Believe, the French distributor that owns TuneCore, signed a licensing agreement with Suno on 8 September, a day before Suno launched its v6 models. Given how many independent artists the two companies distribute, the obvious question was how much say those artists get. Chief executive Denis Ladegaillerie's answer is that nothing goes into any AI training corpus without the artist consenting first.
The mechanism has two layers. Artists first opt in to being considered for AI programmes at all. Those who do are then shown each specific opportunity, whether Spotify, YouTube, Suno or another service, and can decline any of them. Believe says it will contact every opted-in artist about the Suno deal specifically. Anyone who declines is excluded from training and, by extension, from the outputs.
The deal looks like a reversal of Believe's April policy of blocking distribution of tracks made with Suno models trained on unlicensed material. Ladegaillerie says it isn't: that block still applies to music from Suno's earlier models, while tracks from v6 onward, trained on licensed and authorised material, are eligible for distribution through Believe and TuneCore.
What changed his view, he says, is Suno's recent behaviour: fingerprinting, watermarking, download caps and the retirement of every earlier model. Fewer artists in the training data as a result of consent is, in his words, a price worth paying.
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