Suno's copyright filters are easy to bypass
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- Suno's copyright filters can be bypassed with free tools like Audacity: slowing or speeding a track and adding white noise to the start and end lets users generate near-identical AI covers of Beyoncé's "Freedom," Black Sabbath's "Paranoid," and Aqua's "Barbie Girl" through Suno Studio's $24/month Premier Plan.
- The lyric filter falls to trivial edits — changing "rain" to "reign" and "sweet" to "suite" in "Freedom" produced vocals that closely mimicked the original Beyoncé recording, while entirely unmodified songs by indie artists Matt Wilson, Charles Bissell, and Claire Rousay cleared the filter with no changes at all.
- Suno only appears to scan tracks on upload, not on export, and doesn't recheck outputs for infringement — meaning AI-generated covers can be sent straight to distributors like DistroKid to monetize copyrighted songs without paying the royalties a legitimate cover would require.
- Folk artist Murphy Campbell had AI covers of her YouTube songs (all in the public domain) uploaded to her Spotify profile by an unknown party, after which distributor Vydia filed copyright claims against her YouTube videos and began collecting royalties; the claims were only rescinded after a social media campaign by Campbell, and Vydia says the two incidents are unrelated.
- The AI covers land in the uncanny valley — recognizable but stripped of nuance, with the article describing Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" as reduced to "vacuous dancefloor filler" and the Dead Kennedys' "California Über Alles" reborn as a "fiddle-driven jig."
- Spotify, Deezer, and Qobuz have deployed anti-AI safeguards, with Spotify spokesperson Chris Macowski telling The Verge the company is "continuing to invest in and evolve" detection systems — though he acknowledged keeping up with AI slop enabled by platforms like Suno is an ongoing technical challenge.
- Suno declined to comment on the findings, as did distribution services DistroKid and CD Baby; experimental composer William Basinski and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have also seen imitations reach streaming platforms.
Why it matters: Suno's broken filters let anyone produce monetizable near-copies of copyrighted songs and upload them to Spotify, where a 1,000-stream payment minimum already squeezes indie payouts — and artists like Murphy Campbell, Matt Wilson, and Claire Rousay absorb the damage when AI covers siphon streams from their real work. Suno declined to comment, leaving independent musicians with the least leverage to fight back.
