One of the founders of Suno has crept out of the shadows and given an interview about the AI company and the implications of its technology. If nothing else, it provides plenty of food for thought.
Mikey Shulman, Suno’s co-founder and CEO has sat down with the Guardian and defended his company. He says he sees Suno software as being another tool, as just another example of how technology “pushes music forward”, how “new people get discovered,” and “new genres get invented”.
At present, Suno has only agreed a deal with Warner Music Group – litigation with the other major record labels is still live and Shulman wouldn’t be drawn on the ethics of the platform. Previously, he insisted that “We train our models on medium- and high-quality music we can find on the open internet.”
But when asked what constituted the ‘open internet’ – after all, there is plenty out there on the web, but most of it is under copyright, he said: “Copyright is a different thing. I can’t get into too many specifics because there is active legal stuff going on, and also some of it is trade secrets.”
As for AI slop? It’s all subjective, Shulman suggests. “I made a really funny song with my four-year-old yesterday morning. That is ‘slop’ to you – you don’t care about it – but I love it. It’s fantastic.”
He sees Suno as a way that musicians can take shortcuts in creating music. “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music…. When you get people one-on-one, they’re just more comfortable admitting it. It was described to me that we’re the Ozempic of the music industry – everybody is on it and nobody wants to talk about it.”
When asked if musicians will still need to spend 10,000 hours to master their craft (the amount of time author Malcolm Gladwell estimated it took in his book Outliers), Shulman says Suno won’t change that. “I think people will (still) have to spend 10,000 hours. They may be doing different things and practising different skills, but they will certainly need to spend 10,000 hours to make the best music in the world.”
