From lawsuits to paradigm-shifting partnerships, major players across Nashville’s music industry have taken drastically different approaches to dealing with AI music generators.
AI music platform Suno announced a new partnership with both BMG and Warner Music Group (WMG) on Sept. 9, giving the disruptive technology an added air of legitimacy. For the first time, BMG and WMG artists have the option to earn income by letting their songs be used by Suno users, fans already creating new songs from simple text prompts or images. The partnership allows artists to get paid for making their catalogs available for experiments, not for the training data underlying the AI platform, which is itself the subject of heated debates across the music industry.
Meanwhile, other industry players have decided to fight back, claiming artists should be paid for songs used in the training data as well, materials that have never been publicly disclosed. Musicians, songwriters and more have launched several court cases over copyright infringement. Against that backdrop, AI usage has become ubiquitous throughout the industry.
Chief Product Officer Jack Brody told The Tennessean that Suno is "still working through the artists that want to be onboarded" to the catalog revenue model, although so far none of the artists represented by BMG or WMG were named as part of the announcement.
Now that AI music generators are routinely being used at commercial scale, Nashville’s reaction could redefine how the music industry works in the future.
"Just because someone is paying to create music doesn't mean that they stop paying for other music experiences," Brody said in reference to streaming services, merch and concerts. "The future of music needs to be built in partnership with the industry and with artists."
The details of Suno’s partnership with BMG and Warner Music Group
Suno announced its first global licensing deal with BMG (home of Nashville country artists like Jelly Roll and Lainey Wilson) in August, clearing past catalog use and setting the stage for a new phase of AI tools “built in direct collaboration with the music industry.”
That phase was revealed on Wednesday when Suno rolled out its V6 model in partnership with BMG and WMG (home of Nashville country artists like Bailey Zimmerman and Cody Johnson).
In a blog post written by Suno founder and CEO Mikey Shulman, the platform’s “V6” model was described as a “blueprint for how AI and the music industry can strengthen one another,” both expanding creative possibilities for users while opening a new revenue stream for creators.
Three new subscription tiers are available, with tools Suno said include “safeguards to protect artists’ work from being used without permission, and make it harder for bad actors to abuse.”
Along those lines, Brody commented that giving Suno users the ability to play around with an artist's catalog increases the diversity of people who can make music, regardless of the old school tools and instruments they may actually own.
"This technology lends itself to both people who have never made original music before and the Grammy-winning producers," Brody said.
Shulman touted V6 as the start of a new way for people to interact with the music and artists they love. Not everyone agrees with this perspective.
Why did BMG and WMG make a deal with Suno?
Suno is currently worth an estimated $5 billion and claims 100 million people have created songs on the platform, which counts 2 million paying subscribers in addition to many more free accounts. Multiple court cases are ongoing to test the rationale that the business could train AI software on copyrighted material using the "fair use" copyright exemption. Both BMG and WMG were part of one major lawsuit until they reached settlements that paved the way for their new partnership.
In joining forces with Suno, BMG and WMG may be applying lessons learned from the disastrous rollout of file sharing in the early 2000s. After riding high through the 1990s, the recording business contracted by more than 50% before it finally returned to pre-Napster levels with the advent of subscription streaming. Joining forces with AI platforms for new revenue models may be a faster way to prevent losses than waiting on punitive payments for software models already trained on copyrighted music.
Back in August, BMG's EVP of Global Marketing & Streaming, Celine Joshua, said in a press statement that the music label and publisher behind country stars like Blake Shelton and Jason Aldean is entering "the era of creation" while "shaping that future together with our creators and Suno.”
Inside Round Hill Music's $1 billion lawsuit
Other music businesses have not been so accommodating. Round Hill Music is an independent music publisher and record company with an international footprint, as well as a manager of investment funds that hold the copyrights to “some of the best known songs and records of the past 50 years,” including country songs written by Ashley Gorley and works by emerging artists like Katie Pruitt.
Round Hill filed a massive lawsuit against Suno and AI giant Anthropic in August, claiming the companies used musical works owned or managed by Round Hill “without authorization, license, or compensation to train their AI models.” The songs in question include "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls, "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler (written by Jim Steinman) and "I Got You (I Feel Good)" by James Brown.
