Suno chief product officer Jack Brody has outlined a series of platform integrity measures, including audio fingerprinting and watermarking, as the AI music generation company works to secure licensing deals with major rightsholders.
The update follows a recent $400m funding round, during which CEO Mikey Shulman confirmed that Suno is preparing its first model trained on licensed music. Warner Music Group has agreed to participate, but negotiations with Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and independent licensing agency Merlin remain unresolved, alongside ongoing legal disputes.
Platform Integrity Measures
In a LinkedIn post, Brody detailed Suno’s existing rules that “prohibit users from uploading or distributing content they don’t own or have the rights to use,” and described training strategies “intended to reduce the risk of generating unauthorized reproductions,” such as excluding artist names from training metadata.
He also announced new technical developments. “Alongside those efforts, we’re actively developing additional approaches for audio fingerprinting, watermarking, and spam and impersonation detection,” Brody wrote. “In addition, we’re engaging in discussions around AI labeling with our users and creatives at all levels, to understand how to best empower them while respecting privacy.”
Brody stressed that these safeguards are not merely a regulatory formality. “We don’t treat these issues as a compliance exercise. It’s a core part of how we build and it’s led us to put more copyright safeguards in place than traditional music software,” he stated, adding that this applies “not just compared to AI music tools, but compared to all the music tools that preceded them.”
Licensing Progress and Industry Tensions
While Suno promotes its integrity framework, broader disagreements with rightsholders persist. Universal Music Group has advocated for a “walled garden” model that would prevent users from downloading AI-generated tracks and distributing them on streaming platforms. Rival service Udio adopted such restrictions, which triggered a backlash from some users.
In February, Suno’s chief music officer Paul Sinclair publicly opposed the walled garden concept in a LinkedIn post, signaling the company’s resistance to that approach.
