Suno CEO Backtracks on ‘People Don’t Enjoy Making Music’

Photo Credit: Suno

Suno CEO Mikey Shulman walks back on his earlier opinion that most people “don’t enjoy” making music: “I really wish I had chosen different words.”

Last year, CEO and co-founder of AI music platform Suno, Mikey Shulman, made a comment about musicians that stirred quite a bit of controversy, and he seems to regret that now. During an interview on the 20VC podcast, Shulman claimed that the majority of people don’t enjoy most of the time they spend making music. Now, he’s has done some reflecting.

“I really wish I had chosen different words,” he told Billboard in a recent interview. “I do have a lot of respect for music.”

At the time, he said the reason behind that thinking was because of what a time-consuming process making music can be, and because it “takes a lot of practice” to get “really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software.”

Now, he isn’t really expanding on those thoughts. Instead, he shared his vision for the future of his company and what that might look like. Shulman says he’s working to create a “verticalized” service with a TikTok-like social feed (called “Hooks”), a streaming service, and a combination of different music tools to make a product that’s accessible to “anyone from Grammy winners to grandmas.”

“When we talk about ‘verticalizing’ inside the company, it’s not like we want to smush TikTok and Spotify together,” he explained. “Those two things already exist, and that’s not going to reap a lot of benefits.”

Instead, he said, “I’m thinking, ‘How do I make discovery way better than it is now?’ Because we are able to do something no one else can do. [The point of Hooks] is to get you off of the feed, playing with content and remixing it. That’s the kind of discovery that doesn’t exist right now.”

Despite Suno’s licensing deal and settlement with WMG back in November, Shulman still maintains his position on fair use, which has been a pretty controversial stance in the music industry when it comes to AI training.

“The major labels are very important, but what we did is legal, and so that’s what we did,” he said, referring to the deal, part of which required that Suno retire its current model and launch a new one trained only on licensed copyrights from owners who opted in. That model is expected to launch sometime this year. “I don’t think of what we did as a settlement,” Shulman added. “I think about this much more like a partnership. […] It is much more long-term.”

Regardless of Shulman and Suno’s broader feelings on the matter, we’re thinking WMG probably still thinks of it as a settlement. Either way, watching Suno and the broader AI space evolve alongside the major labels, rather than running counter to the industry, is an exciting prospect.