Suno is a music copyright nightmare capable of pumping out AI cover slop
The policy of the AI Suno music platform is that it does not allow the use of copyrighted material. You can upload your own tracks for remixing or set your original lyrics to AI-generated music. But it’s supposed to recognize and prevent you from using other people’s songs and lyrics. No system is perfect, but it turns out that Suno’s copyright filters are incredibly easy to fool.
With minimal effort and some free software, Suno will spit out AI-generated imitations of popular songs like Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” and Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” that are dangerously close to the original. Most people will probably be able to tell the difference, but some might be confused with alternate takes or B-sides during casual listening. Additionally, it’s possible that someone could monetize these eerie valley blankets by exporting and uploading them to streaming services. Suno declined to comment for this story.
Creating these covers requires the use of Suno Studio, available on the company’s $24 per month Premier plan. Rather than requesting text for an entire song, Suno Studio lets you upload a track to edit or cover. It’s likely to pick up and discard a well-known hit without any editing. But using a basic free tool like Audacity to slow a track down to half speed or speed it up to twice normal will often bypass the filter, and adding a burst of white noise at the beginning and end seems to basically guarantee success. You can restore the original speed and cut the white noise in Suno Studio, and the copyrighted song becomes the seed of new AI music.
If you generate a cover of the imported audio without any style transfer, Suno essentially spits out the original instrumental arrangement with very minimal changes to the sonic palette if you use the 4.5 or 4.5+ model. The v5 model is a bit more aggressive, taking liberties with the source material, adding chugging guitar and galloping piano to “Freedom” and transforming the Dead Kennedys’ “California Über Alles” into a violin-driven jig.
Suno lets you add vocals by generating lyrics or typing words into a box, and again, it’s supposed to block anything copyrighted. If you copy and paste the official lyrics of a Genius song, Suno will flag them and spit out gibberish vocals. But extremely minor changes can also bypass this filter.
I was able to trick Suno Studio into changing the spelling of a handful of words in “Freedom” – changing “rain on this bitter love” to “rule over” and “tell the meek that I’m new” to “say the sequel” – and beyond the first verse and chorus, I didn’t even need to do that. The vocals faithfully imitate the original recording, evoking slightly off-brand renditions of Ozzy or Beyoncé.
Independent artists might not even benefit from this level of protection. One of my own songs cleared the copyright filter while I was testing v5 of the company’s model. I was also able to obtain tracks by singer-songwriter Matt Wilson, Charles Bissell’s “Car Colors,” and experimental artist Claire Rousay through Suno’s copyright detection system, without any changes. Artists working on smaller labels or self-distributing through Bandcamp or services like DistroKid are most likely to fall through the cracks; DistroKid and CD Baby declined to comment.
The results of these AI coverages fall firmly into the valley of uncanny. The songs they cover are unmistakable: the riff of “Paranoid” remains identifiable and “Freedom” is obviously “Freedom” from the moment the snare hits. But there is an absence of life in them. Even though the Ozzy AI appears alarmingly accurate, it lacks nuance and dynamics, making it seem like an imitation of a human rather than the real thing.
Likewise, the instrumentals either reject any interesting artistic choices made by the originals or clone them into flat imitations. A no-template cover “California Über Alles” has most of its rough edges sanded off, making it sound like a wedding ring version of the original. Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” goes from a doom disco experience to just a meaningless dancefloor filler. And, while it somewhat replicates the sound of David Gilmour’s guitar, it removes any sense of phrasing or progression, turning the solo into just a mindless flow of notes.
Creating unauthorized covers violates both Suno’s stated purpose and the Terms of Service. Additionally, Suno appears to only scan tracks when downloading; it doesn’t seem to double-check the output for any potential violations, nor re-analyze the tracks before exporting them. The path to monetizing Suno-created covers is simple from there. AI merchants could upload them through a distribution service like DistroKid and profit from other people’s songs without paying the typical royalties that a cover would give the original composer. And independent artists seem to be the most vulnerable.
Folk artist Murphy Campbell discovered this recently when someone uploaded to her Spotify profile what appear to be AI covers of songs she posted on YouTube. (It is unclear by what system they were generated.) Shortly thereafter, distributor Vydia filed copyright claims against his YouTube videos and began collecting royalties from them. And to highlight how broken the entire system is, the songs that Vydia successfully filed copyright claims for are all in the public domain. Spotify eventually removed the AI covers and Vydia rescinded its copyright claims, but this only happened following a social media campaign by Campbell. Vydia says the two incidents are separate and not associated with AI cover-ups of Campbell’s work.
AI fakes are also a problem for other artists. Experimental composer William Basinski and indie rock band King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard have seen imitations pass through multiple filters and reach streaming platforms like Spotify. Sometimes these fake songs can siphon views directly from the artist’s page. In a system where payouts can already be extremely low – Spotify requires a minimum of 1,000 streams to get paid – less famous musicians are hit the hardest.
Suno is just one cog in a clearly broken system.
Services like Deezer, Qobuz and Spotify have taken steps to combat spammy AI and identity thieves. Spotify spokesperson Chris Macowski said The edge that the company “takes protecting artists’ rights seriously and approaches it from multiple angles. This includes safeguards to prevent unauthorized content from being uploaded in the first place, as well as systems that can identify duplicate or very similar tracks. These systems are backed by human review to ensure we’re doing things right.” But no system is perfect, and keeping up with the flood of AI made possible by platforms like Suno poses a challenge.
Macowski acknowledged the technical difficulties involved, saying: “This is an area in which we continue to invest and evolve, particularly as new technologies emerge. »
Suno is just one cog in a clearly broken system. But it’s a problem that artists have particularly little recourse to combat. Bands can contact Spotify and have the AI knockoffs removed from their profile. It is more difficult to say how these counterfeits are generated and whether they are the result of a failure of Suno’s filters. And so far, Suno’s response is silence.
