Listen, the AI music startup that’s being sued by three major labels, the RIAA, and even some indie acts for illegally training their models on copyrighted material has just raised $250 million (which may help pay its legal bills). what caught my eye wall street journal However, in the article about the funding round and the company’s excessive valuation of $2.45 billion, Listen co-founder and chief executive Mickey Shulman was quoted as saying:
“There’s a really big future for music where more people are doing it in a really active way, and where it has a much more valued place in society.”
Suno is primarily known for its text-prompt-based, push-button create feature, which generates entire tracks using an AI model. (I tried it – it’s technically impressive, but it has all the soul of a PowerPoint presentation.) Which makes me wonder what Mickey Shulman’s definition of “really active” is, and in what way does the creation of more AI-generated music increase the value of music in society? I have contacted Suno to see if Shulman has any references or additional comments that might help clarify this statement, but I have not received a response.
As a musician, I find the idea that asking an AI to play “a live band, a jazz rap track with Rhodes piano, a trumpet solo at 96bpm and serious vocals” to be “really active” would be considered downright insulting. And I know I’m not alone. Countless other artists and critics have been very clear that they view AI music as an abomination that they have even tried to sabotage.
But in the interest of fairness, perhaps Shulman is talking about the company’s recently launched Studio offering, which is closer to a traditional digital audio workstation (DAW).
Still, Suno Studio focuses on generative music creation. It can perform audio transformations, so you can hum a melody and turn it into a trumpet, and record live audio to perform a guitar solo. But it can also create drum and vocal tracks entirely from its own AI models. In fact, it seems to be designed primarily for deep editing and stem separation of songs you’ve already created using Listen’s prompt-based create. And while chopping up an AI-generated track to fine-tune a song is definitely more involved than simply pressing a button and accepting whatever comes out of the Suno V5, I wouldn’t call it “really active.”
So perhaps Shulman simply means that Listen Studio is fulfilling the company’s stated goal of bringing “interactive music tools to the average person.” Well, to get access to Suno Studio, you will have to pay for a Premier plan, which starts at $24 per month, or $288 per year. FL Studio starts at $99 and includes free lifetime updates. Ableton Live Lite is included free with many budget MIDI controllers. And GarageBand comes pre-installed on every Mac. So listen, music production is not cheaper than the big players in the field. And, while Listen Studio is certainly more stripped-down than those DAWs, frankly, most people can understand the basics of any of them in a matter of a few hours.
Which brings me to the final point: the claim that all these AI tools, all this AI-generated music, will increase the value of music in society. Which, just… how? How does technically enabling the endless creation of music without skill, thought or effort add to its value? Feeding the art of countless people who have worked hard to refine their art into a machine, and allowing anyone who can string a few words together to make some approximation of said art, hardly seems like it’s giving the music any importance at all.
Deezer, Qobuz, and even Spotify (not exactly the epitome of ethical, artist-friendly behavior) apparently view entirely AI-generated music as lacking value, and are taking steps to reduce its visibility and remove some of it from their platforms.
Unfortunately, I think Nick Canovas, the man behind the YouTube channel Mike the Snare, is right when he says that the result of all this is that “recorded music is no longer special.” Nothing ever became more valuable because it was easy, or because there was a lot of it. Basic economics tells you that scarcity is a big factor when creating value. But, as Canovas says, “when anyone can generate music within a few seconds based on a signal,” it diminishes the value not only of that music, but of recorded music as a whole.
This is not just democratizing access to the means of creation – that has already happened. You can make music for free or very cheap right now with your computer or cellphone. Good guitars and synthesizers are cheaper than ever. What Suno is offering is a way to bypass the development of skill, effort and creative instincts required to make art. In short, Suno is completely killing the creative process.