Suno's Terms of Service: What You Actually Agreed To

Suno's terms of service were last revised on 10 August 2026 and took effect on 3 September 2026. That is the version you are bound by, the version this page quotes, and the version Italy's competition authority is now looking at — it opened proceeding CV278 on 6 October 2026 and said, in careful conditional language, that several clauses may be unfair to consumers.

The reason to read the Suno terms of service is not the regulator, though. It is that the contract decides three things you probably care about: whether you can sell what you make, what Suno can do with it afterwards, and what happens to a library you have not downloaded. One of those answers has a deadline attached that nothing else written about these terms mentions.

This is a plain-English reading of a published contract, not legal advice, and nothing here is specific to your jurisdiction. Every regulator objection below is an allegation at an open proceeding.

The short version: what you granted and what you kept

What you kept, on a paid plan: the commercial right to songs you download. Suno's help centre says that on Pro or Premier "you own the songs" and you "should be the only person that is allowed to monetize those songs through distribution or other channels". Its August 2026 announcement puts the same point in terms of the file: "Songs downloaded from Suno on paid plans remain yours to use commercially or personally."

What you granted: a licence that is wider than most people expect and does not expire. The grant is "worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid-up, sublicensable", and a "perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, store, modify, distribute" your Content — explicitly including in connection with improving Suno's products and its AI and machine learning models. It reaches your likeness and voice rights where those are embodied in your Content or Voice Model, and it lets Suno sublicense your Content to other users as far as running the service requires.

Those two facts are compatible. You own and can sell your downloaded song; Suno also holds a permanent licence to it. "Non-exclusive" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it is the word that makes both halves true at once.

What is conditional: your continued access to any of it. That is the termination clause, and it is the one worth understanding properly.

The content licence, clause by clause

The grant is quoted in summary almost everywhere it is discussed. The adjectives are the story, so here it is against the regulator's objections, clause by clause.

The waiver in row two is the clause that explains why an Italian regulator raised this and an American one has not. In civil-law systems moral rights — attribution, integrity of the work — are generally treated as inalienable, which is to say they are not yours to sign away even if you want to. Italy's Law 633/1941 is that statute. A blanket waiver is unremarkable drafting in Boston and a structural problem in Rome, and the same sentence can be both.

What the licence does not do is decide who owns the output or whether it can be copyrighted at all. That is a different question with a messier answer, and it is the one we handle in whether AI music can be copyrighted at all.

Who owns Suno songs — and what "commercial rights" now depends on

Ownership language and commercial-rights language have drifted apart in Suno's own documentation, and reading them together is how the position becomes clear.

The help centre frames it as ownership by plan: Suno owns free-tier songs and permits use "for non-commerical purposes" only; on Pro or Premier "you own the songs". The August 2026 announcement frames it as a property of the file: "Songs downloaded from Suno on paid plans remain yours to use commercially or personally", and in a footnote, "Trial downloads are not eligible for commercial use."

That shift matters because downloads became finite on the date the new terms took effect.

Additional downloads can be purchased, the limits cover songs created before 3 September 2026 as well as after, and unused monthly downloads do not roll over. We worked the arithmetic out catalogue by catalogue on the download caps page.

So the practical reading of "commercial rights" in 2026 is: a paid plan establishes the right, and the download is how you take possession of it. A song sitting in your library is playable and shareable on Suno — and is not yet a file you hold.

For the mirror of this page — what Suno grants you in return, the copyright-protection question, and the litigation — we keep those on a separate page, because what you grant Suno and what Suno grants you are genuinely different contracts running in opposite directions.

Suno deleted my songs: what the termination clause allows

Three facts, each mild on its own. Together they are the join nobody writing about these terms has made.

1. The commercial right in practice attaches to the downloaded file.
2. Downloads are capped at 20 or 60 a month, and the cap covers your whole back catalogue, not just new work.
3. Termination is at Suno's sole discretion, may "remove and discard any content (including your Content or Voice Model)", may "immediately deactivate or delete your account and all related information and files", and "may be affected without prior notice".

