The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: The Future of Foundation Models | The Future of AI Consumer Apps and Why OpenAI Did a Disservice to Them | The Future of Music: Spotify vs YouTube & Spotify vs TikTok: What Happens with Mikey Shulman @ Suno
Fri, 10 Jan 2025
Mikey Shulman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Suno, the leading music AI company. Suno lets everyone make and share music. Mikey has raised over $125M for the company from the likes of Lightspeed, Founder Collective and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Prior to founding Suno, Mikey was the first machine learning engineer and head of machine learning at Kensho technologies, which was acquired by S&P Global for over $500 million. In Today’s Episode with Mikey Shulman: 1. The Future of Models: Who wins the future of models? Anthropic, OpenAI or X? Will we live in a world of many smaller models? When does it make sense for specialised vs generalised models? Does Mikey believe we will continue to see the benefits of scaling laws? 2. The Future of UI and Consumer Apps: Why does Mikey believe that OpenAI did AI consumer companies a massive disservice? Why does Mikey believe consumers will not choose their model or pay for a superior model in the future? Why does Mikey believe that good taste is more important than good skills? Why does Mikey argue physicists and economists make the best ML engineers? 3. The Future of Music: What is going on with Suno’s lawsuit against some of the biggest labels in music? How does Mikey see the future of music discovery? How does Mikey see the battle between Spotify and YouTube playing out? How does Mikey see the battle between TikTok and Spotify playing out?
OpenAI, they did every AI company a huge disservice because everybody thinks that just, like, empty text box is now the right interface, and it is for ChatGPT and it is incorrect for basically everything else. At some point, I don't know if it's version 4 or version 5, there will be a last model release that is released as a model. Everything else is just product releases.
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stabbings, and today we feature Suno, a company where I had the most visceral wow moment with their product since the iPhone. Suno is the future of music. They've raised over $125 million for the company from the likes of Lightspeed, Founder Collective, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross.
And today, we're joined by Suno's co-founder and CEO, Mikey Schulman, to discuss the future of models and the future of music. But before we dive in today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collective $8 billion in total revenue. Wow.
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Mikey, I am like the biggest fanboy of Suno, and I have created like 25 songs in the last few days, so I'm so excited for this. Thank you for joining me. So good to be here. Thank you for having me. Now, I would love to just start with, for those that don't know what Suno is, what is Suno, and what is Suno not?
Yeah, Suno is a way for everybody to experience all of the joys of music, meaning not just background listening to music, but losing yourself in the process of making music, of sharing music, of editing music, of being a much more active participant in music. You know, I like to think we're not making music, we're making musicians.
I love that as like a tagline, but I actually spoke to Mignano before the show and he was like, dude, you got to ask him about the origin because it was an enterprise AI audio tool and it wasn't what you see today. Can you talk to me about that pivot?
I wouldn't call it a pivot. You know, we always knew that audio was really far behind the world of text. You know, that's where we came from. Our backgrounds are all NLP. And we thought it would actually be a lot harder to do good generative stuff. And so we thought the first product would be more sense-making. You know, try to scratch your head and think back to like GPT-2.
No one was really making interesting text with GPT-2. But GPT-2 was like this... interesting tool for understanding text. And that's where we thought we would be stuck for a couple of years until we learned to scale these things up. And it turned out we were wrong. And that good generative capabilities came out much, much sooner. And so the interesting thing here is the ability to generate stuff.
And so we kind of very quickly threw out the sensemaking tool.
I already just love chatting to you because we just go off in many different directions. Do you think scaling laws will continue? You said there about the generative improvements.
For music, it's very different from text. And I think people will very sloppily look at the world of OpenAI and Anthropic and the hyperscalers and say, audio is just a couple of years behind, which it is, but that scale is going to solve all these things. But unlike those domains where you're trying to just get more and more answers to objective problems. Like I want to get a better SAT score.
I want to do better on this benchmark. Music is totally subjective. So scale is not the answer to all the problems. So the models stay relatively small. And there are other techniques that you have to use to actually have these things have good taste.
So we live in a world of many small models in music.
