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Suno launched its long-awaited v6 on September 9, a new generation of AI music models built with three licensed rightsholder partners: Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe.
The startup’s co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman called the launch “the beginning of a new chapter for music.”
The ambition is not modest, and Suno has the numbers to match the language. It was valued at USD $5.4 billion in June, passed 2 million paying subscribers in February, and says more than 100 million people have used the platform.
Speaking at Bloomberg‘s Screentime conference in Los Angeles on Thursday (October 1), Shulmansaid Suno is now “far beyond” the 2 million subscribers and $300 million in annual recurring revenue it last disclosed, though he gave no new figures.
But for a company fighting legal action from two of the three majors, plus collection societies and indie artists, and now under investigation by a regulator in Italy, do those ambitions extend to trading on the public market?
Suno has not said so, but it is building the finance function of a company that could one day list.
A job listing spotted by MBW in July asked one of the company’s next senior finance hires to lead it “through its first-year financial statement audit” and to build “toward the controls and rigor required for IPO readiness.”
So what’s stopping Suno from an IPO?
Here, we highlight the signals pointing to the firm’s potential stock market ambitions and the barriers it faces in getting there.
A first CFO with pre-IPO experience
Last month, Sunohired its first Chief Financial Officer, Cherry Miao, who announced the appointment on September 14. She spent almost three years at data company Hightouch, most recently as its CFO.
Miao earlier spent five years at Montreal-based commerce software company Lightspeed (not to be confused with Suno investor Lightspeed Venture Partners), where she helped scale the company in the run-up to its 2019 Toronto listing. She left to join venture firm Accel in September 2018, months before Lightspeed went public.
A company with more than 2 million subscribers and a nine-figure revenue run rate hiring its first finance chief is, in isolation, ordinary company-building. It reads differently next to that job spec, and next to what a rival did a week earlier.
He joined from payments company Adyen, where he helped take the business public in 2018 and had been CFO since 2023. The Informationreported that ElevenLabs made the hire as it eyes a possible IPO around 2028.
On September 30, ElevenLabs completed a $300 million employee tender offer at a $22 billion valuation, more than four times the $5.4 billionSuno reached in June.
Both companies have now hired finance chiefs within days of each other. Tandowsky has taken a company public and run its finances as a listed business; Miao‘s experience comes from the stretch before a listing.
The two companies are also starting to overlap. ElevenLabs began with AI voice and moved into music in August 2025 with what is now ElevenMusic. On October 1, Suno moved the other way, opening a public beta of Speech, a model that generates spoken voice and background music together as one track.
“Music will always be at the heart of Suno and what we build,” Chief Product Officer Jack Brody wrote in announcing it. “At the same time, our vision has always extended to other forms of human expression.”
Speech is still in beta, but it points to ambitions beyond music, in the direction ElevenLabs has already taken: from a single audio product to a broader platform.
One difference is what has been said out loud. ElevenLabs co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewskisaid in February that the company was building “toward IPO and beyond,” and its likely timing has since been reported.
Suno has not publicly stated an intention to list, let alone a timeline.
That deal adds to a run of UMG AI agreements, including its October 2025 settlement and license with Udio, and deals with Spotify, Nvidia, and KLAY. In August, all three majors, Universal included, took equity in Stability AI via a $76 million Series B round, at a valuation Stability did not disclose.
In other words, the world’s largest music company is licensing across the AI field while continuing to sue Suno. Miao joins a company UMG is still taking to court.
Photo Credit: ElenaR/Shutterstock
The backers built for a listing
The round that set Suno‘s $5.4 billion valuation points the same way.
Sunoraised over $400 million in a June Series D led by Bond Capital, the late-stage firm co-founded by Mary Meeker, whose earlier growth bets at Kleiner Perkins included Slack, Uber, and Snap.
New backers included IVP, which has seen more than 135 portfolio companies go public since 1980, including Coinbase and CrowdStrike; Union Square Ventures, an early investor in Twitter, Etsy, and Coinbase; and Forerunner, whose early bets on Warby Parker and Chime both went public.
