Suno pulled the Mary J. Blige ad and says an unauthorized representative signed the deal

Suno killed its Mary J. Blige advertising campaign on September 3, five days after the clip started spreading. The reason Suno gave has nothing to do with the backlash. The company says the person who signed the deal was never Mary J. Blige’s representative.

Variety broke the story on Thursday afternoon, and Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter matched it within hours. Blige never approved the ad. She spent the better part of a week absorbing abuse online for something she had not agreed to.

Why Suno pulled the Mary J. Blige ad

Suno gave the same statement to Variety and Billboard.

“

We entered into a business deal with someone who presented themselves as Ms. Blige's official representative. As soon as we learned this was not the case, and that Ms. Blige was uncomfortable, we terminated the advertising campaign.

Two claims are doing work in that sentence. Suno was deceived, and Suno acted the moment it found out. Both may well be accurate. Neither has been checked by anyone outside the company.

Who signed the Suno deal, and why nobody can check it

Suno has not named the person who signed. No outlet has identified them. Nobody has reported what the deal was worth or who received the money.

Which puts this story in a strange place. My piece on Tuesday declined to print the multimillion-dollar figure attached to this campaign, because it came from one anonymous post on X and nobody had matched it. Suno’s explanation now arrives with the same evidentiary weight: a single interested party, no documents, no second source.

I think Suno is probably telling the truth here, because a company inventing an impostor invites questions it cannot answer later. That is a guess about plausibility, not reporting.

What the Mary J. Blige Suno ad actually showed

The clip runs 85 seconds. Blige sits in a studio with an unnamed producer as he builds a track apparently called “Pretty Flowers” that sounds like her records from the 1990s and 2000s. She asks him to add strings, then a beat, and watches it generate in seconds.

She says the process is “amazing” and “dope.” Variety notes that the way the video is cut makes it unclear what she is responding to at any given moment.

A shorter version is also going around in which her comments are pulled even further out of context. Variety could not establish whether Suno made that cut or whether somebody unconnected to either party assembled it.

Mary J. Blige has still not spoken for herself

Contacted by Variety, a representative for Blige had no further comment. She has said nothing publicly about the ad, the campaign, or its removal.

Everything known about her position comes secondhand, through a statement written by the company that ran the ad. Suno is the source for the claim that she was uncomfortable. Suno is the source for the claim that she never signed off.

The week Suno spent getting sued over artist identity

The timing matters because of what else landed in the same seven days.

The Isbell and Lowery class action argues that Suno encoded musicians’ identities into its model and then used their names commercially. Three days later Suno confirmed it had run a national ad campaign around a nine-time Grammy winner’s identity without her consent, for a different reason and through a different mechanism.

Suno has settled with Warner and signed a global licensing deal with BMG in August, and it is still in court with Universal and Sony. The legal side is being cleaned up deal by deal. The Blige campaign was a marketing decision, and it came apart on the question of whether an artist agreed to be there.