I don't know about many, but scale is not as much of a panacea as it is in text.
If we think about like insight developments, you said to me before, music should more closely resemble a video game in the future. I thought this was a fascinating analogy or comparison. Why should it resemble a video game?
The thing about video games is that they're interactive, they're engaging, they're rich experiences, they're fun by yourself, they're more fun with your friends. And when I think about what music should be for me, it should be all of those things. In that sense, I want to make music more like a video game.
Nobody half plays video games the same way people kind of put on music in the background and half pay attention to it. And then the other way is I think if you accomplish all those things and if you make music interactive and you make music engaging, people will pay for it like they pay for video games.
And I'm sure I don't need to tell you that the video game industry is so much bigger than the music industry and most other industries. And it's because people have no problem parting with their hard-earned money to experience those things. And to me, it seems like just crazy that music should not be as engaging as Fortnite.
I agree with you, people will pay for it. I think I did the $300 option as fast as I could. Thank you for your support. By the way, I tweeted this yesterday actually because of this, sorry. But I don't think in the future we will pay more for access to newer models. I think that is just a stage of the development cycle that we're in. In five years' time, we won't pay more for a better model.
You'll just get the Suno product.
I agree with that very strongly. I'm not even sure you'll know what model there is. At some point, I don't know if it's version four or version five, there will be a last model release that is released as a model. And everything else is just product releases because in the end, you know, it's not today, but in the end, I think people aren't going to care what powered the thing.
You're just going to care that the music made you feel a certain way. And there's going to be lots of things that go into that.
Can I ask, what powers Suno?
Yeah, it's a transformer model. We've not been shy about that. Our competitive edge here has not been to innovate on the architecture and has been to innovate on the audio representation. So if you like, you can think it's not obvious how to tokenize audio.
But if you spend night and day doing that and basically take everything from the open source text community for how to make and scale models, that's a pretty good recipe.
I do just want to go back to something you said there, which is we're not cheapening music, we're making it more valuable. With total respect as an economist, which I'm not, but as a venture investor, I proclaim to be something I'm not as a frequent job. When you increase supply, it reduces the price. You are making supply infinite. Does that not reduce price?
I think it reduces the average value of any given piece of content, but I think it greatly increases the value of music to society or to any given person. I think that's what we want, right?
Like we want a bigger, more vibrant music industry that has way more participants in it, that has way more engagement and not this more precious thing where very few people have access to actually doing it, to making it. And the range of experiences that the average person has is kind of limited and therefore not valuable.
I want to start, before we really dive into the company, there were elements that we were talking about before where you were like, I'd like to touch on these. And they were not in my purview of like, okay, these are logical ones to go with. You said to me, quantum computing will be amazing, but you still should not do it. Why will it be amazing, but why shouldn't we do it?
I think the promises are are are incredible. You know, there's a big part of me that wishes that we knew more things to do with these quantum computers. But I just see a rush of commercial dollars into the space where far more research was necessary. And people are so short sighted, including, if I may, in your business, VCs are so short sighted, you expect returns over a certain time horizon.
And at least from my vantage point, the the challenges are not they're still physics challenges. There's still like basic research challenges that have to happen here. And so it's not something where you can kind of just turn the crank and make companies out of it. And to my knowledge, all of the companies that sprang up around this are not doing all that well.
And to my knowledge, the best stuff that happens happens in this weird public-private partnership type of situation.
But if you agree it's amazing, should we not pursue it, go through that trough of disillusionment, that pain to get to the amazing outcome?
We should, you should not. You know, career advice, it's a very risky career because it may not work. You know, so just to be spicy, people should not join companies doing it just yet.
But if that's the case, we will never get to that.
I agree with you. It's like a tragedy of the commons, but like it's an irrational decision right now, right? It's like it's going to need some massive government intervention, I think, in a good way to make it happen. And we should do that. But should the government fund it? I think so. Not venture investors. I don't think so. I don't think you're going to get your money back in a reasonable time.
called Enterprise SaaS Investing, my friend. Do you know how long it takes? Years, years. No, but this is decades. This is my point. Why do physicists and economists make the best machine learning engineers?
