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

1. 0:00 – 3:48

   Mikey’s background

   1. SGSarah Guo0:00

      (techno music plays) Hi, listeners, and welcome to No Priors. Today, we're talking to Mikey Schulman, the co-founder and CEO of Suno, an AI music generation tool trying to democratize music making. Users can make a song complete with lyrics just by entering a text prompt. For example, I was playing with it this morning, and you guys will all get to hear, um, Kodo Boom Bop with lo-fi intricate beats.

   2. NANarrator0:27

      Underneath sakura trees and their spring's embrace. Nature weaves tales in each gentle race. Ethereal petals fall, time slows its pace. Every fleeting cherry bloom, a hint of grace.

   3. SGSarah Guo0:39

      Okay. So, um, feeling really excited about quality here for a company that is just under two years old, but is making waves in the AI and music industries, um, since you came out of stealth mode late last year, Mikey?

   4. MSMikey Shulman0:52

      That's right.

   5. SGSarah Guo0:53

      All right. Well, we're excited to talk to you about AI music models and how it's been going since launch. Uh, thanks so much for doing this. Welcome.

   6. MSMikey Shulman1:01

      Thank you. I'm, I'm super excited to be here.

   7. SGSarah Guo1:03

      Okay, maybe just start us off with a little bit of background. Uh, you're a kid who loved music, playing in bands. How do you go from that to, um, you know, Harvard physics PhD building, you know, couple AI companies?

   8. MSMikey Shulman1:16

      Uh, yeah, I guess a, a bit of a circuitous route. Um, uh, I've been playing music for a really long time, since I'm f- s- I started playing piano when I was four. I played in a lot of bands in, in high school and college growing up. Um, and the dirty secret is I'm not that good. Um, and so the, uh, smart move, I suppose, for me, was to, um, pursue the thing that I was relatively better at, which was physics. I went, I went, uh, to college and then to grad school and did a PhD in physics. Um, studied quantum computing. Uh, maybe for, for your next podcast, I can tell you about why, why you shouldn't go into quantum computing.

   9. SGSarah Guo1:51

      What did you think you were gonna do? Like, did you think you were gonna be, like, um, like, a theoretical physicist or, like, an academic?

   10. MSMikey Shulman1:57

       Oh, goodness. Um, well, two things. Like, I've never had a master plan, so I don't think I-

   11. SGSarah Guo2:02

       Okay.

   12. MSMikey Shulman2:02

       ... thought what I was going to do or not going to do, but I am certainly not great at physics. Um, you know, I think I had a, a reasonably successful PhD, um, not because I'm good at physics. The, the quantum mechanics that I studied was worked out in, like, the '50s. Um, uh, there was a lot of very tricky, uh, low temperature microwave engineering that turns out to be really important for, for actually doing this stuff. I got lucky that I was, uh, relatively good at that compared to all the other physicists. So, um, you know, kind of something, kind of something on the boundary between two disciplines. Um, I enjoyed every second of that. I would do it all again, even knowing, um, what, you know, what I would be when I grew up or when I grew out of that. Um, still very close with my PhD advisor. Um, I still live walking distance from my old lab. Um, you know, it's, it's kind of a fun place to just walk around Cambridge, Massachusetts. But, um, yeah, quantum computing is cool. It's not what I wanted to do with my life. Um, I found a company called Kensho by accident. Not founded, found. Um, they were local, and I met them and, um, probably 10 people at the time, and I met all 10, and I really, really liked them. And I said, "Let's go do this." Um, and I was hired as a software engineer, and I think I got really, really lucky in terms of timing. About a month after I joined, the machine learning opportunities came along, and in 2014, guy with PhD in physics is what passes for a machine learning engineer. And so, I took full advantage of that opportunity, learned a ton, got to build a team, got to build some fun products. Um, uh, we were acquired by S&P Global in 2018, um, uh, and got to pursue a lot of fun stuff after that acquisition as well. So, I guess I found my way into AI somewhat by accident, um, but I really like it. Uh, it's, it's a lot of fun.