The company is seeking $1 billion in damages, which is coincidentally close to the estimated value of its $1.1 billion investment portfolio. Even so, Round Hill CEO and founder Josh Gruss said in a statement that his company is not against artificial intelligence nor technological advancements, having helped develop the field of music-catalog investment.
“We are against the idea that you can build a business worth billions on top of other people's creative work and pay the creators nothing,” Gruss explained.
Round Hill’s statement also said the goal is to take the case to trial, as the company “will not accept a resolution that leaves songwriters and artists deprived of their rightful share of compensation.” The company noted that licensing rules are not obstacles to be overcome, but are instead frameworks of protection aimed at making sure creators don’t get taken advantage of. It remains to be seen how many artists will opt in to the catalog revenue model compared to those that will join lawsuits focused on training data.
Why did Jason Isbell sue Suno?
Grammy-winning Nashville singer-songwriter Jason Isbell has also launched a lawsuit against Suno, aiming for class-action approval on behalf of virtually all artists. Filed Aug. 31, his fellow plaintiffs include the frontman of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, David Lowery; Texas blues musician Guy Forsyth; and Florida-based saxophonist Eduardo Calle.
Isbell has taken a slightly different approach in his attempt to rein in AI music generation. His suit alleges Suno essentially stole the identity of the artists it trained its models on.
The specific issue Isbell's suit highlights is Suno’s ability to create an entire song (with artwork) which mimics an artist's sound and style, based only on a user typing in a real artist’s name. Since Suno is a for-profit business, the suit characterizes that activity as profiting off the artists’ name and identity without consent.
Ever the creative, Isbell’s suit invoked pop culture in making the claim (along with 39 exhibits to drive home his point). The filing compared Suno to “the Borg” from Star Trek, a technological alien species which assimilates every life form it encounters, consuming unique traits to make them its own.
“Autonomy is consumed and repurposed in the service of a cold machine intelligence that feels nothing for what it has taken,” the lawsuit stated.
Isbell and his co-plaintiffs make their case by feeding Suno prompts like “Buddy Guy,” “Carly Simon,” “Mavis Staples,” and “The Chicks,” then showing the songs it created in their signature style. However, Suno appears to have introduced some restrictions on what users can search. Attempting to generate songs or art based specifically on "Taylor Swift," for example, will inform the user that the prompt is being replaced with broader genre suggestions.
Do people actually want AI music?
It would be hard to overstate how widespread these controversial tools are, which is why Suno's paid tiers offer tools for professional songwriters and creators as well as running weekly writing camps across the country, including an invite-only product demo for Nashville songwriters immediately following the announcement.
Along those lines, Brody described V6 wild as a tool "informed by feedback from artists for unexpected variety and brainstorming," while the Studio 2.0 environment allows songwriters to experiment with their own original work by, for example, swapping banjo for guitar in this section, changing the tonality of another section and changing one line of the lyrics. The Tennessean has reached out to both BMG and WMG for comment and will update if we hear back.
Regardless, as these cases and deals make clear, there is no lack of AI-generated music out there.
“I've seen AI in every studio, in every session. I'm not remembering a song I've been around or a room I've been in that was not using some form of AI," Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. said in a Verge podcast released in June.
Streaming service Deezer revealed in 2026 that about 75,000 AI-generated tracks were uploaded to the platform each day, or roughly 44% of its daily total.
Likewise, AI-generated tributes to Dolly Parton claiming to be “inspired” by Miley Cyrus, Ed Sheeran and others were posted online within hours of the country icon’s death. But whether fans want this content, or can even tell the difference between music recorded with instruments versus generated with software prompts, raises different questions entirely.
A report published in early 2026 by the data insights company Luminate found interest in AI music dropping and discomfort with AI music creation growing. Those with the most negative view of AI music were from older generations, but the trend was growing fastest among the youngest Americans. Time will tell how this wave of AI-music generation plays out, and what role Nashville’s music industry will play in that future.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: What Suno's Warner, BMG deals mean for the future of Nashville's music