Great question. Two completely different reasons, I think. And I'll preface this with building an AI company, you are in the business of trying to find talent and trying to find underappreciated talent, let's be honest, I will pay you less than OpenAI will pay you. And I need to find a reason to convince you to come join us.
And I think for economists, economists are great at thinking about natural experiments. They're great about doing kind of first principles reasoning in a way that isn't just like turn the crank, get better at this benchmark. But it's much better at thinking about what do these benchmarks really mean? Are there natural experiments that I can pursue there?
Because lots of economics research happens in kind of data poor environments. And I think those are really interesting perspectives. Physics, I'm maybe a little bit closer to. Experimental physicists just get good at running high quality experiments really quickly. And AI is an empirical discipline. And so whoever can run more high quality experiments quickly will win.
How do you compete in a war for talent with OpenAI, with Anthropic, with the massive incumbents that we have in the space who are paying millions of dollars?
Yeah, we don't pay millions of dollars. So how do we compete? There's a couple of things. One is we're not in Silicon Valley. If you want to be in one of the cities where we are, we're headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We're kind of the coolest AI company, certainly in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
There's something else that goes back to what we were talking about before, which is that if you are interested in a different AI problem, in the problem of how do I align models not to objective truth, but to human taste, I think there's nowhere else to do it.
How do you align models to human taste when human taste is so subjective?
Yeah, it's really hard. We have the advantage of having a lot of usage. And so we can run, we have a lot of data, we can collect a lot of data, we can run a lot of A-B tests on things. In the future, there's probably a lot more personalization that happens in this domain. But in the meantime, it's similar techniques that align models to human preferences for like RLHF or for chat GPT, etc.
But it's totally not obvious that that is what the future should be. You know, it's totally not obvious that the same techniques that are used to align LLMs to weird human taste should be the same techniques that we use to align music models.
How far will large model providers go into the application layer? I'm really just throwing you off on this. But listen, there's nothing to say OpenAI doesn't move into customer support or music creation.
Totally. We think about this a lot. They will try. I don't know if it will be music. You know, customer support seems honestly bigger. You know, the thing that OpenAI is going after is, let's be honest, I hope to build a giant company. But general intelligence and customer support are both much bigger than music.
No, customer support's not. Come on, Zendesk is like a $10 billion company at best and overbid by PE providers.
The future of customer support might be much, much bigger than Zendesk, right? If everything can be automated. You have all these BPOs, you have all these. It's not obvious to me. I'm quite certain that the future of music is also much bigger than it is today, but maybe that's not dawned on the folks at OpenAI. What I will say is that this isn't just, it's the same thing about things being tastes.
This is a product game. At the end of the day, people will use Suno because it's a better product, not because there's a better, bigger model under the hood. We are in the business of selling pleasurable musical experiences to people, plain and simple. And so a chat interface is not the be all and end all that people want to do for that.
you know what's amazing about your product is your time to wow which is like five seconds I typed in like you know slow inspirational song to run to male guitar vocals and it came out with like unbelievable in five seconds I'm very happy we used
transformers because it lets us kind of get that to you quicker. We can actually measure. It's super important what you said. And we keep a very close eye on making sure we deliver an amazing experience for your first song because it matters a ton. And I can tell you, for example, we can introduce a little bit of artificial latency into the product and we can see people like it less.
Sometimes you see like the working in the background, loading some magic and people feel like more value is being created with that psychological experiment of it takes a little bit more time.
Yeah, but 10 seconds is worse than eight. I don't see us getting to one second anytime soon, but I think that the crossover that you're talking about, we're still kind of far away from.
What is the metric for a successful user? Is it three songs created, one song shared? How do you think about that?
There's a few things we look at there. The most salient one is actually just like, did you hit the paywall your first day? Even if you didn't go through it for whatever reason, if you hit the paywall, you just enjoyed the last 10 or 12 minutes of your life. And I know I did something good there. If you made one song and threw it away and never came back to it, we didn't wow you.
