AI Music Startup Suno Bets Anyone Can Be a Rock Star(bloomberg.com) |
AI Music Startup Suno Bets Anyone Can Be a Rock Star(bloomberg.com) |
> Mikey Shulman is co-founder and chief executive officer of Suno, a generative artificial intelligence startup in Cambridge that lets people be rock stars without ever picking up an instrument. Users type a few words into the app—“I want a walk-up song for my Little League at bats,” say—and Suno will spit out a complete tune. The results improve with more detailed instructions about genres and lyrics; if you want that walk-up song to be a spoken-word poem with a dubstep beat, go crazy. Paying users can train Suno on their voices, so their creations can even sound like they’re singing them. More than 100 million people have used the product since 2023, and over 2 million people shell out as much as $30 a month for it. Shulman says Suno will do for music what Instagram did for photography. Not everyone can be Ansel Adams, but anyone can post a selfie. Not everyone can be Olivia Rodrigo, but now anyone can crank out a ballad.
> “We’re going to change how people are entertaining themselves"
https://suno.com/blog/suno-updates-tos
https://suno.com/terms-september-2026
tl;dr They will watermark songs you generate and remove older models and restrict paying customers to max 20/60 song downloads a month.
is anybody using this slop for entertainment? I actually think the use case of "walk-up song for Little League" is smart, but AI creative output works best as backdrop, not the main course. Seems naive to think that I would listen to my friends' AI karaoke at a frequency anywhere close to my Spotify habits.
Yes, from time to time I buy a subscription and upload my songs to see what comes out. Very entertaining. If you know how to handle it, the output is far from slop; see e.g. https://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1428. The whole point is, that this is just another "instrument" (i.e. a means to make music, as was the drum machine in the eighties, or the Fairlight for those who could afford, or all its much cheaper alternatives in the nineties to this day). The "instrument" doesn't replace musicality and abilities, but it enables people who have those to make (good) music.
I think of Suno "music" like I think of Soylent as "food": it gets the job done as a means to an end, but hell no would I ever consume it for its taste alone.
By the way, Zappa is rolling in his grave to be invoked on this article