‘TeaMickey Shulman says, “The format of the future is the music you play withNot just playing. As CEO and co-founder of generative AI music company Suno, Shulman currently finds himself in the exciting, perhaps unenviable position of being considered simultaneously the architect of music’s future – and its executor.
Suno, which was founded just two years ago, allows users to create entire songs with just a few text prompts. At the moment, you can’t hint at it with the name of any specific pop star, but asking for “stadium-level confessional pop-country” that references “past relationships” or “public rivalries” might get you a Taylor Swift-style song or something there.
In June 2024, Listen became the target of a lawsuit by the record company trade body RIAA on behalf of major labels in the US, while GEMA, the German archive society representing songwriters, filed its own lawsuit the following January. Both claimed that the service was training its systems on their copyrights without authorization or license.
General AI music services have created an existential crisis in the music industry. The utopian notion is that they will democratize creativity. The worst thing is that art will be destroyed due to the lack of AI, as humans making music will become surplus to requirements. (And many musicians already struggle to make a living from streaming revenue.) Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart called them an “unstoppable force” and said musicians should embrace them, whether reluctantly or enthusiastically. Katherine Anne Davis, aka Anchoress, recently told me she thinks it’s “dystopian.” Music lawyer Gregor Pryor has argued that it is already eliminating the function of background music.
“I like to think that we’re trying to create the next format for recorded music,” says Shulman. “The future format will be interactive.” What does that mean? “It should be social, meaning you’re doing it with other people. What we’re doing is creating the best digital version of it.”
Investors clearly weren’t scared. In November, Suno raised $250m (£187m) in funding, taking its valuation to $2.45bn (£1.83bn). General AI is the hottest thing in Silicon Valley, with Stanford University reporting it could attract $34 billion (£25 billion) in private investment by 2024. But there is fear, especially Bank of EnglandThat this spectacular surge can be followed only by a bitter fall. However, right now investors believe that General AI is too big to fail. The stakes for Suno’s success are surprisingly high, especially considering recent leaks investor presentation suggesting that the company only had 1 million paying customers. The standard monthly plan costs £8.25 ($10).
“The thing investors need to help them understand is how important music is in the world. Once you show them that, their mind changes and they realize so much more is possible,” says Shulman.
When a new outside technology imposes itself on the music industry, the reaction typically ranges from indifference to legal action, then negotiation, and ultimately licensing. The three biggest names in General AI music are at different stages along this trajectory. clay got deals with the three chiefs This is made rare in this “launch first, license later” world by having the time to launch or train your technology on music. Eudio signed deals with Universal Music Group (UMG) and Warner Music Group (WMG). However, Suno only has a deal with WMG, and legal action from other larger companies is still ongoing.
Shulman, now 39, was a failed musician, who provided the catalyst for Listen. “I played in a lot of bands in high school and college,” he says, speaking via video from his home in the US, pointing to a bass hanging on the wall behind him. “I was okay, not great, and I wasn’t going to make a good career out of it.” He is careful and thoughtful when he speaks, without that touch of ego that you sometimes get from highly publicized start-up founders.
A career change towards a PhD in Physics brought him together with Suno’s other co-founders. They wanted to create something different from heavyweight AI companies like OpenAI, because they “deal with logic and automation to solve very specific problems. Music is not like that. There is no right or wrong answer. It’s not a problem to solve.”
There is ongoing debate over where exactly Suno obtained the music to train its system – essentially breaking music into data strands for cataloging – before it had its licensing deal. “We train our models on the medium and high quality music we can find on the open Internet,” Shulman wrote in one. 2024 blogpost. Listen’s initial legal defense was that it was fair use, and the music on which it was based did not require prior permission. The record industry thought differently. “fair use,” RIAA counteredDoes not apply “When the output wants ‘substitute’ for the copied task.”
I ask Shulman what he means by “open Internet.” There is a clear distinction between what is copyrighted (recordings are typically protected for 70 years) and what is in the public domain. “Copyright is a different thing,” he says. “I can’t go into too much detail because there are active legal things going on, and some of it is also a trade secret.”
Could Suno’s philosophy of “democratizing” music-making be inherently anti-art? What was once the product of extraordinary human creativity has now become ordinary. Shulman stressed that, like digital recording or sampling, this is just another example of how technology “moves music forward”, how “new ones are discovered” and “new genres are invented”.