   13. SGSarah Guo3:47

       So,

2. 3:48 – 5:33

   Bark and music generation

   1. SGSarah Guo3:48

      you guys actually started with this open source, um, model, Bark. Can you talk about, like, w- what the idea was at the very beginning and how you ended up in music generation?

   2. MSMikey Shulman3:57

      We did our fir- We were doing all text at Kensho, and we did our first audio project, um, after we were acquired by S&P Global, which was learning to transcribe earnings calls. So, I'm sure both of you have read an earnings call transcript. Uh, exceedingly likely it was done by S&P Global. Um, it used to be done completely manually, very painful, and w- we could lend a lot of speed and scale by bringing automation to that. And we fell in love with doing audio AI. Like, we happened to be musicians, but it kinda took this very, honestly, non-sexy project of earnings call transcription to show us how much we loved it. And we also realized that certainly compared to images and text, audio is really, really far behind, and this was in 2020. And I, I think that's maybe even more true now if you just look at everything that's happened in images and text in the last couple years. Like I said, we never had a master plan. We, we made Bark and, um, as an open source project, and, um, even before we released Bark, we knew we wouldn't be focusing on speech. I think, if I'm honest, a lot of people told us, "Go build a speech company. It is more straightforward. You'll build a great B2B product, and people will love it." And we couldn't help ourselves. We just love music too much, and so we decided to build a music company.

   3. SGSarah Guo5:09

      Why did you know you weren't gonna focus on speech?

   4. MSMikey Shulman5:12

      Speech is super interesting, but the inherent creativity that we were so drawn to was, like, not really present in speech. Speech just needs to be right, just like, "Read me this New York Times article." And if it's a tiny bit non-expressive or a tiny bit robotic, that'll still get the job done. And the real creativity was happening in a totally different part of audio, which is music, which all

3. 5:33 – 6:57

   Architecture for music generation AI

   1. MSMikey Shulman5:33

      I care about is how it makes me feel.

   2. EGElad Gil5:35

      That's really cool. And then is there a approach that you've taken... 'Cause I guess the, the two main architectures that people have used for, uh, different, uh, forms of audio models, I mean, a lot of them are traditionally on diffusion models. I know there's been more work on the transformer side, and then there's o- obviously a few other types of architectures. Um, is there anything you can tell us about sort of the technical approaches you've taken or how you think about it? Uh, and one of the reasons I ask is obviously for a lot of the transformer models, the- people just look at scaling laws and how things will sort of adapt with scale, and I'm a little bit curious how that applies to-... to music and how you think about that future, relative to, to models and approaches.

   3. MSMikey Shulman6:06

      We don't make it a secret that, uh, these are just transformers. Um, this is somewhat, uh, our backgrounds, um, doing text before, but also, um, transformers, uh, scale nicely, um, a lot of work ends up being done for you by the open source text community, which is always really nice. We can really be choosy with where we innovate, and where we end up innovating a lot is, um, how do you tokenize audio? You know, uh, audio does not give us the good favor of being nicely discretized. It's, it's sampled very, very quickly, approximately 50,000 samples per second. It's a continuous signal, um, and so you have to use a set of heuristics or models in order to turn that into a manageable, um, set of tokens, um, and that's where we expend I think a lot of our, um, kind of innovation cycles, is really understanding that.

   4. SGSarah Guo6:56

      As you said,

4. 6:57 – 8:20

   Assessing music quality

   1. SGSarah Guo6:57

      the thing that matters is how it makes you feel, and so like, how did you measure quality in your own models? Like, what do you know about how to train something that creates great generations? Is it just all like Mikey as human eval?

   2. MSMikey Shulman7:09

      (laughs) Uh, it's definitely not all Mikey as human eval, uh, but, um, you know, one thing we say here is that aesthetics matter, and I think that is, um, a recognition that, uh, I think in, in all branches of AI, we become slaves to our metrics, and you say, "I did this accuracy on this benchmark and this accuracy on this benchmark." And then in the real world, sometimes it doesn't necessarily matter, and these benchmarks are extra terrible in audio, um, just because the field is so new. And so, "Aesthetics matter," is like a way of saying that you have to use your ears, uh, in order to evaluate things. You can look at the things like, uh, what your final loss is or something like that, but ultimately, um, it's, it's definitely more tedious to, to evaluate than, than you want it to be. I think the good news is everybody here really loves music, and so evaluating your models, which means listening to a lot of things and getting people to listen to a lot of things, and doing a lot of A/B tests turns out to be fun, um, but I think we have a long way to go in this journey on how, on how we're actually gonna evaluate these things. And I think we learn a lot about, um, human beings and human emotions while we learn to evaluate these things.

