How do you make a song with Suno?

Suno is a web app that turns text into music. You type what you want, and it returns a full track with a singing voice, instruments and a structure of verses and choruses. On March 21, Suno released version 3 of its model, which the company describes as its first able to produce radio-quality music, and made it available to everyone at app.suno.ai. It writes complete songs of about two minutes in seconds.

You don't need to read music or own any equipment. What you do need is a clear idea of the mood, the style and, if you want control, the words.

Two ways to ask for a song

The quickest way is a short description, the kind Suno uses in its own examples: a song for a Sunday study session, or a metal opera about Mondays. Suno writes the lyrics and picks the arrangement. This is good for fun and for discovering styles.

The second way gives you more control. In the custom option, you paste your own lyrics into one box and type a short style description in another. The style is a handful of words: genre, mood, tempo, instruments and the kind of voice. Version 3 follows these prompts more closely than earlier versions, according to Suno, with fewer odd results and better endings.

One limit is deliberate. Suno says its models don't recognize the names of other artists, so "in the style of [famous singer]" won't work. Describe the sound instead: "warm female vocal, acoustic guitar, slow folk."

A worked example: a birthday song with your own lyrics

Say you want a short song for a friend named Marie who loves canoeing. First, write or draft the lyrics. Square-bracket labels such as [Verse] and [Chorus] help mark the parts of the song.

[Verse]
Up before the sun on the quiet lake,
Marie's got a paddle and a thermos to take.
Mist on the water, a loon calls twice,
Another year older, and the view's still nice.

[Chorus]
Happy birthday, Marie, paddle on, paddle on,
Every bend in the river is a brand-new song.

Then the style box:

upbeat folk, acoustic guitar and banjo, hand claps, warm female vocal, campfire singalong

Listen to the result more than once before judging it, and generate again if the first take doesn't suit you. If the melody works but the mood is off, keep the lyrics and change only the style words, such as "slow" instead of "upbeat." If a line is sung awkwardly, shorten it so the syllables fit the rhythm better. This is the same iterative method that works with text chatbots: change one thing at a time, then compare.

What to keep in mind

Suno's terms of service set a minimum age of 13, and users under 18 need a parent's or guardian's consent. The terms also say you must have the rights to anything you submit, so paste lyrics you wrote, not someone else's song. And Suno says it embeds an inaudible watermark that can detect whether a track came from its system, so a Suno song can be identified as AI-generated.

Who owns the result?

Suno's terms, last revised on January 27, answer this differently depending on your plan. On the free tier, Suno owns the songs you generate. You get a license to use them only for lawful, personal, non-commercial purposes, and you must credit Suno. On a paid plan, Suno assigns its rights in the songs you make during your subscription to you, as long as you follow the terms. So if you plan to sell a song, use it in an ad or put it on a streaming service, check that you made it while subscribed. Either way, Suno keeps a broad license to use what you create and to say that it was made with Suno.

Owning a song under a contract is not the same as holding copyright in it. In the United States, the Copyright Office said in March 2023 that material generated by AI from a prompt is not protected, because the machine, not the person, decides how the music or text is actually expressed. It compares prompts to instructions given to a commissioned artist. Parts a person creates, such as lyrics you wrote yourself, can still be protected, and so can a creative human selection or arrangement of the material.

In practice, keep your own lyrics in a file with a date, note which plan you were on when you made each song, and read the terms again before any commercial use, since services update them. Rules in other countries may differ, so check locally for anything serious.