You didn't have that magical experience. We missed our mark. So I think that's like kind of the most important one. And it's fairly high how the fraction of people that hit the paywall their first day.
This may be completely crap user feedback, but I found actually the numbers jarring because you price it annually.
Yeah.
It's like bigger numbers. And so like when you see 300 bucks, you're like, wow, it's a lot. But if you showed me that $29.99, I'd be like, fair enough.
We do want you to do an annual subscription though. I think in some sense, not the most deliberate decision, but we made a decision to start charging from day one, which is like a little bit against the traditional wisdom of Silicon Valley of just like give the product away for free, scale, scale, scale. And why did you? And we didn't want to be a novelty item.
We wanted to be giving people something that they enjoyed enough to pay for. And so I remembered when we launched this thing, it was a Discord bot. We started collecting, you know, we always had this free tier, same free tier as it is today. And if you wanted to do more, you had to pay. And a surprising number of people subscribed in that first month.
And it was a sign that like, hey, this is a real thing. But even without the revenues, which are fantastic to have, and they offset a lot of GPU burn, knowing what gets people to subscribe is such valuable data that I don't know how we would do this without it. What do you mean by that? What did you learn from that valuable data?
Imagine it were just only the free tier or everything were totally free. When you hit the end of your free tier, I don't know why. I don't know if you wanted to continue or didn't want to continue. I don't know how to pick out the users that I want to interview that found this really valuable or not really valuable. Like I'm kind of lost in the desert a little bit.
And if you have it and you can say, okay, these are the people who subscribed. These are the people who subscribed before they even hit the paywall. Let's go talk to them. Let's figure out like, what was that magical moment they had? Or these were the people that hit the paywall and didn't subscribe. Let's go talk to them. Let's figure out why we didn't wow them.
Sure, maybe we would be a little bit bigger, but we would also have, I think, a worse product if we hadn't had that data at our hands.
Can I ask you, you mentioned GPU burn there and revenue offsetting that. What percentage of your spend today is GPU burn?
It's the biggest thing by far. It's a few times payroll. We also have a big research cluster that these technologies didn't exist when we started the company, and research is still a huge part of what we do. How do you anticipate that changing moving forwards? I don't. I hope GPU prices come down, but we'll probably just get more.
So you just get more and the product gets better and better and better?
No, you know, you need to run high quality experiments. And so the machine learning team at Suno will almost certainly not scale as quickly as a software team. Or said differently, research is not something that you can solve with scale. You can just throw more bodies and you'll get comparatively more results. It will be sublinear returns there.
And so it's very important to really understand like, okay, I have like really talented researchers doing the problems that are going to be really important for the future of music.
I want to discuss the future of music and I want to kind of go to the product itself. I love the output. I'm just starting with a blunt question. There is a lawsuit from RIAA in June 2024. Was there any basis to this lawsuit? The lawsuit is basically saying that you use their media to train your models.
I have to be very careful what I say and don't say about a lawsuit. So yeah, we know that there are some copyrighted works in our training data. That's not illegal. It's stock standard for the industry. It's what every AI company does. In some sense, the lawsuit wasn't totally shocking. Most AI companies get sued. Everybody in music gets sued. It's a
bit depressing in some way because I think there is a much bigger and brighter future of music to build together with the existing industry instead of kind of fighting it out and having the potential for this thing to just be net smaller. I'll say something ill of lawyers for a minute, but we were talking about economists and there's this famous econ paper from like the 80s
looking at why do some countries grow and some countries don't grow. And this guy, Andre Schleifer, one of the conclusions is basically like they're looking at the ratio of like how many engineers are in a country and how many lawyers are in a country. The conclusion is like more engineers equals more growth, more lawyers equals less growth. And that's like a little bit reductive.
But I think that instead of fighting it out, if we were talking, which we were before this lawsuit happened, at least to some of the players in that lawsuit, if we were working together toward building a bigger future of music, everybody would just be happier. And the music business is one that has such... an embedded fixed pie mentality.
There's a fixed pie of money out there and we are all just trying to divide it unfairly for ourselves. And if we were focused on growing that pie, I think like just everything gets easier.