   3. EGElad Gil8:19

      Yeah.

5. 8:20 – 10:02

   Mikey’s music background as an asset

   1. EGElad Gil8:20

      It's interesting 'cause, uh, as an analog, I know that in the early days of Midjourney, one of the ways it really stood out is people just felt that there was better taste exhibited, you know, it was better aesthetics. Versus, hey, there's a, a much better eval function that they're, uh, they're optimizing against, although obviously there were things they were doing there as well. And so it feels similar here, where that sort of taste component really matters, um, particularly early on. Um, are there other ways that your music background has impacted the development of Suno or really helped sort of facilitate some of the things that you're doing?

   2. MSMikey Shulman8:50

      There's this cliché about, um, it being really important to look at your results and look at your data in, in, in machine learning and in AI, and if that is pleasurable, it is not, um, nearly as tedious, and that's not just for me. That's kind of everybody here, and that ends up mattering a lot. I've learned a lot, uh, about music actually since starting this company, and just the, um, exposure to different genres that I never knew existed and exposure to hybrids of genres that, um, have yet to be created by people has been like really, really eye-opening. But it's funny, um, 'cause you ask like, okay, you know, maybe the, the stuff that I know about music, we actually try very hard not to put too much, um, play implicit bias in the model, um. The model shouldn't know about music theory. Um, you don't tell GPT this is a noun and this is a verb. GPT figures it out. Um, if I tell my model, "There are only 12 tones," my model will only know how to output 12 tones. If I tell my model there's 50 different instruments, I will never get that unique sound. And so, um, we've really tried very hard not to do anything like that, and honestly, I don't think this is so smart of us. This is something that we've stolen from the text world, of there's something beautiful about next token prediction,

6. 10:02 – 11:30

   Challenges in generative music AI

   1. MSMikey Shulman10:02

      um, that ends up being very, very powerful.

   2. SGSarah Guo10:05

      Mikey, what's, uh, what's hard in AI music? Like, I know less about like what this frontier looks like, like where do you wanna push in terms of things that, um, are really hard for the model to get right? Like, you know, in visual models or video, like human hands, object permanence, like there's lots of things that are more intuitive to me there.

   3. MSMikey Shulman10:23

      Yeah, that's a really good question. I confess, I've not really thought about that too much. Um, there are the easy things, or the easy to describe things, like, you know, did you get the stereo right, did you get the bit rate high enough, et cetera. Um, again, I think the reason music is so special is because it makes you feel a certain way, and like to the extent that any of this is difficult, it is because you are really targeting human emotions in some way, and, um, that's not terribly well understood by anyone, um, and it is also super, super, um, diverse and super culturally dependent and super age dependent or demographic dependent. So, um, you know, I think what we're doing is so far from objective truth, um, and it's very easy for people who spend all their days in text LLMs to be thinking about things like, "This is how well I did on the L- on the LSAT. You know, I can pass the bar with this size model," uh, like the, the law bar. Um, and, um, none of that exists for us. It's really just like, "I, I made a song and it made me feel a certain way," and it may have been grainy audio that made me feel a certain way, it may have been a long song, a

7. 11:30 – 14:38

   Business model

   1. MSMikey Shulman11:30

      short song. I think there's a lot more unanswerable questions in this domain.

   2. EGElad Gil11:34

      And then, one of the things that you all did, um, quite early, is I believe you have like a free tier so people can make up to 10 songs a day, and then you have, um, a subscription-based approach. How do you think about your users over time in terms of consumer versus prosumer versus business users, and is it too early to tell? Is there a specific area that you're most focused on? Like, how do you think about all that stuff?

