Entrepreneurship Technology

Suno AI Is Disrupting the Music Licensing Industry — Here’s What Content Creators Need to Know

Custom branded music used to cost thousands. Royalty-free licensing from platforms like Artlist or Epidemic Sound brought that cost down to around $10–$25 a month. Now Suno AI is pushing the question even further: why license someone else’s music at all when you can generate your own in under a minute for free?

That’s not a hypothetical. It’s what I cover in my latest YouTube video — watch it here — where I walk through how Suno works, what it can produce, and why it matters specifically for small businesses trying to produce more content without ballooning their costs.

This post adds context to what I showed in the video. Because the tool itself is only part of the conversation. The bigger picture is what it signals about where content production is heading.

What Artlist and Epidemic Sound Actually Solved — And Where They Fall Short

Before getting into Suno, it’s worth understanding what the existing platforms were actually built for — and why they became standard tools for content creators in the first place.

Artlist and Epidemic Sound both launched as answers to the same problem: music licensing is complicated, expensive, and full of legal risk. A single popular track can cost well over $1,000 to license. For small businesses producing regular video content, that’s simply not viable.

Both platforms solved this with subscription models. Epidemic Sound starts at around $10 per month billed annually and gives you access to a curated library of over 50,000 tracks and 200,000 sound effects — all royalty-free, all cleared for commercial use. Artlist operates similarly, starting at around $9.99 per month, and adds a perpetual licensing advantage: music used during your subscription remains licensed even after you cancel.

I used both. They’re solid. The libraries are genuinely good, the search tools are intuitive, and for most content creators they removed the licensing headache entirely. If you’re producing regular YouTube content or social media videos and you just need reliable, professional background music — either platform does the job cleanly.

But here’s the limitation neither platform can solve: the music you’re using is also available to every other subscriber. You’re not building a sonic identity. You’re sharing one.

For big brands, that matters. For a small business trying to sound distinct, it’s a quiet ceiling you eventually hit.

What Suno Changes

Suno is an AI music generator. You type a prompt — describe a genre, mood, tempo, instruments, whatever context you need — and it produces an original, full-length track complete with vocals, instrumentation, and structure. Under a minute. No music theory required. No studio, no producer, no budget beyond a subscription you can start for free.

Suno’s free plan gives you 50 generation credits per day — roughly 10 songs. The Pro plan is around $10 per month and gives you 2,500 credits monthly, commercial use rights, and access to their v5 model, which produces noticeably higher quality output including more natural vocals and cleaner instrument separation.

That’s directly comparable to Artlist and Epidemic Sound pricing. But the output is entirely different — because every track Suno generates is unique to you.

For a small business producing social content, ads, podcast intros, or branded video — that’s a meaningful shift. You’re not choosing from a library that thousands of other brands are also browsing. You’re specifying exactly what you need and getting something that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

I walk through the prompt process in the video — including how to be specific about genre, mood, instruments, and structure to get output that actually matches what you need rather than something generic.

The Real Disruption Is Happening at the Cost and Customisation Level

The music licensing industry is facing the same pressure that stock photography faced when AI image generators arrived. Not overnight collapse — but a slow, significant redistribution of where small budgets go.

Here’s the honest comparison as it stands right now:

For background music at scale: Suno wins on cost and originality. If you’re producing a high volume of content and need consistent, custom-feel audio, generating it is faster and cheaper than searching a library.

For premium, broadcast-quality licensed music: Artlist and Epidemic Sound still hold an edge. Their libraries are curated by professional musicians, the quality ceiling is higher for complex productions, and the licensing terms are clean and battle-tested.

For brand identity and one-of-a-kind media: Suno is genuinely compelling. The ability to prompt for a specific sonic character — your brand’s personality translated into music — without commissioning a composer is a capability that didn’t exist at this price point two years ago.

The disruption isn’t that Suno is better. It’s that Suno does something different at a price that makes the comparison unavoidable for budget-conscious businesses.

The question is no longer “which library should I subscribe to?” It’s “do I even need a library?”

Working with content teams at SMEs across retail and professional services, I’ve seen this shift play out in real time. Teams that used to budget R2,000–R5,000 a year for music licensing are now generating custom tracks in Suno and putting that budget into distribution. That’s not a small change in workflow. That’s a rethinking of what a content budget is for.

What Suno Still Can’t Do

This would be incomplete without being straight about the limitations — because Suno is impressive but not perfect.

The output can be inconsistent. You’ll generate ten tracks and get two that are genuinely usable. The other eight might have lyrical repetition issues, odd melodic choices, or vocals that drift off in ways that feel unpolished. Every failed generation still costs you credits, which adds up if you’re iterating heavily.

Complex, professional-grade production isn’t there yet. For a polished brand film, a broadcast ad, or anything where the music is genuinely front and centre rather than background — a curated platform or a commissioned piece still produces better results.

And the copyright landscape is still evolving. Suno settled a lawsuit with Warner Music in early 2026 and now operates under a licensed model with stricter download rules. Worth watching as this space matures.

None of that means Suno is the wrong call. For the majority of small business content production — social media clips, YouTube intros, branded video backgrounds, podcast music — it absolutely does the job. You just go in with realistic expectations about iteration.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Suno AI free to use for business? Suno’s free plan is non-commercial, meaning you can generate and explore but cannot use the output in commercial work. For business use, you need the Pro plan at around $10 per month, which includes commercial use rights for music generated while your subscription is active.

How does Suno compare to Artlist and Epidemic Sound for small businesses? Artlist and Epidemic Sound give you access to curated libraries of professionally produced tracks for a similar monthly cost. Suno generates unique, original tracks from text prompts — meaning every piece of music is exclusive to you. For high-volume, branded content production, Suno offers a cost and customisation advantage. For premium, broadcast-quality needs, Artlist and Epidemic Sound currently have the edge.

Do I own the music Suno generates? On paid plans, you own the rights to use the music commercially for content produced during your active subscription. Suno’s 2026 licensing updates have added some restrictions on downloads, so it’s worth checking their current terms directly before building a workflow that depends on it.

Can I use Suno without any music knowledge? Yes — and that’s the point. You describe what you want in plain language, the same way you’d brief a designer. The more specific your prompt (genre, mood, tempo, instruments, use case), the better the output. I walk through this process in detail in the companion video.

The Bottom Line

Suno isn’t going to replace Artlist or Epidemic Sound for every use case. But it’s doing something neither of them can — generating original, custom music from a brief at a price small businesses can actually sustain.

For content-heavy SMEs looking to build a more distinctive media presence without a production budget to match, that’s not a small thing. It’s worth understanding properly.

If you’re thinking about how AI tools like Suno fit into a broader content and brand strategy for your business, reach out to me, I’d love to help..

If you’re thinking about how AI tools like Suno fit into a broader content and brand strategy for your business, reach out to me, I’d love to help..