No Priors Ep. 64 | With Suno CEO and Co-Founder Mikey Shulman

Mikey Shulman, the CEO and co-founder of Suno, can see a future where the Venn diagram of music creators and consumers becomes one big circle. The AI music generation tool trying to democratize music has been making waves in the AI community ever since they came out of stealth mode last year. Suno users can make a song complete with lyrics, just by entering a text prompt, for example, “koto boom bap lofi intricate beats.” You can hear it in action as Mikey, Sarah, and Elad create a song live in this episode. In this episode, Elad, Sarah, And Mikey talk about how the Suno team took their experience making at transcription tool and applied it to music generation, how the Suno team evaluates aesthetics and taste because there is no standardized test you can give an AI model for music, and why Mikey doesn’t think AI-generated music will affect people’s consumption of human made music. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @MikeyShulman Show Notes: 0:00 Mikey’s background 3:48 Bark and music generation 5:33 Architecture for music generation AI 6:57 Assessing music quality 8:20 Mikey’s music background as an asset 10:02 Challenges in generative music AI 11:30 Business model 14:38 Surprising use cases of Suno 18:43 Creating a song on Suno live 21:44 Ratio of creators to consumers 25:00 The digitization of music 27:20 Mikey’s favorite song on Suno 29:35 Suno is hiring

Sarah GuohostMikey ShulmanguestElad Gilhost

May 16, 202430mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: May 16, 2024
Duration: 30m
Channel: No Priors
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Mikey Shulman, the CEO and co-founder of Suno, can see a future where the Venn diagram of music creators and consumers becomes one big circle. The AI music generation tool trying to democratize music has been making waves in the AI community ever since they came out of stealth mode last year. Suno users can make a song complete with lyrics, just by entering a text prompt, for example, “koto boom bap lofi intricate beats.” You can hear it in action as Mikey, Sarah, and Elad create a song live in this episode. In this episode, Elad, Sarah, And Mikey talk about how the Suno team took their experience making at transcription tool and applied it to music generation, how the Suno team evaluates aesthetics and taste because there is no standardized test you can give an AI model for music, and why Mikey doesn’t think AI-generated music will affect people’s consumption of human made music. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @MikeyShulman Show Notes: 0:00 Mikey’s background 3:48 Bark and music generation 5:33 Architecture for music generation AI 6:57 Assessing music quality 8:20 Mikey’s music background as an asset 10:02 Challenges in generative music AI 11:30 Business model 14:38 Surprising use cases of Suno 18:43 Creating a song on Suno live 21:44 Ratio of creators to consumers 25:00 The digitization of music 27:20 Mikey’s favorite song on Suno 29:35 Suno is hiring

SPEAKERS

Sarah Guo
host
Narrator
other
Mikey Shulman
guest
Elad Gil
host

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of No Priors, featuring Sarah Guo and Narrator, No Priors Ep. 64 | With Suno CEO and Co-Founder Mikey Shulman explores suno’s CEO on Democratizing Music Creation With AI-Generated Songs Suno CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman discusses how Suno uses transformer-based AI models to generate complete songs—including lyrics, vocals, and instrumentation—from simple text prompts, with the goal of making music creation accessible to everyone. He explains why the team chose to focus on music rather than speech, emphasizing that quality is ultimately judged by human emotion and aesthetics, not standard AI benchmarks. The conversation covers Suno’s technical approach to tokenizing audio, emerging user behaviors around collaborative creation, and the potential impact on how people create, share, and experience music. Shulman predicts that AI tools will expand participation in music, accelerate cultural evolution in sound and song structure, and blur the line between creators and consumers.

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