‘The format of the future,” says Mikey Shulman, “is music you play with, not just play.” As the CEO and co-founder of the generative AI music company Suno, Shulman currently finds himself in the exhilarating if perhaps unenviable position of being simultaneously regarded as the architect of music’s future – and its executioner.
Suno, which was founded just over two years ago, allows users to create entire songs with just a few text prompts. At the moment, you can’t prompt it with the name of a 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 thereabouts.
In June 2024, Suno became the target of litigation by record company trade body the RIAA on behalf of major labels in the US, while German collection society GEMA, representing songwriters, filed its own lawsuit the following January. Both claimed the service was training its systems on their copyrights without authorisation or licences.
Gen AI music services have triggered an existential crisis in the music industry. The utopian reading is that they will democratise creativity. The dystopian one is that art will be smothered by AI slop, as humans making music become surplus to requirements. (And many musicians already struggle to make a living from streaming revenues.) Dave Stewart of Eurythmics called them an “unstoppable force” and said musicians should, begrudgingly or enthusiastically, embrace them. Catherine Anne Davies, AKA the Anchoress, told me recently she believes it to be “dystopian”. Music lawyer Gregor Pryor has argued it is already killing off background music work.
“I like to think of us as trying to make the next format for recorded music,” says Shulman. “The format of the future will be interactive.” What does he mean? “It should be social, meaning you’re doing it with other people. What we are doing is building the best digital version of that.”
Investors were clearly not scared off. In November, Suno raised $250m (£187m) in funding, taking its valuation to $2.45bn (£1.83bn). Gen AI is the hottest thing in Silicon Valley, with a Stanford University report saying it drew $34bn (£25bn) in private investment in 2024. But there are fears, notably at the Bank of England, that this brilliant boom can only be followed by a bitter bust. For now, however, investors believe gen AI is too big to fail. The stakes for Suno’s success are astonishingly high, especially given the recent leaking of an investor presentation suggesting the company only had 1 million paying subscribers. The standard monthly plan costs £8.25 ($10).
“The thing that investors needed help realising,” says Shulman, “is how important music is in the world. Once you show them, their minds are changed and…
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