GoKawiilis the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.
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Suno’s new v6 AI music model is its first made with support from the record industry. Suno’s Jack Brody told The Verge that v6 was “trained from the ground up, with a new set of data that does not include the same data that our previous models were trained on.” The data includes content licensed from partners Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe, as well as “user data.” It’s unclear whether that means v6 training data is completely free of dubiously obtained content.
One of the big changes in v6 is that there are actually three different models: v6, v6-wild, and v6-mini. Mini is the model available for free to all. It’s focused on fast, resource-light creation. The results it spits out are simpler and often have more artifacts that betray it as the product of an AI prompt. v6-wild is supposed to be more unpredictable. Brody said that v6-wild is designed for “happy accidents and natural imperfections.” Though, in my limited testing, I found it hard to notice a difference between wild and bog-standard v6.
All three models are dramatically better at understanding genre. I recycled a handful of prompts that I used with older models calling for “hyperpop” or “krautrock” songs that missed the mark by a mile. v6, on the other hand, nailed all the superficial hallmarks of any genre I threw at it.
What it remains incapable of doing, however, is actually delivering on the “natural imperfections.” As with v5, my attempts to get off-key, out-of-tune, or slightly dissonant results failed every time. No matter how hard you push Suno’s v6, it remains incapable of making anything other than harmonic and rhythmic perfection. Tell it you want “monotone vocals” and “no drums,” and it straight-up ignores you (see below). Repeated demands for “out-of-tune piano played haphazardly, with no regard for key or rhythm” that was “fully out of tune with the rest of the song,” delivered nothing of the sort.
It does retain the unnatural imperfections of AI music, with vocals especially seeming to produce more of the harsh-edged artifacts common with AI models than v5 did.
Suno’s v6 also has some under-the-hood updates that can fundamentally change how people interact with it. Now users can edit parts of a song using plain language within a chat, and changing individual elements like a guitar line or a single lyric doesn’t require regenerating the entire track. v6 can also mash together multiple elements from your Suno library, combining outputs into new creations.
Prompts are also no longer limited to text descriptions. Suno v6 can create tracks based on images, video, or other audio.
Suno v6 starts rolling out today, and the company says it will eventually retire its previous models.