AI Music Digest

Suno’s new downloads policy takes effect on Thursday, September 3, along with a rewritten Terms of Service. The company announced both on August 10. Free accounts get seven trial downloads for life, for personal, non-commercial use only. Pro accounts get 20 downloads a month; Premier accounts get 60; Premier subscribers using Suno Studio get unlimited downloads from within Studio. Allowances reset on the billing date and do not roll over, and extra downloads can be bought. The caps apply to everything in a library, including songs made before Thursday — though every song stays playable and shareable on Suno itself, on every tier. Music Business Worldwide, which reported the change on August 11, puts Pro at $8–$10 a month and Premier at $24–$30, and notes that all three tiers previously had unlimited downloads.

The part that has drawn less attention is in the terms themselves. The September Terms of Service state that “you may commercially exploit Output solely to the extent it adheres to Suno’s Conditions of Access and Use as outlined above provided you have obtained a permitted download of that Output in accordance with the download allocations for your applicable service tier.” Commercial rights, in other words, now attach to the download rather than to the generation — so a Pro subscriber who makes 200 songs in a month can commercially use 20 of them, absent buying more. Rights already secured are durable: the same section says any assignment and the commercial use rights for a download already obtained “are perpetual and are not affected by your exhaustion of your Download allotment, by any later change to allotments or pricing, or by the expiry, cancellation, downgrade or suspension of your subscription.” The new terms also route disputes to binding individual arbitration with a class-action waiver, and add a staged process that kicks in once 25 or more similar claims are filed.

Suno frames the caps as ecosystem hygiene, saying limiting downloads makes it harder for bad actors to mass-export music and encourages more intentional creation. The company also says its first models built in partnership with the music industry will roll out alongside the changes, and that earlier models will be retired when they do — existing songs stay in libraries, but covers, remixes and extensions of them will run on the new models and may sound different. MBW notes the contrast with Udio, which disabled downloads outright after settling with Universal, and reports that Suno may attach a fingerprint, watermark or metadata to downloads and can terminate accounts that work around the limits.

Why It Matters: Anyone using Suno commercially now has a monthly ceiling on sellable output, retroactive to their whole back catalogue. It is also the clearest sign yet that licensed AI music means metered AI music.

Australia’s chart ban on wholly AI-generated recordings, which took effect with the ARIA chart dated August 31, has been widely covered as the first national implementation of the IFPI’s global AI eligibility principles. Finland got there earlier and went further, and almost nobody noticed. The rules for Suomen Virallinen Lista, the Official Finnish Chart run by Musiikkituottajat – IFPI Finland, carry a July 2026 date and contain a dedicated AI section. The document’s own file metadata puts its creation on July 16 — two weeks before IFPI announced its global principles on July 30. A copy re-uploaded on August 17 is textually identical on this point. The rule surfaced in English only on August 30, when the Finnish technology site AfterDawn wrote it up; no English-language music trade appears to have covered it.

Section 7 of the rules bars tracks and albums made or produced wholly by AI, and admits AI-created recordings only when they are “predominantly made by humans” and the services used were properly licensed and lawful. Non-qualifying recordings are excluded from the chart or removed from it, retroactively if necessary, with other positions corrected to compensate. The Chart Committee decides, and its rulings are final. An annex sets out seven conditions that a recording must meet in full where generative AI was used for anything beyond ordinary production assistance: the AI service must be licensed by rightsholders and lawful to use; the recording, assessed as a whole, must be predominantly the result of human creative work; there must be no suspicion of chart manipulation; the recording must comply with copyright, neighbouring rights and personality rights law; releasing it must not breach the AI service’s own terms of use; the use of AI must be disclosed and marked in the release’s distribution channels; and artists, rightsholders and distributors must give the chart operator accurate and sufficient information, with misleading or incomplete disclosure grounds for rejection or removal on its own.

Two of those go beyond what ARIA published. Requiring that a release not breach the generative AI service’s own terms of use imports one company’s contract into chart eligibility — which, read against the Suno story above, means a Finnish chart entry made on a Suno free account would fail on that ground alone. And making inaccurate disclosure independently disqualifying puts the burden of proof on the people submitting the record rather than on a detection system, in a market where no chart body has one that works reliably.

Why It Matters: The national chart rules being written now are not uniform, and the strictest ones are appearing in small markets without coverage. Finland’s version makes AI vendors’ licensing status and their terms of service into chart eligibility criteria.