Suno trained its v6 AI music models with help from Warner and BMG

Igor Bonifacic for Engadget

AI music generator Suno has just introduced its new v6 family of models. The models mark the first time the company has worked with labels to train a new set of AI systems. As of today, the v6 series consists of three models: v6, v6-wild and v6-mini. The first of those is Suno's new flagship offering. The company describes v6 as "reliable, precise," and capable of delivering consistently "polished music across every genre and style."

For users who want "less predictable" outputs, there's v6-wild. Suno says it's designed for experimentation. "What we've heard time and time again [from musicians and producers] is that they're often not looking for the single best output of the music model," says Jack Brody, Suno's chief product officer. "They're actually looking for something that helps them think more expansively about the kind of music they could make. They're looking for a brainstorming partner, and so v6-wild is our most creative model yet."

Finally, there's v6-mini, which is the one model Suno is making available to free accounts; the other two require either a Pro or Premier subscription to access. According to Brody, the new models are faster than the ones they replace, allowing users to listen to the tracks they generate within seconds of writing a prompt. They also offer new features, starting with the ability to edit specific sections of a song using only natural language. Additionally, you can now generate mashups from multiple sources in a single request. So, for example, you can tell the models to pull vocals from one of your generated songs and drums from another, then add new lyrics on top. Sampling is more precise too, allowing users to isolate and generate a new beat through a single text prompt.

Separately, the new models offer better multi-modal understanding, allowing them to generate songs from other audio, as well as images and video. At the same time, you can now describe a feeling you want a song to evoke and the models will do their best to create something appropriate to that emotion. You can now also replace a single lyric without generating a song all over again.

When I asked Brody to describe how the new models work, he declined to share specifics, saying only that the v6 family incorporates training data Suno had not used before. "The v6 family has been trained from the ground up with a new set of data that differs from the data that went into our previous models," he said. "That includes licensed data from our partners and user data, but most importantly all of the iteration and R&D that has gone into fine-tuning these models in ways to make them subjectively the best models on the market."

You might recall that in 2024 a group of record labels made up of the industry's largest players, including Warner Music, sued Suno and Udio, accusing the companies of copyright infringement at a "massive scale." In 2025, Warner dropped its lawsuit against Suno in exchange for a licensing agreement that it said would gave its artists "full control" over how their voices and music are used in AI-generated tracks.

Brody said v6 is the formal start of the company's relationship with labels like Warner and BMG. "From the day it launches on September 9, this partnership starts generating revenue for our partners," he said. "[...] it enables new product experiences to be developed with artists and our partners that allow people to create music and remix music from participating artists, which will in turn create additional revenue streams for the artists who participate."

Whether those partnerships are enough to legitimize Suno remains to be seen. A 2026 leak found that the company had scraped decades' worth of music and podcasts from YouTube, Deezer and other platforms to train its previous models. Not by accident, Suno is retiring those older models as the v6 family rolls out.