The Musician's Guide to Suno AI Music in 2025
Ezra Sandzer-Bell- Jan 11
- 9 min read
Updated: Apr 27
Suno AI is the most controversial and polarizing generative AI music company in the world. They have been accused of stealing intellectual property from artists without remunerating labels, diluting the revenue streams from DSPs like Spotify and devaluing music as a whole.
On the other hand, Suno was the first generative AI music app to show the world what this technology was truly capable of. No former competitor came anywhere near to compositional variety and quality of Suno. They challenged long held conceits about music creativity and proved that data is the biggest challenge.
Musicians are divided between vocal opposition and silent adopters. There are a number of fascinating use cases for Suno as a musician, from "AI crate digging" to song extension and style transfer.
We'll get into the product, techniques and musician workflows in this article, but it's important to first understand where they stand in 2025. This includes ethical, cultural and licensing problems that you could face. We've created a table of contents below so you can use to skip to whatever section most interests you.
Our team was contracted briefly by Suno in early 2024, prior to the revelations of unlicensed model training. This post was not sponsored by Suno, however they did provide free credits to our team for testing and product evaluation.
You can find Suno's website here.
Table of Contents
The Basics: Getting started with Suno AI Music
When you sign up for Suno, you get a certain amount of generation credits for free. Below is a screenshot of what the interface looks like from the Create view.
The left panel features a separate text area for lyrics and musical style. Hit the "instrumental" switch if you want to create music without vocals. On the other hand, if you've got lyrics and don't know what style of music would be best, you can hit "exclude styles".
Near the top of that left panel, located the "upload audio" button. You'll need to agree to their terms and only upload music that you have the rights to use (oh the irony). Then you can record directly or upload a file from your computer.
As a musician, you'll want to go deeper than mere song generation. So in the next sections we'll show you how to get the most out of Suno with stem separation, audio extension, style transfer and vocal cover song features.
How to prompt Suno: Instruments & genre fusion
Plenty of resources exist for learning how to prompt Suno effectively.
In my experience, the most important detail is that Suno does respect instrument prompts, whereas its main competitor Udio does not. The more instruments you request in Suno, the less likely it is that you'll get all of them.
When you upload an audio file (like a piano sample) and use a bracketed style prompt like [cello] or [synthesizer], it will do its best to transfer your original performance onto that new instrument using similar dynamics and notes.
Suno is also capable of genre fusions that have never existed, but it tends to get lost when you ask for more than two at a time. Try to keep it simple.
AI crate digging: How to get stems from Suno
Crate digging refers to a classic music sampling technique. Artists used to go digging through vinyl, looking for the perfect break or vocal chop. If they were lucky enough to turn that into a hit, there was always a legal team on the other end waiting to collect royalties for that original sample.
To access Suno's Get Stems feature, click on the vertical ellipsis located to the right-end of a song in your collection list. Select the create menu item and then hit Get Stems. This action will allow isolate instrumental and vocal tracks, but they don't go any deeper than that.
If you want to go deeper and separate individual instruments in the mix, I can recommend RipX or Samplab 2. Those are both paid tools with note-changing capabilities to adjust the mix and get MIDI transcriptions.
There's also a free stem splitting tool called Audio Splitter AI that will separate drums and bass from the rest of your instruments. RipX has the most comprehensive separator over all.
Legal note: Suno generate original compositions, which means musicians can create tracks that never existed before and sample their favorite sections. Their terms of service permit commercial use, though there are technically some federal guidelines stating that AI generated works are not copyrightable.
If you're pulling stems out of Suno, chopping them up and adding effects, you're in a better position legally than if you sample them directly. AI content detection services like MatchTune are targeting Suno tracks specifically and will be working with DSPs to block AI generated content.
Suno's extend feature (Style transfer)
We've written a deep dive article on AI music extension that covers this topic in depth. Commonly known as audio-to-audio, this technique takes an existing track and builds upon it. There's more than one way to use this feature and we'll summarize it here for you.
The tutorial above will walk you through the process of extending any audio file in your Suno collection. It's more or less the same as getting stems, as you'll see here:
Extend isn't the best word for this feature. Suno cannot match the precise timbre of your existing track and extend it verbatim. Additionally, it will not blend the former track with the new generation. It creates an entirely new track, attempting to develop new ideas and variations based on your initial audio condition.
If you want to extend a song seamlessly with AI, I strongly recommend going for Udio instead. Their service will stitch your input with the extension and are much better at maintaining the timbre of your track. Just be aware that Udio was also sued by the RIAA and carries the same legal and ethical baggage that Suno does.
Suno's extend feature should really be called "style transfer" because that's what it's best at. You can upload a melody, with or without accompaniment, and dictate the lyrics + musical style that you want to hear. It's remarkably good at workshopping a chord and melody arrangement across different genres.
Want to hear that idea as a lofi hip hop beat? As a trap instrumental? As a death metal track with blast beats and growling vocals? Suno can do all of that. Where Udio excels at extending the input, it is totally incapable of creating new arrangements around an audio input.