Bond and IVP are later-stage investors, backing companies that are already large and growing fast, often in the years before an IPO. Union Square and Forerunner usually invest much earlier, in a company’s first funding rounds.
What the round has in common is a roster of investors who have walked companies to the bell before, and who tend to price a stake on the assumption there is an exit at the end of it.
Shulman spoke about Suno‘s investors at Screentime last week.
“Just thinking about investors, we have amazing investors and partners for building this business,” he said. “But a lot of people think of music as a small business and one that they don’t necessarily wanna get into.
“And I think we’ve shown the world actually that music is a big business. Music is a really big part of people’s lives, and there’s immense potential for growth.”
The case hanging over it
Suno was sued in June 2024 by all three major music companies, which accused it of copying their recordings without permission to train its AI models. The case, coordinated by the RIAA and filed in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, alleged “mass infringement” of copyright.
Warner Music Groupsettled in November 2025 and licensed Suno, leaving UMG and Sony Music Entertainment as plaintiffs, with 560 of their recordings in suit. At up to $150,000 per work, that is a theoretical maximum of around $84 million.
UMG has shown it will deal with a defendant: it settled with Udio in October 2025 and licensed it. Sony hasn’t settled with either AI music generator, and in July it sued Udio a second time. Whatever price Suno might pay to make the majors’ case go away, there is a rightsholder on the other side that might just want a ruling more than a settlement.
In May, the labels asked to add 61,026 more recordings they had identified inside Suno‘s training data. On August 18, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IVrefused, noting they could bring those works in a separate suit, but let them add a DMCA claim alleging Suno used the tools YT-DL and YT-DLP to scrape recordings from YouTube.
On September 18, the labels took that route, suing Suno for a second time in the same Boston court, before the same judge, over 60,202 recordings. At the statutory ceiling, that is just over $9 billion.
The new suit also targets v6. The labels allege the new models were built on the outputs of Suno‘s earlier ones, and on users’ preferences between those outputs. Training on an infringing model’s outputs “does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it,” the complaint states. “v6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree.”
Sunocalled the claims “fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law,” and said v6 was trained in part on “interactions including creations and preference signals from our community.”
In its September 1 answer in the first case, Suno admitted that “audio data was obtained from YouTube for use as training data using YT-DLP.” Its first defense is fair use, which it calls “quintessential.” It also argues any infringement was innocent, which could cut statutory damages to as little as $200 per work.
None of it will be settled quickly. Fact discovery in the first case largely closed on September 30. On September 22, at the parties’ joint request, Saylor pushed the deadline for dispositive motions back to June 22, 2027, so a summary judgment ruling on fair use is not expected until the second half of 2027. Any S-1 filed before then goes out with the central question still open.
The lawsuits are piling up elsewhere
Separate from the majors’ case, a run of other parties have brought their own actions against Suno since early 2025.
One of those actions has already been decided. The Munich Regional Courtruled on July 31 that Suno had infringed copyright in a case brought by German collecting society GEMA, the first European decision on a generative AI music tool. It took jurisdiction over the training that happened in the United States, applied US copyright law to it, and rejected fair use. It also ordered Suno to disclose the revenue tied to the works, and found it liable in damages.
Suno says it is evaluating its options, including an appeal, and the judgment is not final, but it stands as an adjudicated finding of infringement, in a court that has already rejected the defense Suno is running in Boston.
The complaint argues that a record company’s authority to license a recording does not on its own give an AI firm the right to use the performer’s identity. It cites Warner‘s own deal with Suno, under which artists have full control over whether and how their names, voices, and likenesses are used, and argues that the protection extends only to participating rightsholders and their artists, not to musicians such as Isbell.
A European regulator is now looking at Suno as well. Italy’s competition authority, the AGCM, opened an investigation into Suno‘s terms of service on Tuesday (October 6), saying they “may create a significant imbalance in the rights and obligations under the contract, to the detriment of consumers.”
Among its concerns is a content license that, the AGCM said, “imposes the waiver of moral rights” contrary to Italy’s copyright statute. Suno‘s terms grant it a “perpetual, irrevocable” license over user content, including the output users generate, and the company has said v6 was trained in part on its users’ “creations.”
