Suno Says It Will Start Watermarking Songs
- Reference: 0184892276
- News link: https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/26/08/07/1710226/suno-says-it-will-start-watermarking-songs
- Source link:
> In a [5]blog post , co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman shared core principles and said that the platform wants to promote original creation while enabling more people to make music with its AI tools. One of the key points of contention involved users uploading AI-generated songs on other streaming platforms and gaming the system to earn revenue. Suno said that now it will use audio watermarking and fingerprinting to prevent misuse on other streaming platforms. It's not clear if Suno will use an existing system like Google's Synth ID or adopt a new one, and the company did not say when contacted by TechCrunch about this.
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> The startup also signed an agreement with lyrics provider Musixmatch to use its Sentinel system for copyright detection, the blog post said. [...] The company added that it plans to add a new download policy to bar mass distribution on streaming platforms, but declined to provide details on the record. Suno has also changed its community guidelines to explicitly prohibit "deceptive audio presented as real" and "using a real person's voice or likeness without permission" to prevent copycats.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/06/amid-legal-battles-suno-says-it-will-start-watermarking-songs/
[2] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/08/01/1525210/ai-startup-suno-says-music-industry-suit-aims-to-stifle-competition
[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/german-court-rules-ai-music-firm-suno-broke-copyright-rules-2026-07-31/
[4] https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/07/15/2010250/hack-reveals-suno-ai-music-generator-scraped-youtube-deezer-and-genius
[5] https://suno.com/blog/building-the-future-of-music-responsibly
Abuse of Copyright Law (Score:3)
The music industry is notorious for their aggressive stance copyright law. Suno offers a tool and should not be liable for users who use it wrongly. Going after Suno for copyright is similar to going after Microsoft or Photoshop for allowing a copy and paste feature for files, images or text. It is not the tool maker's responsibility to monitor its users and the fact they are implementing watermarks and fingerprinting is a total violation of users' privacy.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the difference is that Photoshop is not trained on copyrighted material. Photoshop, at least traditionally and I havent used it in a long time, doesn't generate work for you.
Does Suno work at all without first being trained on copyrighted material?
Re: (Score:2)
In Photoshop copy and paste allows exact copying of copyrighted material all the time. The act that makes it violate copyright is profiting from the new creation. If someone wants to violate copyright Photoshop and Microsoft are far better tools. You could say Suno is profiting by producing a copyrighted work, but that's not what they are selling. The are selling the paintbrush, not the art.
How can you watermark a song ... (Score:2)
... without impacting the listening experience?
And how can you check for that watermark?
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, no, what they usually do is much more insidious: fingerprinting rather than watermarking. The fingerprint isn't actually included in the audio, it's included in a database. If they want to tell if the track was generated, they just try to match the fingerprint in the database. Can't filter it out of the track like you can with a watermark.
Re: (Score:2)
I used to mess around this years ago by tweaking the transparency bits of an image (the alpha channel). It worked really well but my method was easily detectable as I had no idea how to encrypt or hide the extra information. To the eye however you would have no clue another file was embedded in the image.
No wonder they want to ban local, open models (Score:2)
Big AI is basically making itself irrelevant with its push for "Safety" at this point.
Re: (Score:2)
Except instead of pursuing policies that would help open models at the expense of Big AI, anti-AI people pursue just the opposite - policies that can cripple open source AI but have no realistic ability to meaningfully hurt big AI. It's so short sighted.
Only now? (Score:3)
I would have assumed they watermark the songs. I wouldn't think doesn't watermark, just as I do not assume that cloud providers don't access my data if they think it would benefit them.
Their "prevent mass distribution" claims are laughable of course, because when there is no copyright on AI output, the worst thing they can do when someone distributes their song is to cancel the account so they cannot create more songs. The whole "You cannot do ... with your outputs" claims are absolutely void, because without copyright protection the provider also cannot make rules about the content.
Out of money in 3, 2, 1... (Score:3)
Suno was neat for making goofy meme songs to listen to by yourself, but the latest free model kind of sucks. The only people actually paying to use this are folks gaming streaming platforms, and for background music in ads (which is a trend that really needs to die).
I'm also kind of surprised they've mentioned copyrighted lyrics being blocked as if it was a recent thing. It's been like that for awhile, ever since it became relatively well known that if you spun up enough generations using existing popular song lyrics, you'd eventually get it to spit out something that sounded remarkably close to the original. That was also kind of fun for changing the genre, so you could do things like reimagining a Dr. Dre song as Big Band.
Open source solution (Score:1)
We need an open source solution for this that companies cannot ever censor. This is the only way we're going to get anywhere with AI tools.
Re:Open source solution (Score:4, Informative)
The two mainstream options (both about half a year old now, we're due for something better) are Ace Step-1.5 and Stable Audio 3 Medium.
Ace Step has full vocals with its music. See [1]here [youtube.com] for examples. The downside in my opinion (judge for yourself) is that it has Suno's flaw of sounding too "clean", "mainstream" and "uncreative", except even moreso (Udio was always much better than Suno at this, albeit "less well behaved" - but Udio is out of the game now).
Stable Audio 3 doesn't do vocals, though it has other useful features, like inpainting (great for fixing glitches in recorded tracks for example). In my view, it [2]sounds a lot better [youtu.be]. It can also be used to create sound effects. License is a bit more restrictive, though, if you actually care about that, but generally won't affect the average user.
Both are trained on fully licensed data and both are open-weights. So even if the devs released a version that included some sort of watermarking in the future (or someone developed a fingerprinting algo for the existing versions), you could just finetune them to break that.
TL/DR, if you want open source and want to just churn out a full track: choose Ace Step 1.5.
If you want open source and want to do instrumental tracks or to supplement manual work (such as your own vocals) or do audio editing: chose Stable Audio 3.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzddQoCKKss
[2] https://youtu.be/TU3PvItvSO0?t=167