Suno
In plain wordsA popular AI service that writes and performs complete songs — music, lyrics and singing — from a short text description.
A commercial music generationmusic generation, n.: Using AI to compose or produce music — from melodies written as notes to complete songs with vocals — often from a short text description like 'upbeat jazz with saxophone'. service from Suno, Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that generates complete songs — instrumentation, lyrics and sung vocals — from a text prompt or user-supplied lyrics, and since September 2025 has offered a digital-audio-workstation-style editor, Suno Studio. Its production models are proprietary and their architecture undisclosed; the company earlier released Bark (April 2023), an open-source transformer text-to-audio model. Major versions include V3 (March 2024), V4 (November 2024) and v5.5 (March 2026), the latest identified as of October 2026. In June 2024 the Recording Industry Association of America coordinated copyright suits by major labels against Suno and its competitor Udio, alleging unlicensed training on recorded music. In November 2025 Suno settled with Warner Music Group, agreeing to move to licensed models and to give the label control over certain uses of its artists' likenesses and music; the settlement also included Suno's acquisition of the concert-discovery service Songkick. Universal Music Group and Sony Music were still pursuing their claims against Suno in spring 2026.
Origin
Founded by four former employees of the financial-AI company Kensho. Its song generator became widely available on 20 December 2023, launched partly as a plugin for Microsoft Copilot. The name is commonly glossed as Hindi for 'listen'.
Related
- music generationmusic generation, n.: Using AI to compose or produce music — from melodies written as notes to complete songs with vocals — often from a short text description like 'upbeat jazz with saxophone'.
- neural audio codecneural audio codec, n.: A neural network that squeezes sound into a very compact stream of numbers and rebuilds it, used both to send audio cheaply and to let AI models 'write' speech and music piece by piece.
- AI copyright litigationAI copyright litigation, n.: The many lawsuits in which authors, artists, news organizations, record labels and others accuse AI companies of copying their work without permission to build or run AI models.
- voice cloningvoice cloning, n.: Using AI to copy a specific person's voice from recordings, so a computer can say new things that sound like them — useful for dubbing and accessibility, and abused in scams.
- AI artAI art, n.: Images, music or other artworks made with the help of AI — from early computer drawing programs to today's prompt-based image generators — and the debate over whether and how such work counts as art.
Mentioned in
music generationmusic generation, n.: Using AI to compose or produce music — from melodies written as notes to complete songs with vocals — often from a short text description like 'upbeat jazz with saxophone'.