Suno reports $300 million in recurring revenue

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Amanda Silberling techcrunch.com

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Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and chief executive officer of Perplexity, during TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024. techcrunch.com

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Suno, an AI music generator, says it has reached two million paying subscribers and roughly $300 million in annual recurring revenue, according to a LinkedIn post by co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman reported by TechCrunch. The disclosure comes three months after Suno announced a $250 million funding round valuing the company at $2.45 billion; at that time, the company told The Wall Street Journal its annual revenue was $200 million.

The numbers matter because they show that “AI” is no longer a speculative promise in at least one consumer category. Suno sells a subscription product that turns text prompts into finished songs, lowering the skill and time costs that previously constrained music production. That shift creates a new kind of supply shock: millions of users can manufacture near-infinite tracks, while platforms and labels still operate on scarcity assumptions—limited release slots, marketing budgets, and finite listener attention.

The legal risk, however, sits in the model’s past rather than its current billing. Labels and musicians have sued Suno over alleged copyright infringement, arguing the system was trained on existing recordings. TechCrunch notes that Warner Music Group has now settled its lawsuit and struck a licensing deal that allows Suno to build models using Warner’s catalog. That deal is less a moral verdict than a template: once a large rightsholder can charge for “permission to train,” litigation becomes a negotiation tactic and licensing becomes a toll.

The likely end state resembles streaming’s earlier consolidation. In the Spotify era, labels regained leverage by controlling catalog access; in the AI era, they can also control training access and, potentially, distribution partnerships that decide what synthetic music gets promoted. The interesting twist is that regulation can turn a private dispute into a collective solution. If lawmakers or regulators push toward compulsory licensing or collective rights schemes for training data, the costs of past scraping can be standardized and spread across the industry—predictable fees, predictable compliance—while the subscription revenue remains privately captured by the model owner.

Suno’s own success hints at the direction of travel. TechCrunch reports that synthetic tracks have been realistic enough to chart on Spotify and Billboard, and highlights a viral Suno-generated song that led to a reported $3 million record deal for its creator. The product is already producing commercially valuable outputs; the argument is now about who gets paid for the inputs.

For now, Suno can point to two million subscribers and a licensing settlement with a major label. The lawsuits did not prevent the company from reaching $300 million in recurring revenue first.