All the latest in AI ‘music’

Suno just released one of its biggest updates yet with v5.5 of its AI music model. Where previous updates focused mostly on improving fidelity and creating more natural vocals, v5.5 is about giving users more control. It includes three new features: Voices, My Taste, and Custom Models.

In the release notes, Suno says that Voices is its most requested feature. It lets users train the vocal model on their own voice. They can upload clean accapellas, finished tracks with backing music, or just sing directly into the mic on their phone or laptop. The cleaner and higher quality the recording, the less data is required. And to prevent someone from simply stealing another person’s voice, Suno requires the user to also speak a verification phrase. Though, this might be possible to fool with existing AI models of celebrity voices.

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Apple is asking artists and record labels on its music streaming platform to voluntarily label songs that were made using AI. The new “Transparency Tags” metadata system for Apple Music was announced in a newsletter to industry partners yesterday, according to Music Business Worldwide, and covers four categories, including track, composition, artwork, and music videos.

The track tag should be applied when “a material portion of a sound recording” has been generated by AI tools, while the composition tag covers other AI-generated compositional elements, such as song lyrics. The artwork tag applies to static or moving graphics, but only at the album level. For all other AI-generated visual content — whether standalone or bundled with albums — the music video tag should be applied. Multiple transparency tags can be used simultaneously for works that require more than one of these disclosures.

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ProducerAI, an AI-powered music-making platform, is joining Google. As part of the deal, Google will fold ProducerAI under the Labs umbrella and power the tool with a preview version of its new Lyria 3 music-making AI model.

ProducerAI is a music-making platform that allows users to work with an AI agent to generate sounds, workshop lyrics, remix songs, and even create new instruments based on a prompt. The platform launched in July 2025 as a successor to the AI music-making tool Riffusion, and initially used the startup’s own AI model to help you generate songs and tweak existing ones. Seth Forsgren, the cofounder and CEO of ProducerAI, tells The Verge the team is “just scratching the surface of what these models are going to be able to do once we harness everything that Google brings to the table.”

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Google has given Gemini the ability to spit out AI-generated music, courtesy of DeepMind’s latest audio model. Beta access to Lyria 3 is rolling out in the Gemini app, enabling users to generate 30-second tracks based on text, images, and videos, without having to leave the chatbot window.

The new music-making tool is available globally starting today in English, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese, with plans to expand in the future. Access is limited to Gemini app users who are 18 years or older.

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The music streaming service Deezer is giving other companies access to its AI song-detecting tool. The tool, which identifies, tags, and excludes AI-generated music from algorithmic recommendations, is now available for businesses to purchase and use, according to an announcement on Wednesday.

Deezer launched its AI music detection tool last year as part of efforts to “prevent fraudulent actors from stealing royalties from real artists through mass produced AI-generated music.” The company says it has used the tool to identify and tag more than 13.4 million AI songs in 2025, even as the flood of AI-generated tracks continues to grow. Deezer claims its tool can detect AI songs with a 99.8 percent accuracy rate.

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ElevenLabs has released an album of AI-generated songs in its latest attempt to separate itself from the ethical concerns surrounding AI music. The Eleven Album aims to showcase “how artists can use AI to expand their creative range while maintaining full authorship and commercial rights,” according to ElevenLabs.

ElevenLabs is using the album to market its Eleven Music generator and Iconic Voices Marketplace platforms it launched last year, both of which are cleared for commercial use. ElevenLabs says that every artist on the project “produced a fully original track that blends their signature sound with the capabilities of Eleven Music,” and retains full ownership of their work alongside earning 100 percent of any streaming revenue.

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Bandcamp has built its entire brand around serving artists. And, with the artist furor over AI growing every day, it’s no surprise that the company has decided to take a stand against it. In a Reddit post, Bandcamp announced that AI-generated content would not be permitted on the platform and would be subject to removal.

The guidelines leave little room for interpretation. In the post, the company says that “Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.” It also prohibits using AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles, similar to a rule implemented by Spotify in September. The support team also encourages people to use the site’s reporting tool to flag any music that “appears to be made entirely or with heavy reliance on generative AI.”

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Universal Music Group is partnering with Nvidia to bring a new AI model to one of the world’s largest music catalogs. Among other initiatives, Tuesday’s announcement touts the extension of Nvidia’s music AI model Music Flamingo, which is designed to mimic how humans understand music by recognizing nuanced elements like song structure, harmony, emotional arcs, and chord progressions.

It’s another instance of the music industry’s about-face on AI, which took UMG from suing Anthropic in 2023 over distribution of song lyrics to partnering with AI music generator Udio in October following another high-profile lawsuit. Still, concerns remain that AI is proliferating slop on streaming platforms, stomping on copyright holders, and enabling a new wave of AI artists.

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When songwriter Patrick Irwin moved to Nashville last year, he was entering a lottery. Each day hundreds of sessions take place where writers create a song demo to pitch to a publisher. Publishers then share those songs with labels and managers, who may share those songs with the artists. Even if a major country star records (“cuts”) the song, it still takes a stroke of luck for that song to become a No. 1 hit.

The odds of winning are extremely low. Recently, Irwin was in a room where his cowriters Sam Fink and Duane Deerweater tried something new. Instead of booking studio time or calling a “track guy” to produce a demo, one cowriter opened Suno, an AI music platform, uploaded a voice memo with just guitar and vocals, and typed in a prompt: “traditional country, male vocal, folk country, story telling, 90s country, rhythmic.” Thirty seconds later he had two fully produced demos complete with drums, electric guitars, bass, and backing harmonies. There were no studio musicians, no invoices.