   3. MSMikey Shulman11:56

      Yeah, that's a great question. I would say, you know, we are trying to change how the entire globe-... interact with music and to open new experiences for people. And so what that means is that this is a consumer product. This is not sprinkling AI into Ableton or Logic or Pro Tools. This isn't for the person already staying up all night as a hobbyist, um, trying to produce music. This is for everybody. This is for, like, my mom. And, um, y- you know, I think the business side of things, it may not be conventional wisdom to say, "Start charging immediately for your product," um, but it's actually really important as we are trying to create something that is a set of behaviors does that- that does not exist, um, to be able to understand what actually makes people want to part with their hard-earned dollars. If I'm being honest, people ask about the business model of generative AI a ton, and I think, um, everybody's doing kinda something that looks like SaaS pricing, and it's kind of done very crudely, and we are certainly no exception to that. But, um, I don't know if this is right in the long term, and it- it strikes me as probably just a vestige of it is the same types of people who were building SaaS companies five years ago and the same investors who were investing in SaaS companies five years ago who are building it and investing in it this time around. And so, it- it kinda feels like a bit of a- of a vestige. No offense to you guys. You guys are both great investors. Um, but, like, this feels like something that's not totally worked out yet.

   4. EGElad Gil13:26

      Yeah. It's interesting 'cause, like, um, I remember talking to some people who were very active in the '90s as the web browser was really coming to the forefront, and they were trying to figure out the right business model for web pages. And a lot of the emphasis was actually, um, should we do micropayments? So every time you read a New York Times article, you pay a fraction of a cent instead of ads-based models, right? And of course, the world ended up collapsing on that side to ads-based models. But nobody that I've talked to from that era actually thinks that was necessarily the right answer. They just think it was the easiest thing to do in the short run. And so I think there's a really interesting question here to your point in terms of, you know, subscriptions. There's ads. There's other sorts of, um, ad placement. There's a variety of things you could do over time. There's microtransactions, and so there's reselling things in a marketplace and letting people take a cut of subscribers, you know, almost like a next-gen Spotify or something. So it's super interesting to wonder how all this evolves and where you take it, so it's really cool that you're thinking deeply about it right now.

   5. MSMikey Shulman14:24

      Yeah. It's- it's actually funny to hear you say that 'cause I remember, um, back in the '90s, my older brother was a beta tester for AOL, um, and I actually remember some of these things, uh, happening, and I remember actually watching him beta test these things.

8. 14:38 – 18:43

   Surprising use cases of Suno

   1. MSMikey Shulman14:38

   2. EGElad Gil14:38

      Yeah. That's cool. Are there any ways that people have started to use a product that were very unexpected for you or surprising use cases or applications or other things people have done with it?

   3. MSMikey Shulman14:48

      I think so much has been, um, really fulfilling and cool to see and definitely surprising. And, you know, one thing I'm constantly reminding everyone is that we are eliciting a set of behaviors that are not, um, common and that are not, uh, regular for people to do. And so it's not going to be surprising when we see stuff, um, that comes out. It is maybe not surprising that people love to feel creative, and they love to feel ownership over what they produce, and they love to share it with others. If you wanna be a little bit more, uh, reductive about it, they love to feel famous. Um, but I think it's not the same way that- that famous people are famous. It's- it's- it's a little bit different. And so we've seen that people will spend a lot of time in front of their computers enjoying making songs. This is really cool, and it is different from, I think, the way music is done now. Music is done now sometimes painfully but only in service of the final product. Um, and I think when you open this up to people, um, sure, you definitely care about the final product, about what the song sounds like on the other end, but you also really cared about the journey and that people will really enjoy making music, um, regardless of the final product. And I can tell you, you know, um, personally, uh, the most fun I have ever had doing music is playing music with friends, jam sessions, even when you're not recording. And I think there's something that's, like, very, um, very akin to that that we are able to open up with some of these technologies.

   4. SGSarah Guo16:18

      It's such a- like, a magical experience, and I, um, I feel like everybody should- should feel some of that, like, joy of creation with other people. Maybe you already see it in the product, but are you imagining that you get that collaboration joy from, like... or, you know, the creation joy of working with yourself, feeling like you are more skilled, you're collaborating with AI, with Suno, or are people jamming? Do you see, like, mixtape, like, sharing behaviors today you can talk about?