You mentioned that it's very natural for AI companies, whether it's open AI or any of the others, to have lawsuits and be under the same pressures. When you think about how that naturally gets resolved between new AI players and traditional incumbents in any industry, so not specific to this lawsuit, how do you think that plays out?
Is it just settlements with new AI companies bluntly using venture dollars to pay off large incumbents? Is it equity distributions to larger incumbents to feel like they have a part of the companies? How does this play out?
I don't know. There's like the traditional Silicon Valley mentality of like, screw you existing industry. I will disrupt you. There's nothing that you can do about it. And then there's like the existing incumbent approach, which is like, I will sue you, you know, until you go away. And like, both of these are obviously wrong.
People will ding us for building a tech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But like, it's actually nice not to have that embedded Silicon Valley mentality of like, screw you existing industry, I'm going to disrupt you and there's nothing you can do about it.
Every single person at Suno has like an incredible, deep love and respect for music, which culturally is amazing, but also just keeps people out of that mentality and much more focused on building a bigger, brighter future, hopefully with the incumbents in the industry. And by the way, there are plenty of incumbents in the industry who do work with us.
How would you like the incumbents to have behaved who are suing you? Talk to us first, probably. Yeah. And they don't?
Some did, some didn't. On paper, I would say it just seems silly to throw a bunch of venture dollars at lawyers instead of sitting down and talking about how you could work together. Deciding to sue first and then ask questions later seems to me to be inefficient.
As a founder, when you get a lawsuit, how do you respond?
I mean, I would obviously rather not get sued, right? Like, I think, you know, I think I would be bullshitting you.
I know some genuinely, you know, psychotic founders who are like, yeah, fuck you. Like, feed off the pain. This means I'm winning. Like, you notice me because you're suing me.
I mean, there's certainly an element of that. But those people, I think, are lying if they tell you, like, this is a good thing. It's like, maybe it's a sign of a good thing, but it itself is not a good thing. If nothing else, it's going to cost money and time.
If they win, what happens?
If this lawsuit goes to trial and we lose, it's obviously not good for us. The company's not dead, but it's obviously not good for us. I don't think that's likely. I would just be thinking about, A, the game theory of what all players want here, and B, what is the best future of music for everyone? Even if you could make Suno or Suno-like companies or AI companies go away, do you really want that?
What if the music industry can be as big as the gaming industry? There's gonna be a lot of happy people.
When we think about the future of music then, how does that look? Because you have existing players today, your Spotify is most namely of the world. How does that look in your ideal world?
There's a few different ways. I'll tell you what I hope it is, which is that there are a lot more people participating and there are a lot more experiences on tap. And so what does that mean? That means we didn't just want to build, let's say, a company that makes the current crop of creators 10% faster or makes it 10% easier to make music.
If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music, you have to build something for a billion people. That is first and foremost, giving everybody the joys of creating music. And this is a huge departure from how it is now. It's not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice.
You need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.
Do you not think that's like running? It is hard to run. It is painful to run. You don't particularly enjoy it, but you love running and you get good at it and you get better at it and you speak to the runners and they love running.
Most people drop out of that pursuit because it was hard. The people that you know that run, this is a highly biased selection of the population that fell in love with it.
I'm jumping back and forth, but you know, we talked about kind of the training and you said training on copyrighted music. At what point can you train on Suno music? Because you have such a library now. When can AI train on AI?
Huge open question for how do you do this in a way that doesn't impart just massive bias into models? We work on it a little bit. The bigger players are hitting data walls and are more actively working on it. And like everything else, it's really nice to have the big players solve a lot of the really thorny problems for you. And you can kind of focus on your competitive advantage.
So I'm hoping somebody solves that problem and it's not us.
When we spoke before, you said that it's not good to have two worlds, AI music and like normal music. So what does that look like and what does that look like from a customer experience? I said to you before, like, why isn't Spotify just blended into the app and then you have both in one home?
From a customer perspective, at the very least, it would just be a bummer if I had to go to two different places. I don't know if there's any content that you know about that doesn't exist on Spotify that you're looking for, but it's a huge pain in the butt to go to another app to go find it. I don't. There's some audio books, which aren't there yet. Wow. Okay.
