Holly Herndon spotlights the fight over AI music and copyright
Suno’s v5.5 launch sharpened the copyright fight around AI music, while Holly Herndon kept arguing that machine-made songs could be a new creative instrument.
Suno released v5.5 on March 26, 2026, calling it its "most expressive model yet" and adding voice capture and personalization tools as its copyright fight with the music industry continued. The release sharpened a question Holly Herndon has been making for years: in a September 15, 2023 MusicTech interview, she said, "Sampling led to hip-hop… AI music has the potential to do something similar."
Herndon has tested that argument through Proto, released in 2019, and Holly+, an AI voice model trained on recordings of her voice. Art Basel wrote in 2024 that Herndon and Mat Dryhurst use projects such as Holly+ to rethink individual expression as a communal tool, letting others sing in Herndon’s timbre rather than treating voice as a locked property.
Suno’s own help pages say the company launched music creation via Discord in 2023 before moving to direct use on suno.com later that year. Its model timeline shows V2 in fall 2023, V3 in spring 2024, V3.5 in summer 2024, and V4 in November 2024, along with consumer-facing features such as iMessage keyboard integration. That speed has made Suno a central defendant in lawsuits filed by major record labels in 2024 against Suno and Udio over alleged copyright infringement.
The RIAA called those cases "landmark cases," after labels accused Suno and Udio of using copyrighted recordings to train their models. The legal question is whether that process resembles sampling, which Herndon invokes, or wholesale copying. The taste-test paradox is now built into AI music: a Suno-generated track can satisfy the ear even as the training data still raises consent and compensation questions, leaving listeners to weigh novelty, convenience, and genuine musical value against the rights of the artists whose work made the system possible.
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