Worked through with real numbers: a 400-track library on Pro is 20 months of continuous subscription to extract — 20 downloads a month, no rollover, and you keep paying for every one of those months. On Premier it is a little under 7 months. For the whole of that period the un-extracted remainder of your catalogue is content whose commercial rights you have not taken possession of, sitting in an account the contract permits deleting without notice.

The counterweight is real: Suno's published position is that already-downloaded songs keep their rights even if your allowance runs out, the limits change, or your subscription ends. Nothing here says Suno is deleting paying subscribers' accounts, and we have no reported pattern of that. This is what the contract permits, which is the only thing a contract tells you.

The honest conclusion is dull and actionable: download is a different state from stored, and the gap between them is measured in months.

And it points at a structural answer rather than a workflow one. If a generator holds your catalogue, your storefront and your relationship with listeners, platform risk is concentrated in a single account. Selling direct — and particularly pitching for paid sync placements, which is where money in this niche demonstrably is — moves the part that earns onto ground you control; played.fm is built for that, with a direct storefront alongside it where you keep 100% and own the audience. Bandcamp is the obvious comparison and it is not available for this: it bans AI music outright.

The parts that decide where you can complain

If something does go wrong — a billing charge, a deletion, a dispute about rights — these clauses decide what you can do about it, and most of them are easy to skim past.

That one-year row is the sleeper. AGCM's objection on this cluster, as reported, runs to the forum and the procedure — US arbitration, Massachusetts jurisdiction — rather than naming the limitation period. But the limitation period is the clause with a clock on it, and it is in the terms you are bound by today. If you have a complaint about a charge from fourteen months ago, the contract's position is that it is gone.

Credit where it is due: the most thorough independent guide to these terms is Gary Whittaker's at Jack Righteous, which covered the AGCM proceeding the day it broke. It does not carry the one-year limit either.

What Italy's regulator is investigating

The proceeding is narrower than the coverage suggests, and the shape of it is the part worth knowing. The objections quoted below are as reported by Music Business Worldwide and Music Ally, which carry the regulator's wording directly.

Read the verbs. The licence "seems to be" insufficiently defined; the terms "appear to allow" termination, "appear to limit" liability, "seemingly establish" Massachusetts jurisdiction and "seem to give" Suno discretion over unilateral changes. That is a regulator setting out what it intends to examine, which is the opposite of a finding — and the threads reacting to this news largely treat it as a result already obtained.

Two more things it is not. It binds nothing today, and any remedy would be prospective. And it is not about training data: AGCM's objections are contract-fairness objections. Suno's acknowledgement that community creations and preference signals were among the inputs used in developing v6 is a separate statement about a separate question, and collapsing the two is how a reasonable worry turns into a claim that cannot be supported.

Our page on the licensed v6 model covers the Warner agreement, which is the industry-side counterpart to this consumer-side proceeding. If what you are chasing is who owns the company behind the terms, sunowatermarkremover has that in who owns Suno.

What this changes for you today: honestly, nothing yet

No clause has been struck down. No refund mechanism exists. No Italian remedy reaches a user outside Italy, and even inside it the next step is a consultation. The correct response to this news is not to do something about the regulator; it is to do the five things the contract already made sensible.

1. Download what matters, in priority order. Released tracks, anything with an ISRC, anything a client paid for, anything you would be unable to recreate. The cap is the constraint, so the order is the decision. Our download caps page has the maths by catalogue size.
2. Keep the files somewhere that is not a generator. The download is where possession starts; your own storage is where it stays.
3. Diarise the one-year window. If you have a live complaint — billing, deletion, anything — the contract's deadline is twelve months from when it arose.
4. Check which plan a release was made and downloaded under. Free-tier trial downloads are not eligible for commercial use, and that is a fact about the file, not about your current subscription.
5. Separate the contract problem from the release problem. Nothing in these terms affects whether a distributor's automated screening flags a track, and nothing that clears screening touches your contract. Six distributors accept AI music openly; what happens to some AI releases is that automated systems flag and reject them. Those problems sit on the audio, not in the contract.

The terms will change again — they say so themselves, and the clause reserving that right is itself under examination. Which is why the date matters more than any sentence here: last revised 10 August 2026, effective 3 September 2026, read at source on 12 October 2026. Check it before you rely on it.