That just shows you that there is a lot of friction. And if there were two worlds of music, I think that would A, be friction for the average consumer, but I actually hope it's much more than just consumption. There shouldn't be like a set of fun experiences around making and sharing music.
And that is somehow disjoint from all of the other music that you listen to at a party while you work out, while you're in your car commuting, whatever it is. Like together, these things are much bigger than if you just separate them.
I totally agree with that separation and the friction that comes with that chasm. But then that means you either need to move into Spotify or Spotify need to move into you.
Or both or neither. I think there's lots of different worlds that are possible here. Time will tell which of these things is correct. How do you think artists feel about Suno? I will tell you that- They love it. Well, actually, yes. So it's a biased sample of artists that I speak to, but the vast, vast majority of artists that I speak to behind closed doors admit that they use and love Suno.
Is there a way to create like personalized models for different creators? And what I mean by that is that Ariana Grande comes to you and says, hey, I want to do a deal with you where I give you exclusive access to my content. Then I'm able to train on my content and I can leverage my brand, effectively have full control, but unlimited supply of future Ariana Grande songs in seconds.
The answer is yes. And I would love to do that. Depending on what her contracts look like, she might not even be allowed to do that, which would be kind of crazy. Why would you not be able to? She doesn't own all of her music. But she owns her name and likeness. I would love to get to a world where she can have models that make Ariana Grande songs.
You know, you've noticed in our product, you can't make Ariana Grande songs. If you put her name in, we're going to wave our finger at you and you're going to say, like, that's not what the future of music is. That's not original music. Suno is for original music. It's not for impersonating people. But if she uses it, it's not impersonating.
This is an immensely powerful tool for her to make music, for people writing songs for her to hear it how she would do it. Or maybe even she's forward leaning enough to want to give this over to her super fans. And her super fans can make what I can only describe as the equivalent of fan fiction if she wants that.
And that would be an immensely engaging activity, way more valuable and way more engaging than like having an AMA with her if you're a huge fan.
If I listen to, I love Dean Lewis, this kind of male guitarist who sings sad songs. Clearly I need a therapist. But I click go to radio on Spotify and I hear other songs like his. He does not get paid for other songs like his.
What is the difference between me going to Suno and saying, give me some songs like Dean Lewis, but actually focused on an Australian man and a Australian woman sadly sung with guitars. And he gets a cut for that because Dean Lewis is in the prompt.
Right now you can't do that. I would love to see a future where you can with him opting in to that as an example. How does that completely change what you can do? The thing that people don't realize is that right now we've made something where people enjoy making music so much they are paying to create the music. This has nothing to do with listening.
I think that a big part of the future of music is rethinking a lot of these business models where right now it's set up in this capped stream share. The stream share is a certain size and everybody is kind of fighting over it and artists don't make a ton of money from that.
And there are hopefully new business models that you can figure out that are much more tied to the enjoyment that people get, that are way more tied to artists if people want to actually be interacting with the artists themselves. What are some of those business models then? Imagine you found some creator that you really love, teenager in Saskatchewan, and you just love this guy's music.
You could have a Patreon thing where you can pay him directly. You could have your own kind of fork of his model if he were cool with that and you were cool with that and you're paying him for that. And now you're making songs that are, you know, your riffs on what he does. Let me give you an example. We had this remix contest with Timbaland and a tremendous number of people submitted remix songs.
And to me... Getting to remix the music of your musical idol is like the ultimate form of engagement with them. It is so much cooler than like, honestly, even meeting them backstage after a concert. The old model of stream share does not properly account for an interaction like that.
Talk to me about that partnership. Timbaland is obviously a huge industry figure. How does that even come about?
If you talk to anyone in the business, they will tell you like he is the cutting edge of technology and music and has always been. He was a fan of the product actually before we met him, which is amazing. And I think you can't fake this stuff. And so it's really an amazing partnership for a variety of reasons. One is we learned a ton working with him. We do a lot of product development with him.
