Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future

This is Mikey Shulman. CEO of the generative AI music company, Suno. Suno is worth $2.5 billion, largely because investors believe in Mikey's vision for the future of the music industry. He wants to model it after the video game industry.

MIKEY: I think that the music industry is way smaller than it needs to be. What if the music industry can be as big as the gaming industry? The gaming industry is 50 times bigger than the music

industry, and it's because gaming is super active. …if you make music interactive and you make music engaging, People will pay for it like they pay for video games. Look at the video game industry.

These are rich and engaging experiences that people have. And music, today, is mostly just listened to. Too much music is just passive consumption. ADAM: Now, in contrast to the passive consumption of audio recordings, Mikey's vision is to take generative AI and use

it to sell the idea of making music as a consumer product unto itself. MIKEY: We are best known for giving everybody the ability to create. The thing that is new here is certainly creation.

We have opened up a new method of interaction, which is creation. ADAM: He pitches this idea to the many investors that he talks to on podcasts by using this analogy of a video game.

MIKEY: It's a little bit like a video game. HOST: Why should it resemble a video game? MIKEY: In some sense music is a game. It is interactive, it is engaging. It is fun by yourself, but it's more fun with

your friends. To me, it seems like just crazy that music should not be as engaging as Fortnite. ADAM: Now, in order to make music as engaging as Fortnite, Suno lets users create songs in a bunch of

different ways. You can prompt the model through text, kind of like chatGPT. But you can also sing melodies into the app and then it will generate music and chord progressions that go

with your melodies. You can also upload demos and then the app will realize a fully produced track around your demo. Suno does not think of these as professional workflows, but rather consumer experiences.

MIKEY: We are in the business of selling pleasurable musical experiences to people. …super engaging digital experiences around music. …the new experiences that were never possible before… So many more experiences are possible!

…engaging, meaningful experiences… …way more valuable and fun experiences… we’ll start to see a lot more around meaningful consumption experiences. ADAM: “Meaningful consumption experiences” might mean making music with other people, what Mikey calls multiplayer mode. MIKEY: The most fun experiences.

will involve 2 or more people. For lack of a better word, multiplayer. For lack of a better word, everything multiplayer. multiplayer. People basically hacking multiplayer mode.

ADAM: Now, Mikey is a businessman, and he wants to find ways of monetizing these …meaningful experiences. One option that he pitches to investors is to focus on super fans. MIKEY: If you read the earnings calls from The major

rights holders. There's a lot of talk of superfans. The next wave of modernization is going to come from increased. interactions between fans and their favorite artists.

So we did this contest with Timbaland where, um, fans could remix one of his songs. And to me, this is like an incredible part of the future of music. I will feel like I am co-creating with that artist.