Mikey Shulman, CEO and founder of AI music generation company Suno AI, believes people don’t enjoy making music.
“We didn’t just want to build a company that would make today’s creators work 10 percent faster or make music 10 percent easier. If you want that, you need to build something for a billion people,” Schulman said on the 20VC podcast. “And that’s first and foremost about giving everyone the joy of making music, which is very different from the current situation, where it’s not so much fun to make music now (…) It’s so time consuming and It takes a lot of practice and you have to get really good at the instrument and the production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”
Suno AI works like other common generation AI tools, allowing users to generate music by writing text prompts that describe the type of music they want to hear. And like many other generative AI tools, Suno was trained on a trove of copyrighted music that was fed into the training dataset without consent. Suno is currently being sued by the recording industry for this action.
“It’s not very fun to make music these days…It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to get really good at your instrument and your production software. I don’t think I enjoyed most of it… pic.twitter.com/zkv73Bhmi9
— Mike Patti (@mpatti) January 11, 2025
In an interview, Schulman said he was disappointed that the recording industry was suing his company. Because Suno and other similar AI music generators will ultimately allow more people to make and enjoy music, which will only grow audiences and the industry and benefit everyone. This is because I believe that. That may ultimately be true, and it could be compared to the history of electronic music, digital production tools, or other technologies that have allowed more people to make more music.
However, the idea that “the vast majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music” is important to understand when it comes to music, why people make art and become artists, and the human nature of building and learning skills. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of basic practice.
Music is a form of creative expression that is as old as humanity and exists in every culture. Long before babies can talk, they “make music” by clapping their hands and breaking blocks, and they don’t get annoyed by it.
It’s true that it takes time to get good at music production. Even if you pick up a guitar for the first time, the joy of playing a bad guitar solo perfectly won’t come right away. You have to start from scratch, learn theory, and build muscle memory and finger calluses. Some people become musicians because they enjoy this slow process of improving little by little over time. Instead, some people spend their time getting better at blogging, carpentry, programming, hair cutting, etc.
Interviewer Harry Stebbings interjects, and Schulman says that making music isn’t fun, comparing it to running. This is also obviously rewarding, and something that many people enjoy getting better at over time.
“Most people turn away from a pursuit because it’s difficult, so when people you know go into it, it’s a very biased selection of the group that’s obsessed with it. I think there is,” Schulman said.
It’s funny how Schulman can’t connect the dots (or pretend he can’t) and understand that the process of learning and challenging yourself is part of music’s essential appeal. It’s frustrating. During the interview, Suno repeatedly said that by making the music industry more accessible, it could grow to be as big as the video game industry. Of course, this means that video games are designed to be challenging, that the world’s most popular games are incredibly competitive and difficult to master, and that most video games are essentially It ignores the fact that it is a slow process of getting better at a physically difficult task. .
It’s no surprise that a CEO of a generative AI company would take this position. In the future, it is very likely that generative AI will become a more common way to create images, music, and text. We report on how these AI-generated outputs are already flooding the internet. However, in most cases, its output is of low quality and is an annoyance to users, who find it increasingly difficult to find valuable human-authored content on the Internet, so its output is derided as “vulgar”. I am. internet. Pretending to type text prompts into Suno turns you into a musician, increasing your output and your company’s value.
“Everyone at Suno has an incredibly deep love and respect for music,” Schulman said later in the interview.
