‘AI becomes pro-artist’ according to Warner’s licensing agreement with Suno, but can it compete with the divine feminine?

[Georgia Jenkins]

 Georgia Jenkins Saturday, November 29, 2025 - AI, Artificial Intelligence, collecting societies, collective autonomy, copyright law, copyright licensing, Georgia Jenkins, human creativity, misuse of private information, Personality rights

When this Kat heard Rosalía confirm that ‘listening to music low gives you bad luck’, her ears pricked up. Rosalía explains that: 'When I’m at home, I’m blasting it because it gives me energy and I can hear all the details. And when you’ve made an idea in the studio, you want to hear it loud and you’re going to enjoy it more.'

And after listening to Lux (loud), this Kat can confirm that you hear all the inherently human details – from small giggles and gasps in ‘La Perla’ or the sheet music turning in ‘Reliquia’, there is this innate feeling that you are listening to a new form of resistance: human creativity.

Photo by Simion Andreea-Marina on Unsplash This Kat is chanelling the divine feminine  as copyright saviour

The Warner-Suno licensing agreement

And yet, the latest AI licensing agreement between Warner Music Group (WMG) and Suno paints a very different picture of creativity. WMG describes it as:

[A] first-of-its-kind partnership that will open new frontiers in music creation, interaction, and discovery, while both compensating and protecting artists, songwriters, and the wider creative community. 

Settling litigation between the parties, the agreement follows Suno raising $250million at a $2.45billion valuation in November while reaching $200million in annual revenue, largely from its 100 million subscriptions.

Those same subscriptions form the basis of the new licensing models that Suno will launch next year, which Warner explains means that ‘the current models will be deprecated’ ('current models' being Suno’s unlicensed models.) Next year, only paid users will be able to download AI-generated audio. The ‘freemium’ approach means that those songs made using a free-tier account will be limited to playing and sharing on the platform with users with ‘monthly download caps’ and ‘the ability to pay for more downloads’.

Similarly to the Universal-Udio settlement (IPkat here) and Spotify’s Agreement with major music labels (IPKat here), Warner and Suno are also fixed on ‘deeper fan engagement’ with plans to add ‘powerful new interactive features’ alongside ‘new revenue streams’ for artists and songwriters. They state that artists and songwriters can opt-in for ‘the use of their name, image, likeness, voice and compositions in new AI-songs’ and receive compensation.

Furthermore, Suno’s acquisition of Songkick from Warner, where 15 million users ‘track artists across six million listed concerts and festivals globally’, has been described as ‘buying an additional layer of actionable fan insights’. It is worth noting that Songkick’s behavioural data comprises ‘what music people want to create; which artists inspire their ideas, and crucially; which live shows they’re tracking and planning to attend’. In tandem with the Suno Studio, which ‘combines […] AI music generation technology with professional multi-track editing tools’, Suno is now in a powerful (and dangerous?) position to shape music production and prioritise superfan-aligned music to the detriment of artistic agency and music pluralism.

Comment

The Warner-Suno licensing agreement appears to supersede both legislative discussion and litigation which centres on addressing the economic harm related to unauthorised reproductions. Particularly in jurisdictions lacking personality rights, like the UK, this agreement nudges norms and values relating to creativity without any real consultation with artists and songwriters, nor its broader societal impact. Perhaps Australia’s new Statutory Tort of Privacy is a good building block for the UK to expand its own common law tort of misuse of private information to cover the commercial exploitation of identifiable attributes relating to voice characteristics. Whether they should follow Danish and Dutch legislative initiatives is worthy of reflection (IPKat here).

In parallel, collecting societies like GEMA and Koda have also begun plugging this gap by commencing lawsuits on behalf of the artists, songwriters, publishers and creators they represent. With a lawsuit pending against Suno and an appeal likely after the OpenAI ruling (IPKat here), GEMA is pushing the boundaries of the copyright system to capture the economic harm of unlicensed reproduction and making available of such works. Similarly, Koda’s lawsuit against Suno alleges that Suno has ‘stole[n] music from Danish artists’ including ‘Barbie Girl by Acqua and ‘Final Song’ by MØ.

With other agreements between music publishers and AI-related platforms surely on the horizon, it is Koda’s broader message that rings loud and clear:

It is completely unacceptable that it takes a lawsuit to make Suno and similar AI services pay for the music they use. If we want to continue having talented artists creating new Danish music in the future, we must protect our music industry and not leave it to cynical tech companies and their algorithms to shape and tell our story. 

It hints at a collective value of data related to creativity and cultural memory that copyright and related rights currently seem incapable of processing: its socio-cultural worth. At present, this Kat is of the opinion that a broader discussion is needed to address the seismic impact of these licensing agreements on human creativity. And one that does not exclude the position of creative users, who are also missing within this debate. A quick look on Reddit emphasizes their perceived fallout.

And while Rosalía may declare that, ‘There is no AI. It’s a human album’, for the 13 languages studied to create Lux, it all started through typing lyrics into Google Translate, which uses neural networks and deep learning techniques to translate whole sentences simultaneously. The picture is complicated and a binary approach to creativity is at best unhelpful, and worst, harmful. Though 97% of people allegedly can’t tell the difference between real and AI music, Lux stands a testament to the divine feminine where Rosalía’s humanness transcends algorithmic reproduction and creates something deeply magical like the mystics that inspired her. The divine feminine mentality might just be our saviour.

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