   5. MSMikey Shulman16:45

      We see all of that, which is super cool. Like a video game, music is fun by yourself and maybe more fun in multiplayer mode, and so we see people enjoying this by themselves. But we see people basically hacking multiplayer mode, uh, into this in- in lots of fun ways where you can have people co-writing lyrics together, trading off words, trading off verses. Uh, "I'll write the- the verse, you write the chorus," or, "I'll write the lyrics, and you pick all the styles, and, uh, I'll make a song. And then I'll send it to you, and you'll, you know, make a song back." And so it's not surprising. I think humans really evolved to resonate strongly with music and wanna do music together. Every culture basically has music, and so it really shouldn't be surprising that we see, um, all of this. But it is really fulfilling from our perspective because it really brings people together. It makes people smile. I don't pretend like we're curing cancer at Suno, but it- it- it is really cool to make a lot of people smile.

   6. SGSarah Guo17:38

      One of the things that you and I talked about previously was, um, in creation platforms, you have, like, a very skewed ratio in general, and it varies by, you know, what the platform is, um, of, like, creators and people who are listening, absorbing, viewing, whatever, right? There, of course, are a lot of people who make music today, but, um, you listen to the creations of a relatively few number of people, right? How much do you think that changes with something like Suno?

   7. MSMikey Shulman18:08

      I think a lot. I will say, you know, I'm speculating here. It's still super, super early. But, um, I think of us opening a few important avenues. The first is, um, I guess all of the sort of smaller niche micro sharing that is possible, where we can make songs that the three of us, um, are going to listen to because it is capturing a moment that three of us had, the same way we might take a selfie. Um, and that is sharing dynamics that just, um, are completely absent in music right now. But I think that-

   8. SGSarah Guo18:40

      Let's do it. Let's do it. Sorry to interrupt you.

   9. MSMikey Shulman18:42

      I love it.

9. 18:43 – 21:44

   Creating a song on Suno live

   1. MSMikey Shulman18:43

      Okay. I need, I need some genres. Um, what should we make a song about?

   2. EGElad Gil18:48

      My favorite genre, but I don't know that, um, uh, it's supported yet, is phonk, P-H-O-N-K.

   3. MSMikey Shulman18:54

      Yeah, I think so.

   4. EGElad Gil18:54

      But it may be too obscure. Okay, that'd be very exciting.

   5. MSMikey Shulman18:56

      No, I think we can do some, but let's, let's do some hybrid also, like, uh, I don't know, a phonk-

   6. SGSarah Guo19:00

      Yeah.

   7. MSMikey Shulman19:01

      ... reggae song?

   8. SGSarah Guo19:01

      How about some, like... Yeah, or like Hawaiian R&B?

   9. MSMikey Shulman19:05

      Ooh. Hawaiian R&B.

   10. SGSarah Guo19:08

       You wanna choose, like, an instrument to add in there?

   11. MSMikey Shulman19:11

       Yeah. Um, you said koto before. Um-

   12. SGSarah Guo19:14

       Koto or sitar or s- something random.

   13. MSMikey Shulman19:17

       Sitar is cool.

   14. EGElad Gil19:18

       Oh, sitar. Sitar sounds cool.

   15. SGSarah Guo19:19

       Okay.

   16. MSMikey Shulman19:19

       Yeah.

   17. SGSarah Guo19:20

       Yeah.

   18. MSMikey Shulman19:20

       I have heard a lot of really good sitar trap on Suno. Um-

   19. EGElad Gil19:23

       Yeah.

   20. MSMikey Shulman19:24

       ... goes really well together. Uh-

   21. EGElad Gil19:26

       That's my second favorite genre.

   22. MSMikey Shulman19:28

       ... about priors in, uh, statistics, 'cause we have no priors here. Let's see, let's see how we do.

   23. SGSarah Guo19:35

       Just, just learning from the world ground up.

   24. EGElad Gil19:38

       (laughs)

   25. MSMikey Shulman19:38

       I've learnt a lot... I've, I've learnt a lot about a lot of new genres, um, since-

   26. SGSarah Guo19:43

       Yeah.

