BMG And Suno Collaborate For New A.I. Music Licensing Deal

BMG (BMG Rights Management)  and Suno, an AI music generator, have partnered with each other to try out a new business model.

The licensing deal allows BMG’s work to be used to create songs on Suno’s platform. Songwriters and musicians must opt in for their work to be used to train the AI and for Suno’s users, according to Billboard. BMG (BMG Rights Management) and Suno, an AI music generator, have partnered to test a new business model.

Songwriters and musicians must opt in for their work to be used to train the AI and for Suno’s users to make new works based on their content. Artists who decide to opt into the new deal will receive compensation for the usage of their original content. 

This agreement comes on the heels of a recent promise in a company blog post about how they would utilize this new technology. The post, written by Suno co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman, gave further information on how the AI would be trained. This included the assertion that it does not use artists’ names in its training metadata, working with them. 

“Building the future responsibly means working directly with the people who make music and the companies that represent them,” Shulman said.

Despite his statements meant to reassure the community, the lawsuits from the German collection society GEMA (Society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights) were not dropped. Instead, the court ruled in their favor just last week. Per Music Business Worldwide, the Danish rights organization Koda has sued on the claim that the company’s AI was trained on their artists’ copyrighted material without anyone’s consent or compensation beforehand. 

Aside from those issues, there was also a problem with just how much AI music was being generated on the site. There has been a deluge of content that the platform is trying to limit by using new watermarking and other tracking methods. While these have not been implemented yet, they will be available, as Billboard put it, “in the coming weeks.”

Celine Johnson, executive VP (Vice President) of global marketing and streaming at BMG stated, “Choice is the guiding principle. This agreement establishes strong protections, clear economics, and new creative possibilities for artists and their fans.”