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The Twenty Minute VCMikey Shulman, CEO @Suno: The Future of Music, What is Gonna Happen? | E1244
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Suno CEO Predicts Interactive, AI-Powered Music Will Eclipse Streaming
- Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno, explains how the company aims to transform music from a passive listening activity into an interactive, game-like experience where everyone can be a creator. He argues that in music, scale alone won’t solve AI quality because taste is subjective, so the real challenge is aligning models to human preferences and building great products, not just bigger models.
- Shulman discusses Suno’s rapid move from an enterprise audio tool to a consumer music creation platform, its decision to charge from day one, and how business model, UX, and taste-alignment—not model specs—will define winners. He also addresses the RIAA lawsuit, data training norms, and why collaboration with incumbents would unlock a much larger music ecosystem.
- Looking ahead, he outlines possible good and bad futures for AI music: from participatory, social, creator-centric worlds with new monetization models, to dystopian hyper-personalized or fully impersonated music streams that cut artists out. Throughout, he emphasizes judgment, product focus, and building a bigger overall “pie” for music rather than fighting over today’s limited streaming economics.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasMusic AI is a product and taste problem, not just a scaling problem.
Unlike text, music quality is driven by subjective taste, so simply building larger models is insufficient; Suno focuses on small transformer models, better audio representations, and techniques like RLHF-style alignment to human preferences.
Charging from day one gave Suno both validation and critical product data.
Introducing a paywall early proved users valued the product and created clear segmentation—who pays, who hits the paywall and doesn’t—which informs product decisions and interviews far better than a fully free model would.
UI and time-to-wow are central to adoption of generative tools.
Suno learned that a dedicated web app massively outperformed a Discord-only interface and that first-session experience (e.g., generating a great track in ~8 seconds) strongly correlates with conversion and retention.
Future AI products will abstract away models; users will buy experiences, not versions.
Shulman predicts there will be a “last model release” after which users no longer track model versions or specs—only product releases and whether the experience makes them feel something.
The most valuable future of music is broader participation, not just cheaper content.
While AI increases supply and lowers the average value per track, Suno’s bet is that enabling billions to create, remix, and socially engage with music will grow the overall economic and cultural value of the music ecosystem.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesWe’re not making music, we’re making musicians.
— Mikey Shulman
At some point there will be a last model release, and everything else is just product releases.
— Mikey Shulman
OpenAI is amazing. They did every AI company a huge disservice because everybody thinks that just an empty textbox is now the right interface. And it is for ChatGPT and it is incorrect for basically everything else.
— Mikey Shulman
It seems crazy that music should not be as engaging as Fortnite.
— Mikey Shulman
We can build a good future of music with AI, and we can build a bad future of music with AI, or we can sit back and let someone else do it.
— Mikey Shulman
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
