Is this man the future of music or its executioner? AI evangelist Mickey Shulman says he makes pop music, not junk | music

‘T“The shape of the future is the music you play,” says Mickey Schulman withAnd not just play.” As CEO and co-founder of AI-generated music company Suno, Shulman currently finds himself in the exhilarating, if perhaps unenviable, position of being seen as both the architect of music’s future — and its executor.

Suno, founded just over two years ago, allows users to create entire songs using just a few text prompts. Right now, you can’t ask for the name of a specific pop star, but asking for “pitch-level confessional pop country” that “references past relationships” or “general rivalries” might get you a Taylor Swift-style song or something similar.

In June 2024, Suno became the target of litigation by the record company trade body RIAA on behalf of major labels in the United States, while the German compilation association GEMA, which represents songwriters, filed its own lawsuit the following January. Both claimed that the service was training its systems on their copyrights without authorization or licenses.

Next-generation music services powered by AI have sparked an existential crisis in the music industry. The utopian reading is that they will democratize creativity. The unfortunate thing is that art will be suffocated by AI, as humans making music become redundant. (And many musicians are already struggling to make a living from streaming royalties.) Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart described them as an “unstoppable force” and said musicians should embrace them reluctantly or enthusiastically. Katherine Ann Davies, also known as the Broadcaster, recently told me that she thinks it’s “miserable.” Music lawyer Gregor Pryor argued that it actually kills the musical work in the background.

“I like to think that we’re trying to create the next format for recorded music,” Shulman says. “The shape of the future will be interactive.” What does it mean? “It should be social, which means you’re doing it with other people. What we’re doing is building the best digital version of that.”

Clearly, investors were not afraid. In November, Suno raised $250m (£187m) in funding, taking its valuation to $2.45bn (£1.83bn). The AI ​​generation is the hottest thing in Silicon Valley, with a Stanford University report saying it has attracted $34bn (£25bn) in private investment in 2024. But there are fears, particularly at the Bank of England, that this remarkable boom can only be followed by a bitter depression. However, for now, investors believe that AI is too big to fail. The stakes involved in Suno’s success are surprisingly high, especially in light of the recent leak of an investor presentation suggesting the company only has 1 million paid subscribers. The standard monthly plan costs £8.25 ($10).

“The thing investors need to help realize is how important music is in the world,” Shulman says. “Once you show them, their minds change and they realize that a lot is possible.”

When a new external technology imposes itself on the music industry, the response usually ranges from apoplectic action to legal action, then negotiation and eventual licensing. The three biggest names in AI music are at different stages along this path. Klay secured deals with the Big Three before launching its technology or music practice, making it a rarity in the “launch first, license later” world. Udio has signed deals with Universal Music Group (UMG) and Warner Music Group (WMG). However, Suno only has a deal with WMG, and legal action from other major companies remains in place.

Shulman, now 39, was a failed musician, which served as the catalyst for Sono. “I played in a lot of bands in high school and college,” he says, speaking by video from his home in the United States, pointing to the bass hanging on the wall behind him. “I was okay, I wasn’t great, and I wasn’t going to make a great career out of it.” He’s careful and thoughtful when he speaks, without a touch of the arrogance you sometimes get from highly-hyped startup founders.

His professional deviance led him to a PhD in physics to the other Suno founders. They wanted to build something different from AI heavyweights like OpenAI, where those companies deal with “inference and automation to solve very specific problems. Music isn’t like that. There’s no right or wrong answer. It’s not a problem to be solved.”

There’s still debate about where Suno sourced the music to train its systems — essentially breaking down the music into threads of data for indexing — before striking its licensing deals. “We train our models on medium- and high-quality music that we can find on the open Internet,” Shulman wrote in a 2024 blog post. Suno’s initial legal defense was that this constituted fair use, and that the music based on it did not require prior permission. The recording industry thought differently. The Recording Industry Association of America disagreed, saying “fair use does not apply when the producer seeks to be ‘replaced’ by the copied work.”

I asked Shulman what he meant by “open Internet.” There is a clear distinction between what is protected by copyright (recordings are usually protected for 70 years) and what is in the public domain. “Copyright is a different thing,” he says. “I can’t go into too many details because there are active legal things, and some of them are also trade secrets.”

Could it be that Sono’s philosophy of “democratizing” the music industry is inherently anti-artistic? What once arose from extraordinary human creativity is now commonplace. Shulman insists that this, as with digital recording or sampling, is just another example of how “technology pushes music forward,” how “new people are being discovered” and “new genres are being invented.”

