Lucian Grainge on Suno's licensed v6: 'they trained on everybody's music and showed complete disregard'

Lucian Grainge looked at Suno’s new licensed model and saw “no difference”.

The Universal Music Group chairman and CEO told The Hollywood Reporter that Suno “trained on everybody’s music and showed complete disregard.” THR named him its first Music Titan, and Ethan Millman’s interview went online on October 8, 2026.

Then Grainge caught himself. “There’s potential litigation,” he said, and then: “I should probably actually shut up.”

Universal is the biggest music company in the world. THR puts Universal’s market share at nearly 39%, citing Billboard.

What Lucian Grainge said about Suno v6 and its Warner and BMG licenses

Millman asked about the model Suno put out “just a couple of days ago”, trained on recordings from Warner Music Group and BMG. That is Suno v6, which went live on September 9, 2026 with Warner, BMG and Believe as partners. Warner got there by settling its own lawsuit with Suno in November 2025.

Grainge’s first answer was his checklist: “Opt in, fair compensation, respect for what the artists do, and respect for our organization and our leadership.” He said the same goes for every tech platform, “whether it’s YouTube or Klay or Nvidia or OpenAI or Apple.” Then: “It’s so uncomplicated.”

Millman pushed back. Isn’t that exactly what Warner and BMG would say they got out of the deal?

“To be quite honest, I only know what my team and I think,” Grainge said. “All I know is what I see, and what I see is that they trained on everybody’s music and showed complete disregard. There’s no difference in my opinion.”

Going by Millman’s question, the interview happened shortly after September 9. On September 18, Universal and Sony Music sued Suno a second time, over 60,202 recordings. Their argument matches what Grainge said: a model built on the outputs of Suno’s older, unlicensed models still infringes, even with licensed recordings added.

Suno answered on September 22 that v6 was trained on licensed partner content, plus “creations and preference signals” from its users. I’m tracking every filing in the Universal and Sony v. Suno v6 case tracker.

Lucian Grainge’s 4 conditions for an AI music deal

Millman pointed out that none of UMG’s AI partnerships allows fully AI-generated music, and asked if that is a nonstarter.

“It’s still the same principles: respect, compensation, protection, opt-in.”

So would he be OK with it one day? Grainge answered with a story from around 1986. He was in the studio with “a huge superstar”, heard an incredible guitar solo on the monitor mix and called it brilliant. The producer smiled and told him: “We played that on a keyboard; it was sampled.”

Then he gave the straight answer: “You’re asking me to answer a question to which I don’t have the answer at the moment.” As long as there’s opt-in, leadership, support and respect for the artists, he said, “I will always pay attention.”

Opt-in already shows up in Universal’s AI deals. The Udio settlement has artists opt in and get paid, the ElevenLabs deal from September 10 is built around “participating” artists, and Grainge called opt-in protections critical back in May.

Why Lucian Grainge says AI feels no different from Napster and Spotify

Millman noted that AI has been called an even bigger shift than Napster and downloads. Does it feel different?

“It doesn’t,” Grainge said. His proof is Spotify. When Universal backed the all-you-can-eat streaming model, “the pushback that I got on Spotify, on the all-you-can-eat model, that was just breathtaking. I was a moron. It was going to be the end of the industry.”

“But here we are, more predictive, more recurring, more stable,” he said, and called AI “another cycle of futurism.”

On the fear that AI replaces artists: “It’s not going to replace [music]. It’ll enhance it. It could stress-test it. It’s a new format.”

He also said every tech CEO he meets, at “companies worth trillions”, opens with the same line: “don’t worry about inauthentic products. It’s not what we see in the data.” His example of fakes not lasting is Milli Vanilli, who won a Grammy and then got discredited.

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I love change, I love disruption, and I'm very bullish about it provided it's compensated and that the tech platforms respect us.

RIAA chief Mitch Glazier reached for Napster too, on October 7. Asked if generative AI is music’s next Napster moment, he told Billboard “I think it’s the opposite”, because this time the fans are on the industry’s side. My write-up of Glazier’s interview has the rest.

Lucian Grainge on the DOJ backing OpenAI’s fair-use defense

The last AI question was about the US Justice Department siding with OpenAI on fair use in The New York Times’ lawsuit. Does that worry him?

Grainge answered with questions. “What do you think I think on the issue? What do you think I spend an enormous amount of my time on in terms of public policy?”

He listed trips to India, Japan, the UK and Washington, D.C., and added: “I’m not trawling bars for the next country singer, let’s put it that way.” A former colleague once described him as “a bit like a submarine,” he said. “I like to turn up quietly.”

Fair use is the defense AI companies lean on in the label lawsuits: the claim that training on music transforms it enough that no license is needed. It is the core question in RIAA v. Suno, the labels’ first case from June 2024.

The rest of the interview covers Grainge’s son Elliot at Atlantic Music Group and Bill Ackman’s failed takeover bid. You can read the full Music Titan interview on THR.