How to use Suno AI and Udio in 2026: free AI music, limits and rights

Where Suno and Udio stand now

In April 2024 we wrote a guide, in Japanese, to Suno AI and Udio AI as free AI music generators. With both, you describe a song in words and get back a finished track with vocals. As of October 2026, both services are still running. What has changed a lot is whether you can download the songs you make and use them.

What drove the change was a set of lawsuits from the major record labels, and the settlements that followed. Here are the main events in order.

HIKARI'S TAKEBoth services still work, but the terms for taking a song out of them have changed a lot. Behind that are the label lawsuits and the settlements.

How to use Suno (2026)

You can start Suno on the free plan, which gives you 50 credits a day, enough for about 10 songs. Since September 2026 there are three models. Free users get "v6-mini". The stronger "v6" and the less predictable "v6-wild" are for the paid Pro and Premier plans.

1. Go to suno.com and create an account. On the free plan, this costs nothing.
2. Describe the song you want. Be specific about genre, mood, theme and where it will play. For example: "Bright acoustic pop for a weekend morning, with English lyrics."
3. If you want to write the lyrics yourself, enter lyrics and style separately. You can paste in your own lyrics and set the style and title on their own. You can also make songs without vocals (instrumentals).
4. Listen, then revise. With v6 you can fix one part of a song by describing the change, or swap out a single line of lyrics. You can also start a song from audio, an image or a video, not just text.
5. Download only the songs you will use. Downloads are capped, and the free plan generally can't download at all (more in the next section).

Besides the main creation screen, Suno offers "Suno Studio" for editing. To start, it is enough to make a few songs on the regular screen and keep only the ones you like.

HIKARI'S TAKEThe basic flow is the same as in 2024: describe a song in words and Suno makes it. What's new in v6 is that you can fix just one part of a song by describing the change.

Suno plans and what the free plan does

Suno has three plans: Free, Pro and Premier. This is what the official pricing page showed on October 26, 2026.

Prices are in U.S. dollars as listed on the pricing page. Sales tax, and the currency you see, can vary by location and payment method.

Download limits (from September 3, 2026)

On August 10, 2026, Suno announced a new download policy. The main points:

1. Free plan: if you signed up before September 3, you get up to seven trial downloads for life. If you signed up later, you may get occasional trial downloads. Free users can also buy downloads. Trial downloads are for personal use only, not commercial use.
2. Pro and Premier: 20 and 60 songs a month. You can buy more downloads beyond that. Premier users have no limit inside Suno Studio.
3. Older songs count too: downloading a song you made before September 3 still counts toward the limit.
4. Your songs don't disappear: they stay in your library, and you can play and share them on any plan.

Who owns a song depends on your plan when you made it

Suno's help center says Suno owns songs made on the free plan, and you may use them only for non-commercial purposes. If you were on a paid plan when you made a song, you are considered its owner, and you keep commercial rights even after you cancel. So what matters is whether you were on a paid plan at the moment you created the song.

HIKARI'S TAKEThe free plan is for trying things out and listening. If you're making songs for work, plan on making them on a paid plan from the start. Downloads are capped too, so pick the songs you'll use before you save them.

Using Udio, and what you can't do now

Udio signed deals with UMG in October 2025 and with WMG in November 2025. It is now in a "transition period" on the way to a new service. You can still make songs during this period.

• The available models are v1, v1.5 and v1.5 Allegro. Features such as Extend, remix and Styles still work.
• You can share songs with a udio.com link, which anyone can open, even without a Udio account.
• The free plan gives you 10 credits a day. When those run out, you can draw on an extra 100 credits a month. You can make no more than three 130-second songs a day, however many credits you have left. The paid Standard plan includes 2,400 credits a month and Pro 6,000.

On the other hand, downloads of audio, video and stems (separate instrument tracks) have been stopped since October 29, 2025. Udio's CEO called the pause "a significant sacrifice". Udio's help page, dated February 17, 2026, still says downloads are disabled.

