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Suno, the AI music startup being sued by the big three major labels, the RIAA, and even some indie acts for illegally training its model on copyrighted material, just raised $250 million (which might help pay its legal bills). What caught my eye in the Wall Street Journal article about the funding round and the company’s insane $2.45 billion valuation, however, was Suno co-founder and Chief Executive Mikey Shulman being quoted as saying:
“There is a really big future for music where way more people are doing it in a really active way, and where it has a much more valuable place in society.”
Suno is primarily known for its text-prompt-based, push-button Create feature, which generates entire tracks using an AI model. (I tried it — it’s technically impressive, but has all the soul of a PowerPoint presentation.) Which leaves me wondering, what exactly is Mikey Shulman’s definition of “really active,” and in what way does the creation of more AI-generated music increase music’s value in society? I’ve reached out to Suno to see if Shulman had any context or additional comments that might help clarify this statement, but I haven’t received a response.
As a musician myself, I find the idea that asking an AI for a “live band, jazz rap track with Rhodes piano, a trumpet solo and gravely vocals at 96BPM” would be considered “really active” downright insulting. And I know I’m not alone. Countless other artists and critics have been very clear that they see AI music as an abomination that they’ve even tried to sabotage.
But in the interest of fairness, maybe Shulman is talking about the company’s recently launched Studio offering, which is closer to a traditional digital audio workstation (DAW).
Even still, Suno Studio is focused on generative music creation. It can perform audio transformations, so you can hum a melody and turn it into a trumpet, and record live audio to lay down a guitar solo. But it can also generate drum and vocal tracks completely from its AI model. In fact, it seems primarily designed for deep dive editing and stem separation of songs you’ve already created using Suno’s prompt-based Create. And while chopping up AI-created tracks to fine-tune a song is certainly more involved than simply pressing a button and accepting whatever Suno v5 spits out, I wouldn’t call it “really active.”
So maybe Shulman simply means that Suno Studio is accomplishing the company’s stated goal of bringing “interactive music tools to the average person.” Well, to gain access to Suno Studio, you need to shell out for a Premier plan, which starts at $24 a month, or $288 a year. FL Studio starts at $99 and includes a lifetime of free updates. Ableton Live Lite is included free with many budget MIDI controllers. And GarageBand comes pre-installed on every Mac. So Suno isn’t cheaper than the big players in the music production space. And, while Suno Studio is certainly more stripped down than those DAWs, frankly, most people could figure out the basics in any of them in just a couple of hours.
Which brings me to the last bit: The claim that all of these AI tools, all of this AI-generated music, will increase the value of music to society. Which, just… How? In what way does enabling the endless creation of what is technically music without skill, thought, or effort increase its value? Feeding the art of countless people who worked hard perfecting their craft to a machine, and allowing anyone who can string a few words together to whip up some approximation of said art, hardly seems like it’s valuing music at all.
Deezer, Qobuz, and even Spotify (not exactly a beacon of ethical, artist-friendly behavior) clearly see fully AI-generated music as lacking value, and are taking steps to reduce its visibility and removing some of it from their platforms.
Unfortunately, I think Nick Canovas, the man behind the YouTube channel Mic the Snare, is right when he says that the result of all this is that “recorded music is no longer special.” Nothing has ever become more valuable because it was easier, or because there was more of it. Basic economics tells you that scarcity is a big factor when creating value. But, as Canovas says, “when anybody can just generate music within a few seconds based on a prompt,” that undermines the value of not just that music, but recorded music as a whole.
This is not democratizing access to the tools of creation — that has already happened. You can create music for free, or very cheaply right now with your computer or cellphone. Decent guitars and synthesizers are cheaper than ever. What Suno is offering is a way to bypass the development of skill, the effort required to make art, and the development of creative instincts. In short, Suno is doing away with the creative process entirely.
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