He says the issue of so-called AI slope is entirely subjective. “I made a really fun song with my four-year-old yesterday morning. It’s ‘slop’ for you – you don’t care – but I love it. It’s brilliant.” Meanwhile, he wants to emphasize that the music produced by Suno can be of extremely high quality.
And AI-powered music is flooding streaming services: Deezer says more than a third of the music distributed each day is AI (equivalent to 50,000 tracks), and 70% of AI music streams on Deezer are fraudulent (scammers obtain AI tracks cheaply on such services, then use bots to manipulate streams on a massive scale to receive royalty payments, though services are increasingly cracking down on this matter. Getting wiser). the company has started AI track tagging To alert users. band camp It recently announced that it will not carry music “generated in whole or in large part by AI” on the platform.
Should others follow suit? Shulman would only say that he “doesn’t want to be the arbiter of what happens on other platforms. Maybe there’s some line to draw, but I don’t know where.”
Velvet Sundown, an entirely AI “act”, released their debut album and a follow-up album last summer. The ’70s-style rock band generated millions of streams, but it was a short-lived phenomenon. “I don’t know exactly what their strategy was,” Schulman says of Velvet Sundown. “It was all a bit strange. I guess that’s why it was a flash in the pan.”
However, some AI-powered tracks have staying power. After allegations it used Suno for cloning Jorja Smith’s voiceI Run by Heaven was left out of the UK charts, but a re-recorded version by a human singer, Caitlin Aragon, was chart-eligible and went into the top 10. by Into the Blue Sienna RoseWhich is widely suspected to have AI functions, recently made the top 10 on Spotify’s Viral 50 global chart. And the track Jag wet, du er inte min is one of the biggest tracks of all time in Sweden, although it is excluded from the country’s charts due to it being “mainly AI-generated”.
Of more concern was the fact that Listen was being used to create tracks last year anti defamation league Glorified Adolf Hitler, used racist slurs and talked about “white power”. Shulman says: “It was three songs with a total of 10 plays. It was a very small thing. Unfortunately, drawing attention to it made it worse.” He says Suno has developed more stringent security measures to prevent similar incidents in the future.
Suno wants its deal with WMG to be seen as proof that general AI companies can partner in mutually beneficial ways. Did AI company Anthropic pay $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) to the book industry in September to settle claims that its AI was trained on pirated copies, prompting Suno to make deals faster? “We didn’t pay that much attention to that,” says Shulman. “There’s a lot more to do together than fight each other. And we intend to show that very strongly, with this Warner partnership.”
But questions remain about the WMG deal. Did the label insist on a change in service? Was there payment to cover up the previous use of her music in Suno’s training? Did WMG get equity in Suno? Shulman would not answer, saying only that it would be “a little early” to share such information, possibly out of fear of compromising pending licensing deals.
Signing agreements with big companies is one thing, but wooing artists is another. The majors insist that they will only use their music if they choose the deal. But if only a small percentage do so – never mind their name, image and likeness rights – it will certainly compromise the results.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the “10,000-hour rule”, suggesting that this is the amount of practice time an artist needs to achieve any form of mastery. Will people like Yeon change this? “I think people (still) have to spend 10,000 hours,” says Shulman. “They may be working different jobs and practicing different skills, but they definitely have to spend 10,000 hours a day making the best music in the world.”
As part of its lucrative campaign, Suno signed with American manufacturer timbaland as a strategic advisor, but he had to make a public apology after the producer took down the track fresh of without permission and, latest allegations“Uploaded it to Suno’s AI platform, and released an unauthorized AI remix”.
Still, Shulman says that the musicians he talks to about Listen see it as an important new creative tool and songwriting aid. He previously told the 20VC Podcast: “I think most people don’t enjoy most of the time they spend making music.” This doesn’t mean that musicians hate the creative process. CompleteBut they appreciate tools that can eliminate at least some of the hassles.
He now suggests that they simply see it as a dirty secret. “When you get people one-on-one, they’re more comfortable admitting it. I’ve been told we’re the Ozempic of the music industry – everyone is on it and no one wants to talk about it.”
Of course, the fear is that by putting music on Ozempic it doesn’t ruin anything.