   27. MSMikey Shulman19:43

       ... since starting this.

   28. EGElad Gil19:44

       What's your favorite new genre, by the way, that came out of that?

   29. MSMikey Shulman19:47

       Gosh. There's some recency bias here, but sitar, sitar trap is, is freaking fantastic. Um-

   30. SGSarah Guo19:52

       Yes.
10. 21:44 – 25:00

    Ratio of creators to consumers

    1. MSMikey Shulman21:44

       when they hit our trending page. And, um, people, people like to feel good about their creations, and you should know. You know, in hindsight, it's obvious, and people will hack your product and tell you what they want out of it. Just one thing, back to your point before, though, Sarah. I think, uh, we talk a lot about, you know, how asymmetric the creation versus consumption is on different platforms. And TikTok is famously, uh, very creation heavy, although still most of TikTok is consumption. And I think, um, these set of technologies have the ability to skew that much, much farther, um, because the, uh, creation process is so enjoyable. But I actually think if we do this right, in the future, these are not gonna be the terms that we use to describe what we're doing. We're not gonna see- say, "I'm creating," or, "I'm consuming." These things will bleed into one another. We'll have a lot of lean in consumption. We'll have a lot of lean out creation. And, and, um, I, I think we will eventually decline to draw the line of how, how, how many people are creating, how many people are consuming. And we'll just say, like, "People are enjoying all of this music stuff."

    2. EGElad Gil22:47

       That's, um, a really interesting vision of the future. I guess that has pretty deep implications as well, in terms of how you think music, about music, the music industry, how it permeates society. Do you have a view in terms of what all this looks like five years from now?

    3. MSMikey Shulman23:01

       If we are correct that there are just modes of experience around music that people don't have access to, that we can get a billion people much more engaged with music than they are now, that just in terms of the number of dollars or the amount of time people are spending doing music, both of those are gonna go up dramatically. That, I feel quite confident about. The exact nature of how this looks, um, I think is up for some more debate. So, this is just an opinion. Um, I don't... Because, uh, music is so human and, and so much emotional connection involved in it, I don't really see people, um, losing connection with their favorite artists at all. Um, in fact, if you labor around music and you understand the process, you feel a much deeper connection, um, with the artists that you love. Um, another thing I think, uh, is likely to happen, um, if we look at, like, the last wave of technologies to enter music, let's say the, the DAW. Um, this really accelerates how quickly music can change and how quickly culture can change. You know, music is really just a reflection of culture, and, um, I think...... the way that happened is the DAW really let a lot of people start making music who could never make music. You could do this from your dorm room if you had a good pair of headphones, and you had a good ear, and you were willing to put in the work to learn the tool. And I think if we can give this to so many more people, um, yes, a lot more people will create, a lot more people will become tastemakers, but the, um, rate at which culture changes, the rate at which the styles of music change, the rate at which new styles of music are uncovered, um, is likely to go up a lot. And I think even if you were just gonna only ever listen to music, which some people will, um, that will get so much more interesting. Things are gonna change so much more quickly. You will not have people really, I think, cribbing off of one another in the same way. So, um, I'm really excited about that.

    4. SGSarah Guo24:54

       Just because not every listener will, like, mix a DAW, like a digital audio workstations like Ableton or something,

11. 25:00 – 27:20

    The digitization of music

    1. SGSarah Guo25:00

       right? Like, it's, you know, you can generate music, put it on a timeline, and create sound as, as Mikey was saying, uh, in your dorm room, in your apartment, cheaply.

    2. MSMikey Shulman25:10

       That was pretty revolutionary when it turned out you didn't need, you know, a, a $500,000 SSL mixer and a staff of 10 people to cut an album. Um, that was, that was really revolutionary, and people, um, made tremendous contributions to, to, like, our collective culture when that happened. Like, there were, there were 15-year-olds who got discovered that, and that was extremely rare before that.