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Streaming service Deezer ran an experiment recently, with the help of research firm Ipsos. The finding — that 97 percent of people can’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated and human-made music — was alarming. But it’s also not the whole story.

In the survey, 9,000 participants listened to three tracks and were asked to guess which, if any, were completely AI-generated. If the participant failed to guess all three correctly, they were put in the fail pile. That means if you got two of three correct, Deezer and Ipsos still said you couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and the real deal.

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Warner Music Group has struck a licensing deal with the AI music creation platform Suno. Under the agreement, WMG will allow users to create AI-generated music on Suno using the voices, names, likenesses, images, and compositions of artists who opt in to the program.

WMG, which owns record labels that have signed musicians like Ed Sheeran, Twenty One Pilots, Dua Lipa, and Charli XCX, says participating artists will have “full control” over how their likeness and music are used, though it doesn’t share how.

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Two years ago, “BBL Drizzy” was the AI music shot heard around the world: a song with vocals that sounded like Drake bubbled up from nowhere and launched what was shaping up to be a battle of artistry, likeness, and of course, copyright. The big three labels — Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records — sued AI companies Udio and Suno for copyright infringement “en masse”; they staged public spats with TikTok over issues including AI content on the platform; and they began spinning up AI detection tools to keep tabs on how their music moved around.

Now the music industry and AI startups appear largely aligned on a (monetizable) path forward — and it looks a lot like the system artists are already stuck in.

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Suno, the AI music startup being sued by the big three major labels, the RIAA, and even some indie acts for illegally training its model on copyrighted material, just raised $250 million (which might help pay its legal bills). What caught my eye in the Wall Street Journal article about the funding round and the company’s insane $2.45 billion valuation, however, was Suno co-founder and Chief Executive Mikey Shulman being quoted as saying:

Suno is primarily known for its text-prompt-based, push-button Create feature, which generates entire tracks using an AI model. (I tried it — it’s technically impressive, but has all the soul of a PowerPoint presentation.) Which leaves me wondering, what exactly is Mikey Shulman’s definition of “really active,” and in what way does the creation of more AI-generated music increase music’s value in society? I’ve reached out to Suno to see if Shulman had any context or additional comments that might help clarify this statement, but I haven’t received a response.

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When it’s not trying to fend off lawsuits from major record labels, Suno is still working on refining its AI music creation tool. The latest model, Suno v5, is an obvious technical improvement over its previous version, v4.5+. But it still can’t seem to escape the bland emptiness that pervades most AI art.

There are some across-the-board upgrades in audio quality that are undeniable, like fewer artifacts and clearer separation between instruments. Some tracks produced using v4.5+ can smush all the melodic parts together in a way where the lines between guitar, bass, and synth are muddy at best. But with v5, the mixes are much cleaner.

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Two weeks ago, record company Hallwood Media signed a deal with Telisha “Nikki” Jones after negotiations that purportedly included an offer of $3 million, Billboard reported. Jones is a Mississippi-based lyricist behind the R&B artist “Xania Monet” whose most popular song on Spotify racked up over 1 million listens, and whose Reels regularly top 100,000 views on Instagram – despite her likeness, vocals, and music being AI-generated.

Multiple copyright experts speaking with The Verge have been quite clear: the law is not at all settled but generally one cannot copyright AI-generated works by themselves without human intervention, but you may be able to secure copyright where there are human-made expressive elements, which in this case are the lyrics. So, what exactly is Hallwood Media buying? What can they license? What does this mean for the future of music as a sellable product? The more questions we asked, the more it became evident that we’re facing a cultural shift in the wake of the flood of AI-generated content. The law is just trying to keep up.

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Major record labels have escalated their lawsuit against Suno, alleging that the AI startup knowingly pirated songs from YouTube to train its generative AI music models. In the amended complaint filed on September 19th, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) accuses Suno of unlawfully “stream ripping” tracks on YouTube — a practice that involves turning content captured from streaming platforms into downloadable files — and circumventing measures designed to prevent unauthorized copying.

The updated lawsuit alleges that Suno “employed code to access, extract, copy, and download” copyrighted works from Universal, Sony, and Warner, and violated YouTube’s terms of service by circumventing the platform’s “rolling cipher” encryption. This circumvention of YouTube’s technological measures “has facilitated Suno’s ongoing and mass-scale infringement,” according to the complaint, and violates the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

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Sure, everyone hates record labels — but the AI industry has figured out how to make them look like heroes. So that’s at least one very impressive accomplishment for AI.

AI is cutting a swath across a number of creative industries — with AI-generated book covers, the Chicago Sun-Times publishing an AI-generated list of books that don’t exist, and AI-generated stories at CNET under real authors’ bylines. The music industry is no exception. But while many of these fields are mired in questions about whether AI models are illegally trained on pirated data, the music industry is coming at the issue from a position of unusual strength: the benefits of years of case law backing copyright protections, a regimented licensing system, and a handful of powerful companies that control the industry. Record labels have chosen to fight several AI companies on copyright law, and they have a strong hand to play.

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The music industry’s nightmare came true in 2023, and it sounded a lot like Drake.

“Heart on My Sleeve,” a convincingly fake duet between Drake and The Weeknd, racked up millions of streams before anyone could explain who made it or where it came from. The track didn’t just go viral — it broke the illusion that anyone was in control.

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