Suno CEO: AI Could Reinvent How We Experience Music

Joining us is Suno cofounder and CEO, Mikey Shulman. I think a really good place to start is for those that just aren't familiar with Suno, what it is and what you can actually do with it. Yeah. Great to be here. For the uninitiated, Suno is a way for everybody to enjoy making music, whether you're a Grammy winning producer, tweaking something, getting that last little bit out of it, or a grandmother just making music for fun. And the thing about music is everybody is creative, but not only is everybody creative, everybody enjoys being creative. And You're talking about humans being creative? Everybody is creative. And so forget the tooling that you use. When you spend thirty minutes making music or making anything, you just feel so much better than the way we're entertained today of just consuming stuff. And we think in the future, everybody will be entertained creatively in this way. That 100,000,000 number is a big number. Kinda surprised me a little. Who are those those people? What types of people? What are the demographics? What are the the the profiles of people that are engaging with the technology? It's so interesting. It is so varied. It's like I said, we know tons and tons of industry professionals using this in their day to day workflows, falling in love with new ways of making music professionally, but it is the whole world. It's every gender, every race, every country. We work in every language. Music so universal, so it's not surprising to us that we see this all over the world. This is, I think, the third edition of Bloomberg Screen Time. And, you know, over those three years, right, we've talked... Been talking about the use of AI in generating music, but but content generally. The music industry, I would say, was initially pretty hostile to the technology, what it would mean for them, for their content, their their IP. Where are we at now? I think we found ourselves in a really interesting complex time. The entire industry of music is moving very quickly, and, actually, the entire industry of AI is moving extremely quickly. Right. And so things are shifting very... In a very complex way. That said, it's a really exciting time because as the technologies progress, we are able to do so much more with our industry partners. We're able to push things forward a lot more. I think slowly, we see people actually excited to speak a little bit about how they use these tools, tools, about how it is helping them amplify their creativity, about how there's actually a human behind everything. And so, I'm really, really excited for the next year. Let... Let's talk about where where, you know, has has got commercially. You have partnerships with Warner, BMG, for example. What is it that you actually do with or for them? What's the output for Suno? It's a great question. I think that, we think of these partnerships as really long term, and it's because where we are today is a particular moment in time. But what the future of music can be is actually still unknown. And the thing we're most excited about these partnerships is building products that could never have been built before without bringing the best technology and the biggest When you say building products, you mean building tracks? Like, what what is it that they pay you for? So imagine, you can take the music of one of your favorite artists and start to play with it and remix it or cover it or mash it up with something else or otherwise change it in a way that has you feeling like you are cocreating with your favorite artist. This is an entirely new product. You know, digital music today has become very, very passive. And to pull people in, get them to engage in new ways, this is how we actually grow the music business. Mikey, let's go to the underlying technology, the core competence that that you and the team at Cunno have. Is it in AIs? Are you model builders, a model lab, or do you harness, harness is a a very specific term. Do you make use of other people's technology? We build all of our technology in house. When we started this company, there was nothing in this space, and so we really had to be the tip of the spear. That said, I really think of us as a music company, as a product company. We are building technology not just for the sake of building technology, but actually for the sake of delighting our users. And you cover a lot of AI stuff. There's so much focus on tools, on utility, on the enterprise, and there's not enough focus on what I think is a fundamental part of being a human, which is fulfillment, creativity, fun, entertainment. And I think this is to everybody's detriment to just think about everything through the technological lens and not enough through the human lens. How important is it? So so, you know, we're talking about the the the medium of audio. How do you sort of make it clear to the world? This is a piece of AI generated audio content, and this is not. Do you need to? Is it incumbent on you to say, make that distinction? This is a really interesting issue. Just my opinion. I think when we think about what is AI music, what does that really mean? This is such a broad spectrum of things, whether it's somebody typed a few words into a text box or a professional using it just in bits and pieces at that final step. And in my opinion, we don't want any single party, whether it's an AI platform, a media platform, a set of rights holders. We actually wanna make these decisions together. And to add more complexity to this, actually, this is kind of a shifting landscape as the technology itself changes, as the way in which we use AI and music production changes. And so it's actually good that we don't have firm rules of the road just yet. Let... Let's, use the case study of a vocal artist. It could be anyone. Right? There are those that have concerns. Right? But there are also people that see opportunity. They could license their voice, essentially. They could make it available. They could open source it, I suppose. What what do you see in that space? You know, that is basically the idea of making a a piece of content attractive because a known entity's name is against it even if it was AI generated? There is so much opportunity here. So everything you said about can you license somebody's, voice or likeness? There's so much opportunity to build new things, around all of this. And so that's the stuff that we're really excited about working with our partners to build. The amazing thing is, again, there is finally the ability to build differentiated products in a world of music that has had a little bit of stagnation actually today. Go to the the screen time. It says where entertainment meets capital. So let's talk a little bit about money. How are you building the business? And, you know, what are your kind of capital needs? Are you kind of in in growth mode, or is is there is now some top line traction that you've been able to get? There's been a a fair amount of traction, and you said a 100,000,000 users have used it. The last, stats that we released, were 2,000,000 subscribers, $300,000,000 in revenue. We are far beyond that by now, And so there is quite a lot of traction. Beyond those two numbers. We are. And I think, you know, just thinking about investors, we have amazing investors and partners for building this business. But a lot of people think of music as a small business and one that they don't necessarily wanna get into. And I think we've shown the world actually that music is a big business. Music is a really big part of people's lives, and there's immense potential for growth. How do you manage usage? Right? Because you're... You know, you must have compute costs, and then there's what you charge. How do you balance that? Yeah. The, we're kind of in the middle here. You know, we're not in the regime of, let's say, streaming where the marginal cost of serving our stuff is so small. But we're also not in the business of general intelligence where we just need to throw as much compute as possible at our problems, and they'll all get solved. Music is art. Music doesn't have right answers. Music is not something that you can just scale, and you'll get to where you wanna go. And so we kinda sit in this in between, and I think we're doing okay from that perspective.