CEO of AI Music Company Says People Don’t Like Making Music

By Pune Media On Jan 14, 2025 19

Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks people don’t enjoy making music.

“We didn’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people,” Shulman said on the 20VC podcast. “And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of 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 popular generative AI tools, allowing users to generate music by writing text prompts describing the kind of music they want to hear. Also like many other generative AI tools, Suno was trained on heaps of copyrighted music it fed into its training dataset without consent, a practice Suno is currently being sued for by the recording industry.

“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now… it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making… pic.twitter.com/zkv73Bhmi9

— Mike Patti (@mpatti) January 11, 2025

In the interview, Shulman says he’s disappointed that the recording industry is suing his company because he believes Suno and other similar AI music generators will ultimately allow more people to make and enjoy music, which will only grow the audience and industry, benefiting everyone. That may end up being true, and could be compared to the history of electronic music, digital production tools, or any other technology that allowed more people to make more music.

However, the notion that “the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of music, why people make art, become artists, and the basic human practice of skill building and mastery.

Music is a form of creative expression that’s old as humanity itself and exists in every culture. Babies will “make music” by clapping their hands and smashing blocks together long before they can talk, and they don’t find that frustrating.

It’s true that becoming very good at making music takes time. Picking up a guitar for the first time does not immediately produce the joy of perfectly executing a sick guitar solo. You have to start from zero, maybe learn some theory, and build the muscle memory and calluses on your fingers. Some people enjoy this slow process of getting a little better over time and become musicians. Some people don’t and instead spend their time becoming good at blogging, carpentry, programming, cutting hair, etc.

The interviewer, Harry Stebbings, interjects while Shulman says the making music isn’t enjoyable and compares it to running, another obviously challenging thing that many people enjoy getting better at over time.

“Most people drop out of that pursuit because it’s hard, and so I think that the people you know that run, this is a highly biased selection of the population that fell in love with it,” Shulman said.

It’s funny and frustrating that Shulman can’t (or pretends he can’t) connect the dots and understand that the process of learning and challenging yourself is part of what makes music inherently appealing. During the interview, he repeatedly says that Suno can grow the music industry to be as big as the video game industry by making it more accessible. This, of course, ignores the fact that video games are designed to be challenging, that the most popular games in the world are incredibly competitive and difficult to master, and that most video games are essentially the process of slowly getting better at a difficult task.

This is not a surprising position for the CEO of a generative AI company to take. It is very possible that generative AI will become a more popular way for producing images, music, and text in the future. We report on how those AI-generated outputs are flooding the internet already, though in most cases that output is derided as “slop” because it’s low quality and annoying to users who find it increasingly difficult to find valuable, human-made content on the internet. Pretending that typing a text prompt into Suno makes one a musician inflates the worth of that output and the company.

“Every single person at Suno has an incredible deep love and respect for music,” Shulman said later in the interview.

About the author

Emanuel Maiberg is interested in little known communities and processes that shape technology, troublemakers, and petty beefs. Email him at emanuel@404media.co