Suno's paying users turn on the v6 model built from licensed music

Suno rolled out its v6 model this month, retired the older ones, and got a revolt from the people paying for it. The AI music company built v6 on the licensing deals it struck with Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe, and its own community forums have been filling with complaints that the output sounds worse than what it replaced.

The company's framing was confident. Chief executive Mikey Shulman called the new generation faster, more expressive and higher quality in a blog post, and presented the release as an example of AI and the music industry strengthening one another rather than fighting.

Chief product officer Jack Brody set out what changed underneath. He said v6 was trained entirely from scratch, from the ground up, on data that is different from what the previous models used. Many users have taken that as the explanation for why the results do not match the promise.

The complaints are specific rather than general. A thread on the r/SunoAI subreddit announcing a cancelled subscription drew hundreds of comments, and a second thread raised muffled audio and distorted, badly mixed vocals; one commenter called it the worst model since v4, and another wrote that the company had made a perfect slop machine.

The licensing that produced v6 came out of litigation. Warner, Universal and Sony sued Suno in June 2024 over training on copyrighted music without permission. Warner settled in November 2025 on terms that required new licensed models to replace the existing ones, which is exactly what v6 is; Universal and Sony are still in court.

The legal exposure has not narrowed since. A 404 Media investigation in July reported a hack of the company and claimed it had ingested decades of music including more than two million clips from YouTube; the same breach exposed personal information belonging to 55.3 million users according to Have I Been Pwned, and a class action over data protection followed. In a September court filing Suno acknowledged taking audio from YouTube for training while defending the practice as fair use, and a German court has found the company liable for infringement in a case brought by GEMA.

EDM.com did not report any response from Suno to the quality complaints themselves, and the company has not said whether the retired models will come back. Our other coverage of the company includes the class actions over its data breach, the German copyright ruling and the BMG licensing deal that fed this model.