    3. SGSarah Guo25:34

       I actually think it's really, like, an untold story. I'm not the right person, but somebody with, like, really rich musical history understanding should, like, explain what happened with digitization of music, where you're like, "Ah, I have, like, infinite set of, like, every snare drum sound in the world I can think of." Just the, the ability to completely unconstrain on, as you said, something that's much cheaper than traditional tooling, where you don't need to know how to play any instrument, and now I think of what, some of what Suno is doing is, like, making the assembly of that, like, another magnitude easier.

    4. MSMikey Shulman26:09

       I think, I think that's right. There's, there's one other thing that I'm really excited about getting unlocked, which is that if you look at the last 10 years of music, um, a lot of the changes are, let's say sonically, it's, like, interesting sounds and maybe slightly less so evolving how interesting songs are. Um, and it's, it's a, it's a function of the technology that, that got unlocked, like, a lot of digita- digitization of things. And, um, I'm actually really excited for, um, the opposite. Like, AI is certainly able to produce interesting sounds that we've never heard before, but putting these tools in people's hands, we can unlock song structures, and chord changes, and, um, borrow different styles and mix them with other styles, and make stuff that is not only sonically new but, um, kind of melodically new. And, um, I think that has the ability to really keep people listening to stuff. Um, and, you know, on my most optimistic days, I'll say untiktokify music, like, get us listening to stuff for more than 30 seconds at a time. Um, maybe I'm a little bit naive and optimistic, but I, I think it's very possible.

    5. SGSarah Guo27:13

       Yeah. Okay, before we wrap, like, um, I played a song at the beginning. We made a song. You gotta play one that's your favorite that's a creation.

12. 27:20 – 29:35

    Mikey’s favorite song on Suno

    1. SGSarah Guo27:20

    2. MSMikey Shulman27:20

       Oh, that's a, um... Let me, let me find it. Um, I'm tempted, I'm tempted to play, um, a song that's at the top of our, our showcase, and it's, um, by, by, uh, an artist called Oliver McCann. It's got a lot of, um, it's got a lot of, uh, plays. It's a really interesting song. Um, e- uh, it is certainly the, the public's favorite, um, so I can, I can play it now.

    3. NANarrator27:45

       Oh, my love. My friend, you know. It's been awhile without thinking of you. But the thought makes me smile. I'm so tired of wanting. Wanting more than this. I know it, but what am I to do? I need some space to breathe. So, give me some room, oh, my love.

    4. SGSarah Guo28:33

       It's unbelievable.

    5. EGElad Gil28:35

       The amazing thing about this, by the way, which, uh, you know, just, uh, for our listeners' sake, is the vocals are completely machine created. The music is completely machine created. The lyrics are machine created, and so this truly is a synthetic song, which I, I think is pretty amazing.

    6. MSMikey Shulman28:52

       Yeah, it, it, it certainly, uh, is easy to lose sight of that fact when you do this day in and day out, but it, it is incredible. I'll say one step further. Uh, the machine doesn't know that there is even a concept of voice. Like, it's just all sound, and somehow, um, it's able to produce the sounds that we have been evolved and acculturated to resonate with. And so all of that makes me think I have the coolest job in the world.

    7. SGSarah Guo29:19

       Not bad for a quantum physicist, a failed one, I guess.

    8. MSMikey Shulman29:22

       (laughs) Exactly.

    9. SGSarah Guo29:24

       Mikey, how, uh, how big is Suno? It's obviously very popular now. You're growing the team. What are you looking for?

    10. MSMikey Shulman29:31

        Uh, yeah, we always... We are always, um, on the hunt for the best people,

13. 29:35 – 30:15

    Suno is hiring

    1. MSMikey Shulman29:35

       people who love technology, people who deeply love music, people who are excited about, um, bringing more music to the world. Um, we're hiring in, uh, primarily the East Coast, Cambridge, Massachusetts, or New York. Um, come drop us a line, uh, careers@suno.com.

    2. EGElad Gil29:50

       Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I think we covered a lot of great things.

    3. MSMikey Shulman29:54

       I had a great time. Thanks so much for having me.

    4. SGSarah Guo29:57

       Find us on Twitter @nopriorspod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you wanna see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That way, you get a new episode every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no-priors.com.

Episode duration: 30:15