AI music company wants to press users' creations onto vinyl records
Published in Entertainment News
LOS ANGELES — Artificial intelligence music company Suno is going retro — eventually.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based AI company has announced Suno Vinyl, a service that will press users' generated AI tracks onto vinyl records. It has not gone live. The company has started a waiting list, with the first pressing reserved for users who sign up. A Suno spokesperson said the company is exploring ways for people to turn their music into physical artifacts.
"Press a banger, because it's too good to live on a screen," Suno wrote on its website.
Users will be able to build a tracklist of up to 46 minutes from their Suno library, then either upload their own album artwork or generate it on the platform for the sleeve, labels and cover. Each record will be a 12-inch pressing made from PETG, a type of plastic. Pricing is estimated about $45 plus shipping. Suno has not said who will press the records.
Vinyl records have seen a major resurgence ever since millennials brought the format back into mainstream culture in the 2010s. Over the years, it's become customary for major musicians to release several vinyl variants to help promote their latest album. Olivia Rodrigo most recently released roughly 10 variants of her new album, "You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love," in June.
Last year, vinyl record purchases accounted for more than $1 billion in U.S. sales, up more than 9%, according to the Recording Industry Association of America's annual report. It was the first time vinyl revenue topped $1 billion since 1983.
The format sold 46.8 million units, against 29.5 million CDs in 2025.
Suno, founded in 2022, has established itself as a leader in AI music tech and maintains an office in Venice. In February, the company said it had surpassed 2 million paid subscribers and was on pace for $300 million in annual revenue. In June, raised more than $400 million in a Series D round led by Bond Capital, more than doubling its valuation to $5.4 billion from $2.45 billion less than a year earlier.
The growth has unfolded as the company fights on several legal fronts. Suno and its competitor Udio were sued for copyright infringement in 2024 by the RIAA on behalf of the industry's biggest labels, including Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment.
WMG was the first of the three to settle with Suno, reaching a deal last November that included a licensing agreement, Suno's first partnership with a major label, and the sale of Warner's Songkick concert platform to Suno.
The UMG and Sony litigation is ongoing, with a fair use hearing set for Massachusetts federal court and the labels seeking to expand their complaint. Suno also lost a case brought by German collecting society GEMA last week and is defending against legal actions from Denmark's Koda.
Separately, class action suits against Suno and Udio have drawn support from more than 1,800 independent artists who say their recordings were used without permission to train the company's models.
Suno has not said whether users will be able to press tracks that resemble copyrighted work, what rights users hold in the records they order, or whether the company takes a cut.
As AI creeps further into the music industry, copyright remains the sticking point — now on a format that fans seek precisely because a person made it.
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