Yesterday I taught a session for people from marketing agencies and big brands. The subject was how to make music with AI the safe way. I opened with a game. We opened isthissongreal.ai and ran it live, clip after clip, people calling out in the chat: human or AI. The group did not do as well as it expected to. People who work in music and advertising for a living kept getting it wrong in both directions, then doubting a right answer once the next clip proved them wrong on the last one. I know that feeling of disbelief. I lived through my own version of it, the day I found out my business was already finished. A film director once hired me to score his new film. His budget was too low for the sound he wanted, and there was no way to build it the old way: book a studio, hire session musicians, pay an engineer to mix and master every scene. I had heard about Suno, so I tried something I had never done before. I gave ChatGPT the script and asked it where music needed to sit and what each moment called for. For every spot, it gave me three prompts. I generated three Suno versions for each one. I remember hitting play on the first version. I was blown away by the quality. By the end of the day, I had a soundtrack that was more or less finished. That was the moment I knew Great Dane, the production house I had built with fifteen to twenty creatives, was finished too. One person and one afternoon had done what used to take my whole team three weeks.
That split, one person doing the job of a team, is exactly what I unpacked for the room this week: what a human still has to do, and what Suno should only ever be used for.
Suno's older models were trained on whatever the company could scrape off the internet. That got Suno sued by Universal, Warner and Sony in 2024, and a Munich court ruled against it this July: GEMA proved six well known songs, including Rasputin and Forever Young, could be pulled back out almost note for note from a simple prompt. Suno's new v6, launched September 9, is trained only on catalogs it has paid for: Warner Music, BMG, and Believe's TuneCore. Try Suno and hear the difference yourself. The rule I gave the room was three parts. Composition and lyrics stay human. Suno can turn one composition into hundreds of different productions. If Suno writes the melody and the words too, your track is one prompt away from sounding like the rest. Suno is for production only. You or someone on your team writes the melody and the lyric. Suno arranges it, mixes it, masters it. That split, using Suno's Custom mode with your own composition as the input, is what makes the result yours, legally and creatively. Clone your own voice, or license one properly. Never let the output sound like a real, identifiable artist you have not cleared. That is a different problem from copyright, and it is the one that ends up in the news. Free: no commercial use. Pro, about eight dollars a month: commercial use, activated on download. Premier, about twenty four dollars a month: same rule, higher volume. Whatever plan is active the moment you download is the plan that counts, not the one you were on when you made the track.
None of this makes the license exclusive, someone else can prompt their way to something close to your track, and none of it guarantees the output avoids resembling an existing song. If a specific track infringes, that risk sits with you, not Suno. AI-assisted and disclosed beats one hundred percent AI undisclosed. The same rule holds outside music. Some AI work can already run start to finish without anyone checking it: scheduling, a first draft of a routine email, transcribing a call. Creative work is not there yet. AI film, AI images, AI music, all of it still needs a human making the creative call, with AI producing underneath. The businesses getting burned right now are the ones skipping that step to save an afternoon. Take a hotel, for example. Or a dental practice, a real estate office, a transport company, a coaching business. You need music behind your reels, your ads, your booking page video, your in-store playlist, and until now you were choosing between an unclear stock license, something pulled off the internet that could get flagged, or no music at all.
Try Suno yourself, the free tier costs nothing to test. If you are already putting out video or audio content for your business and you are not sure the music behind it is safe to keep using, then book twenty minutes with me. I will tell you plainly where you stand, and set up this exact workflow for your business.
P.S. If you played that guessing game with me on the call yesterday, thank you for being honest about the ones you got wrong. That is the whole point. The AI Solopreneur • AI Strategy for European SMBs |