The question of so-called “AI decline” is entirely subjective, he says. “I wrote a really funny song with my four-year-old yesterday morning. It’s a dirty song for you – you don’t care – but I love it. It’s great.” At the same time, he is keen to emphasize that the music Sono produces can be of extremely high quality.

AI-powered music is flooding streaming services: Deezer says more than a third of the music delivered to it every day is AI (equivalent to 50,000 tracks), and 70% of AI music streams on Deezer are fraudulent (fraudsters obtain cheap AI tracks for such services, then use bots to massively manipulate the streams in order to extract royalty payments, though the services are getting wiser to this). The company has begun tagging AI trails to alert users. Bandcamp recently announced that it will no longer play music that was “created in whole or in large part by artificial intelligence.”

Should others follow? Shulman would only say that he doesn’t want to be “the judge of what’s happening on other platforms. Maybe there are some lines to draw, but I don’t know where.”

Velvet Sundown, an all-AI band, released their debut album and sophomore album last summer. The 70s-style rock band generated millions of streams, but was a short-lived phenomenon. “I don’t know exactly what their strategy is,” Shulman says of Velvet Sundown. “It was all just bullshit. I think that’s why it was just a flash in the pan.”

However, some AI-powered paths have staying power. After allegations that she used Suno to clone Jorja Smith’s voice, Haven’s “I Run” was excluded from the UK charts, but a version re-recorded by Kaitlin Aragon, a human singer, was eligible to chart and went into the top ten. Sienna Rose’s Into the Blue, widely suspected to be powered by artificial intelligence, recently made the top 10 on Spotify’s global Viral 50 chart. “Jag Vet, Du Är Inte Min” is one of the biggest songs of the year so far in Sweden, despite being excluded from the country’s charts for being “primarily AI-generated”.

More troubling is Sono’s use last year of creating clips that the Anti-Defamation League said glorified Adolf Hitler, posted racial slurs and talked about “white power.” “It was three songs, 10 plays in total,” Shulman says. “It was a very small thing, and unfortunately drawing attention to it made it worse.” He says Sono has developed stricter safeguards to prevent similar things from happening in the future.

Suno is keen for its deal with WMG to be seen as evidence that AI companies can partner in mutually beneficial ways. Did the $1.5bn (£1.1bn) payment that AI company Anthropic paid to the book industry in September to settle allegations that its AI was trained on pirated copies scare Sono into closing deals quickly? “We didn’t pay that much attention to it,” Shulman says. “There’s so much more we can do together instead of fighting each other. And we intend, with this Warner partnership, to demonstrate that very strongly.”

But questions remain about the WMG deal. Did the brand insist on making changes to the service? Were payments made to cover the previous use of her music in Sono’s training? Did WMG acquire shares in Suno? Shulman did not respond, saying only that it was “a bit early” to share such information, perhaps for fear of jeopardizing pending licensing deals.

Agreements with major labels are one thing, but attracting artists is another. Major labels insist they will only use their music if they sign up for deals. But if only a small percentage did – regardless of the rights to their names, images and likenesses – this would certainly jeopardize the results.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the “10,000 Hour Rule,” suggesting that this is the amount of practice time an artist needs to achieve any kind of mastery. Will the likes of Sonu change this? “I think people will do it [still] “They’re going to have to put in 10,000 hours,” Shulman says. “They might be doing different things and practicing different skills, but they’re definitely going to need to put in 10,000 hours to make the best music in the world.”

As part of its charm offensive, Suno hired US producer Timbaland as a strategic advisor, but he was forced to make a public apology after he took a song by producer K Fresh without permission, which Fresh allegedly “uploaded to Suno’s AI platform, and released an unauthorized AI remix”.

However, Schulman says that the musicians he talks to about Sono see him as an important new creative tool and songwriting aid. He previously told the 20VC podcast: “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy most of the time they spend making music.” This doesn’t mean that musicians hate the creative process In everythingbut they appreciate tools that can remove at least some of the difficult work.

He now suggests they consider it just a dirty secret. “When you meet people face to face, they feel more comfortable admitting it. It’s been described to me that we are the Olympians of the music industry – everyone is in it and no one wants to talk about it.”

The fear, of course, is that by putting music on Ozempic, it is wasted to nothing.