Sony and Universal price Suno's licensed restart at a $9 billion ceiling

A judge just lowered the bar for suing Suno

Monday in Boston, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV let a class action by independent artists proceed↗ against Suno without a single named infringing output. One hundred examples of imitative tracks were enough at the pleading stage, and a YouTube anti-circumvention claim survived alongside them ¹. Ten days earlier, Universal and Sony opened a second front before the same judge ².

$9 billion against a $5.4 billion company

The new complaint, filed 18 September↗, asserts 60,202 sound recordings. Willful infringement runs to $150,000 per work, a ceiling just over $9 billion, plus roughly $150 million if each recording also counts as a $2,500 act of circumventing YouTube's protections ². The 2024 case covers 560 recordings; Saylor on 18 August declined to fold 61,026 more into it ².

Bond Capital led a $400 million Series D in June at a $5.4 billion valuation↗, with Lightspeed and Menlo Ventures among the returning investors ³. Shulman discloses about two million paying subscribers and $300 million in annual recurring revenue ⁴. The ceiling now tops the whole company.

The licensed reset that inherits its past

Suno launched v6 on 9 September as its clean start, built with Warner, which settled and licensed in November 2025, plus BMG and Believe, retiring every earlier model ²⁵. The company says v6 trained on licensed partner content and "interactions including creations and preference signals" from its community, and calls the claims "fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law" ².

The complaint replies that those creations are outputs of the old models: "Training a 'new' model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it." V6, the labels write, is "the fruit of the same poisoned tree" ². Suno's own 1 September filing↗ admits audio data was "obtained from YouTube for use as training data using YT-DLP" ²⁶.

The partnerships became exhibits

Three deals with three rightsholders in under a year "confirm that a functioning market exists" for training licences, the complaint argues, the market a fair-use defense must deny ². Brody's answer: the revenue share is "not in exchange for training" and "not really about the data" ⁵. Munich has already ruled once, on 31 July↗, where Suno conceded unlicensed training, and ordered it to open its books on the works ⁴.

Half a dozen suits are pending against Suno in Massachusetts alone↗ ⁷. Warner took the settlement and the launch partnership; the two majors that stayed in court are the two that sued again ².

What Suno can and cannot argue

Suno's formal answer calls its training "quintessential fair use" while admitting tens of millions of public recordings ². Shulman says v6 holds no Universal, Sony or Kobalt songs ⁵. Both can be true and still not answer the lineage claim, which rests on user creations spun from the old models, not partner catalogs. No court has ruled on laundering, and $9 billion is a ceiling, not a finding.

The dates that decide it

Fact discovery in the first case closes 30 September, the parties want the stream-ripping track extended to 20 November, and the labels want a jury ². The same question is coming for every lab training generation N+1 on generation N's outputs: if lineage carries, provenance becomes a balance-sheet item and rebuilding on synthetic data is no reset ⁸. A licence clears the songs, not the model that grew up on them.