The AGCM can fine companies between EUR €5,000 and €10 million over unfair contract terms, according to its website.
SOPA/Alamy
Litigation has not stopped others from heading for a listing
It’s worth pointing out that an unresolved copyright case has not always been a bar to going public.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued at the end of August, three months after Anthropic‘s filing. OpenAI disclosed its own confidential filing a week after Anthropic, having last been valued at $852 billion, with the New York Times case against it still unresolved.
Neither of those two is a music-focused company. And both filings are confidential, so no public investor has yet had to price the risk. What they have established, however, is that unresolved copyright litigation is not stopping AI companies from starting the process.
The September 9v6 launch appears to be the product side of the same shift. Suno says the new models were trained from scratch, on different data from its previous versions: music licensed from its partners, plus data from its users. Every earlier model was retired the same day. Chief Product Officer Jack Brody told MBW that from launch “a portion of our revenue will be shared with our partners.”
None of that resolves the cases still running, and the second UMG and Sony suit is aimed at v6 itself.
What an S-1 would have to disclose
The risk factors, as they stand today, would have to cover unresolved infringement claims from two major music companies, across two lawsuits and more than 60,000 recordings, one of which reaches the models Suno runs today, with statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work.
On the other side of that ledger: 2 million paying subscribers and $300 million in annual recurring revenue as of February, figures Shulman now says Suno is “far beyond,” more than 100 million people who have used the platform, three licensing deals, and a generation of models built on them. Suno can put a number on its growth, but it can’t yet put a number on what the lawsuits might cost it.
That gap is the practical problem, because under US accounting rules, a company describes a loss that is reasonably possible in the notes to its accounts, even if it can’t put a figure on it. Once a loss is probable and can be reasonably estimated, it has to be recorded as a liability in the accounts themselves.
If Suno loses on fair use at summary judgment, the labels’ claims would move toward that second category, and the cost would show up in the accounts rather than the notes. The auditor on Suno‘s first financial statement audit has to sign off on all of it.
The bigger question
The bigger question
Suno‘s position parts company with those precedents in one respect. Spotify went public holding licenses from all three majors, with the Wixen claim at the edges of a licensed business. Anthropic and OpenAI face copyright claims too (Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle with book authors), but the works in dispute are a fraction of what their general-purpose models were trained on. Suno is litigating with two of the world’s largest recorded-music companies over the material its models were built from.
For nine days last month, some of that liability looked retrospective. When v6 launched on September 9, Suno retired the models at issue in the first case, so what is at stake there became largely the price of past conduct rather than the legality of the current product. That is the kind of exposure a prospectus exists to describe: a number, a range, a set of scenarios an underwriter can work with.
The second suit, filed on September 18, is harder to price that way. By alleging that v6 inherited what Suno‘s earlier models learned from the labels’ recordings, it puts the product Suno sells today into the case.
The number will not sit still either. The copyright claims in the first case carry a theoretical maximum of around $84 million. In the second, at 60,202 recordings, the ceiling is just over $9 billion, against a company valued at $5.4 billion. The labels say even those recordings are “only a small portion” of their works that Suno infringed.
Both sides are expected to move for summary judgment on fair use in the first case when those motions come due next June, in what is widely seen as a ruling that could set a precedent for Suno, Udio, and other AI music companies. Suno has pointed the court to Bartz v. Anthropic, where a judge found AI training on books to be fair use; the labels argue that Suno‘s outputs compete with the recordings used to train it.
The labels now have an appellate ruling to point to as well. On September 29, the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuitrejected a fair use defense over AI training, ruling for Thomson Reuters against legal research company ROSS Intelligence, in a case where the RIAA and NMPA backed Thomson Reuters with an amicus brief.
That ruling does not bind the court in Massachusetts, and the panel distinguished ROSS‘s platform, which it said cannot generate original expression, from the generative models at issue in Bartz.
Suno has the CFO, the backers, and a handful of deals. It’s still battling two of the world’s biggest rightsholders in court, now over the models it runs today as well as the ones it has retired.
Reservoir (Nasdaq: RSVR) is a publicly traded, global independent music company with operations across music publishing, recorded music, and artist management.Music Business Worldwide
