currently recognise AI-generated works as copyrightable, meaning Suno cannot hold copyright in the output in the first place — and you cannot transfer what you do not own.
Suno even acknowledges this directly in their own terms, stating they make no warranty that any copyright will vest in any output. In other words, the assignment clause gives users the appearance of ownership while the legal substance behind it may not exist at all.
Therefore, regardless of the subscription plan, music created on Suno cannot be owned or copyrighted by the user. Furthermore, there is currently no mechanism to financially credit the creators of the training data used to build the model. Because most artists rely on royalties rooted in copyright, the absence of legal ownership means there is no viable path toward a long-term monetisation strategy.
In short: musicians cannot generate a sustainable income using Suno.
What is most interesting, however, is that due to a US Court of Appeals ruling in March 2025, Suno cannot legally assign ownership rights to AI-generated content. Since the main reason to pay for the higher tiers (Pro & Premium) is marketed as “The most important reason to pay is to own the rights to your creations,” this means Suno is effectively charging $10 and $30 a month for owning nothing.
Suno would have no copyright-based legal mechanism to stop people on the Free Plan from using their creations commercially, since the underlying legal principles are the same regardless of which plan generated the output.
Say No to Suno!
Suno strips away the autonomous capacity of individuals to independently produce and govern their creative output. It turns the musician into an unpaid factory worker for an automated conveyor belt of content.
Additional Warning: The Risks of Using Personas
When you submit anything to Suno, be it lyrics, audio, melodies, or prompts, you grant them a license that warrants a very close look. The license is:
“A worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid-up, sublicensable, assignable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, store, modify, distribute, create derivative works based on, perform, display, communicate, transmit, and otherwise make available any and all Content … including … to train, develop, fine-tune or otherwise improve the Service and any related artificial intelligence or machine learning models.”
The moment you upload original lyrics or a melody, you are giving Suno permission to use that work to improve their AI — perpetually and for free. Furthermore, they have the right to sublicense those rights to third parties.
This is particularly critical when using the new Personas feature. By engaging with it, you are essentially granting Suno the right to utilise an AI model fine-tuned on your individual data and identity. Ask yourself: wouldn’t you rather create and own that model yourself?
*Note: Suno reached a landmark settlement with Warner Music Group (WMG) in late 2025. By 2026, Suno began transitioning to “Licensed AI Models,” paying significant annual fees to participating labels. However, independent artists and labels are not part of these specific deals and have not received direct payment.