Suno AI covers: Turn voice memos into full songs
Suno's AI cover feature lets you upload melodic music and hear it performed over an instrumental track. In my experience, covers are basically the same as audio extension, but with a focus on melody over arrangement.
They seem to work best with solo vocal recordings, like a voice memo from your phone. I could be wrong, but covers feel a bit like a "rebrand" of their extension feature, designed to target a different segment of their user base. Suno's extend feature can already transfer melodies into new styles.
My advice would be to try the extend and cover features, to see if there's any noticeable difference in the outputs. See the screenshot below for the Cover Song item within the Create menu.
Is Suno AI an ethical music creation tool?
Generative AI tools took the world by storm in 2023, culminating in an unexpected end-of-year partnership between Microsoft and text-to-song company Suno AI.
On May 21st 2024, the company took to socials to announce that they had raised a staggering $125,000,000 in capital to help power their business. One month later, the RIAA filed a class action lawsuit against Suno and accused them of massive copyright infringement.
Major labels forced Suno's hand and the AI music company had to come out publicly with a defensive admission that they had obtained the music in their training set without licensing the audio from rights holders.
Their CEO claimed that they had tried to strike up deals and were already in active negotiations at the time of the lawsuit. He also made the "fair use" argument heard from the other major generative AI companies in text, image, and video generation.
Despite the lawsuit, Suno pushed forward and continued improving on their model, releasing new features and iterating on product features.
In late 2024, they launched a promotional campaign with Timbaland, one of hip hop's most influential musicians and producers. Users were encouraged to remix a sample with Suno and win cash prizes.
It looked like Suno was pivoting to becoming a musician's tool, but in January 2025 their CEO Mikey Shulmann went on a podcast and made a controversial statement that threw the company's vision and purpose into question.
“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now… it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music.”
His take on music production went viral on social media, racking up four million views on twitter with thousands of reposts. Musicians were offended and even members of their core user base spoke out against his stance.
Mikey did his best to clarify his stance in a follow up statement:
"Watching myself on video always makes me cringe, but doubly so when I’ve expressed an idea badly. This quote makes it sound like I'm discouraging people from learning music, enjoying music, or improving their craft — I didn’t mean to and that's my fault, not the interviewer’s.
I've been playing piano since age 4 and bass since 13. I still play literally every day (I have both a piano and a bass in my office), and it brings me immense joy.
I encourage everyone I know to find joy in music in their own way. But there are two unfortunate and common cases where people miss out on the joys of making music: (a) people who drop their craft out of frustration before they get good enough to truly enjoy it and (b) people who struggle through, learn an instrument to a high level, and then drop it because they couldn’t keep up with the practice or it became stressful. How many people do you know who stopped playing their instrument when they left high school?
This is what I was referring to, not undermining the value of practice — which is valuable whether for instruments, tools like Suno, or (apparently) talking on a podcast. Music is my life, not just my job, and a huge part of Suno is making that joy accessible to more people in more ways."
This clarification was accepted by some and rejected by others. It's easy to pile on and attack public figures, especially when they appear to be exploiting artists for corporate profit. In deed, I think there's a strong case that this is precisely what's happening.
But like everything in life, the situation is nuanced. Tech companies have a long history of "disrupting" legacy institutions in order to push forward innovative new tech for the enjoyment of consumers. Suno is not unique in this regard.
Timbaland doubled down on Suno after the CEO's controversial statement. During one podcast, he compared the rejection of genAI music technology to autotune and insisted that this is where the industry is headed, whether we like it or not.
At the end of the day, it's up to each individual to decide for themselves how they feel about this tech and what they want to do. So without further ado, let's get into Suno V4 and explore the music creation use cases.
Ethical alternatives to Suno for AI music creation
The ethical dilemma of creating music on the backs of unpaid artists has soured a lot of people to the idea of using generative AI. However, there are a number of ethically trained alternatives that musicians can use with a clear conscience.
Lemonaide is an AI MIDI generation tool that creates 4 and 8 bar MIDI loops based on a target music producer's style. Each artist model was trained with consent and includes a 40% revenue share that flows back to the original musicians.
Datamind Combobulator is a neural audio synthesis tool used in underground electronic glitch circles. Like Lemonaide, It was trained in partnership with popular musicians and includes a 50% revenue share whenever an "artist brain" is sold.
Neutone Morpho is a popular Japanese neural synthesis company, similar to the Combobulator plugin. They offer a 50% revenue share, just like Datamind.
If text-to-music excites you and artificial intelligence is not a priority, check out the AudioCipher MIDI chord and melody generator.
Our plugin runs on a musical cryptogram technique, sidestepping the problem of AI model training. Words are transcoded through BPM, scale, chord extension, rhythm settings and a optional randomization features to deliver fun and unexpected outputs.
Check out this full list of AI music apps to learn more about the product landscape as a whole. They are not all ethically trained but you will gain a more complete understanding of the software that's out there in the world. Enjoy!
