After Raising $125 Million, AI Music Generator Suno Is Now Paying Its Top Creators – Music Business Worldwide

In the opinion of many, Suno is one of the two most impressive AI music-generating apps available to the public today (the other being Udio).

In the eight months since it was launched to the public, the AI ​​tool that creates full songs from verbal prompts has attracted attention from the likes of Rolling Stoneand attracted a significant amount of investor money, including a recent Series B funding round that brought 125 million dollarsis said to value the company at 500 million dollars.

Within the music industry, there have been questions about the content used to train Suno’s algorithm, which some suspect includes copyrighted music taken without authorization.

In a recent article for MBW, Ed Newton-Rexformer VP of Audio at AI stability and founder of the nonprofit AI Music Accreditation Well trainedconducted a forensic analysis suggesting that Suno’s AI has indeed been trained on copyrighted material, potentially including music by Eminem, Ed Sheeran and ABBA.

One of Suno’s early investors – Antonio Rodriguez of the VC firm Matrix Partners – everyone has admitted that Suno did, in fact, train without permission on copyrighted material.

However, regardless of the legal issues the AI ​​company may or may not face going forward, its AI technology and music creation platform are moving forward. Suno said recently 12 million people have been using its platform in less than a year that it has been available.

Now the company is taking a big step toward building a community—and toward making music-making on its platform commercially viable for its users: it’s launched a program to pay its most popular music creators.

In a plan announced on her blog late last month, Suno said she plans to pay up 1 million dollars between now and the end of the year for creators making music on its platform, starting with an installment of 100,000 dollars paid for it 500 the highest ranked songs publicly available on the Suno platform in June.

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The Summer of Suno program will pay off 10,000 dollars on the highest ranked track, and 7500 dollars on the second highest track. The amount is gradually reduced to a payment of 500 dollars for tracks ranked between 6th and 50th place, 250 dollars for track 51 to 100, and 100 dollars for tracks ranked between 101 and 500.

Song ranking will be determined “by popularity as measured by a combination of plays, likes and shares,” the Suno co-founder Keenan Freyberg wrote on the company’s blog.

There are some caveats. For one, creators must be 18 or older, and for another, payments can only be made to creators in 54 countries around the world. Residents of most of the developed world are eligible, but Japan in particular is exempt.

Among the most populous countries excluded are India, China, Pakistan, Brazil, Bangladesh, Russia, Ethiopia and the Philippines. Suno provides a full list of eligible sites in a Google Spreadsheet available here.

Additionally, payments will only be made via PayPal and “if you are unable to accept payment via PayPal, we will not be able to release your payment and it will go back to the group for future events,” says Suno.

Finally, only one song per creator will qualify for a payout, as “we want to reach as many creators as possible,” says Suno.

In other words, don’t count on making a living creating music on the Suno platform just yet.

Suno encourages creators competing for a Summer of Suno grant to share their musical creations on social media, singling out X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and TikTok by name.

The company’s goal is clear: to incentivize users of its platform to do as much as possible to promote their music – and by extension, Suno itself.

The platform is increasingly selling itself as a community, rather than just a tool for creating music.

“We’ve seen friends exchange memes, couples trade love songs, and broadcasters co-create songs with stadium-sized audiences,” Freyberg wrote.

“Some creators make songs for others, while others play, explore and make songs for themselves.”The worldwide music business