Udio says the new service built with UMG and WMG will let you make songs, remixes, covers and mash-ups using participating artists' voices and styles, within what those artists allow. Udio's blog and help pages give no launch date, though. Sony, meanwhile, filed a new suit against Udio on July 20, 2026, and is reported to be the only one of the three major labels without a deal with Udio.

HIKARI'S TAKEYou can still make songs on Udio and share them by link. But since you can't save the audio, it isn't a good fit right now for music you need in a video or a store.

Suno and Udio: commercial use and copyright

Before you use an AI-made song for work, it helps to know more than the service's terms. The court cases and the Copyright Office's position matter too.

The label lawsuits are not over

The original suits are UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Suno, Inc. in Massachusetts and UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Uncharted Labs, Inc. (Udio) in New York. Warner has settled with both Suno and Udio, and UMG has settled with Udio. The rest is still in court. In the Suno case, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV refused on August 18, 2026, to let the labels add more recordings, noting they could bring a separate suit. On September 18, 2026, UMG and Sony did: a second suit in federal court in Boston covering 60,202 recordings. It claims v6 grew out of the earlier models, and also accuses Suno of getting around YouTube's protections against downloading. Suno's chief product officer, Jack Brody, says v6 was trained from scratch and includes no data from Universal or Sony.

Against Udio, Sony is the only major label still suing. After the court in New York refused on June 29, 2026, to add more than 30,000 recordings to the original case, Sony filed a new suit there on July 20, 2026, covering 30,117 recordings. It asks for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work. Both Suno and Udio argue that training on recordings is fair use.

In Germany, a ruling against Suno

On July 31, 2026, the Munich Regional Court I largely ruled in favor of GEMA. According to the court's press release, well-known songs such as "Daddy Cool" were stored in Suno's older models (v3.5 and v4) in a form that could be reproduced, and the generated songs reproduced features of the originals. The court held that Suno, not users who gave only simple prompts, is responsible. The ruling is not final.

In the U.S.: owning a song is not the same as copyright

The U.S. Copyright Office's report on copyrightability (Part 2 of its Copyright and Artificial Intelligence report, January 29, 2025) concludes that entering prompts alone does not make you the author of what the AI produces. Copyright can cover what a person adds, such as lyrics you wrote yourself, or your own creative arrangement or changes to the output. So when Suno's terms say a paid subscriber owns a song, that is an agreement between you and Suno. It does not by itself mean the song is protected by copyright. Infringement works the same way it does without AI: if a song copies protected parts of an existing work, using it can infringe.

Suno also updated its guidelines in August 2026 to clearly ban using a real person's voice or likeness without permission, and passing off AI audio as a real human performance. It announced that it will add watermarks to AI-generated songs.

Before we use an AI song for work, we check these four things.

1. Make it on a paid plan. A song made on the free plan is not guaranteed to become usable commercially if you subscribe later.
2. Keep real singers and song titles out of your prompts. Avoid instructions like "in the voice of…" or "like the song…".
3. Listen for resemblance. If it sounds like a song you know, don't use it. Make a new one.
4. Read the rules where you'll publish. Video sites and music distributors may have their own rules for AI-made music.

HIKARI'S TAKE"Commercial use allowed" on a paid plan doesn't mean it's fine if the song sounds like someone else's. Don't ask it to imitate real people or songs, and listen carefully for resemblance before you use it.

Checking our 2024 article

Here is how what we wrote in April 2024 holds up today.

Our biggest miss was saying nothing about rights and lawsuits.

After publishing, we added information about Suno v4 to the original article, but we never mentioned that the labels sued both companies in June 2024. Who owns a song you make, and how far you can use it, should have come before the step-by-step instructions. Today that is exactly where the impact shows most, in the form of download limits.

HIKARI'S TAKEFree credits and prices are almost unchanged, but the terms for downloads and rights changed a lot. Leaving out the rights question is what we regret most.