So he has access to stuff before anyone else does. The next thing is that obviously this provides some amount of recognition for us. Do you think it legitimizes the traditional music industry? Yes, I do. But I think that the real thing that this does is that you have someone who has made it, who does not need to do this publicly saying, yeah, I use Suno and it's awesome.
This kind of gives cover to up and comers to be more open and vocal about using it. Can I be... Hold on, do you like pay him for that partnership? No, we don't pay him in cash. Okay, so they get like equity. Yeah, he's an advisor to the company.
Yeah, yeah, no, fantastic. Calm, I think, did this very well. I don't know if you know Calm.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Did it phenomenally well and with some incredible people. Would you like to do more of these partnerships? And when you think forward about the go forward, like distribution and legitimacy, do you think that's important?
We always wanted to do this and continue to want to do this with players in the existing industry. Timbaland wasn't the first and he certainly won't be the last. Who would you most like? A lot of pop music has gotten boring.
Why has pop music got boring?
Oh boy, we could talk about this for hours. Songs have gotten shorter, yes, but also much more homogenous in melodies, harmonies, song structures, and music innovates very much sonically. Like they're really interesting sounds and they all fit into the same song structure. And this is a product of the technology that people use to make music, digital production. This is a product of streaming.
This is a product of platforms like TikTok.
100%.
How do you think about that? Is that sad?
It's not obviously good or bad. It just is. Those algorithms have spread that music to way more people than otherwise would have.
You said the word there, discovery. You said about making more music just this second. How do you think about the future of music discovery when there is an infinite supply of music?
In some sense, it gets harder. In some sense, it gets easier. People don't realize the extent to which discovery is already extremely algorithmic now, and that you are not always being fed as much of the long tail as maybe you want, or maybe it is exactly what you want.
What do people think about music discovery that they get wrong?
I think people don't realize the extent to which the music that is popular is a product of recommendation algorithms. You should ask somebody at Spotify or TikTok and not me. I think that they probably reverse the causality. Things break on TikTok and then they become famous on Spotify.
But that is a function of both algorithms and people pushing music and not necessarily only a function of the quality of the music.
How do you think about the battle between Spotify and TikTok for music discovery?
They're both really important bits of that ecosystem.
But like I think TikTok win on the short form video discovery. And I think that Spotify win on the algorithmic discover weekly playlist, which is much less visual and much more traditional list based recommendation engine.
I think that's right. But a lot of what becomes popular is also found on TikTok first.
How do you think about YouTube versus Spotify? Because that's the other big battle. There's like long form video and the short form video battle. And Spotify are trying to take on both at the same time.
I hope that Spotify wins. It would mean that people are finding music more engaging. Like YouTube is more engaging than Spotify as measured by the amount of the ARPU for ads, for example, right? Why do you think that is? Video is engaging. There's a ton of just background listening to music, which on its face is not bad.
I'm not anti-background listening to music, but there's so much more that is possible. You know, I'll point this out to people. Like I interview a lot of engineers, maybe a hundred percent. I'm not sure I've interviewed an engineer in the last two years. that does not listen to music while they code. But the whole point of that is not to pay attention to that music, right?
Like so much more is possible with music than like something you put on the background to deliberately not pay attention to it.
Spotify doing Spotify video and the big push in. How do you think that plays out?
I hope people find it more engaging. Let me answer the video question more tangentially like this. The vast majority of Gen AI video companies have asked us for an API so that they can have, you know, Suno music behind their AI videos. And the answer is always no. Why? The reason is we are trying to make music more valuable for people.
And being the background music for your video is not making music more valuable. Like this isn't a cost thing. You can go get Epidemic Sounds music for very, very cheap. And that can be the background for your video.
What with Suno did you not do that you wish you'd done?
A very obvious one for me is actually getting off of Discord. We released our first product in August of last year. And in November, we put up a very thin web app. And I got this totally wrong. I said, we're going to be on Discord forever. I look at Midjourney, they're printing money. It's just a Discord bot. Now it's not, but at the time it was.
I did not appreciate just how much a good UI will totally change the experience for people. Discord is not the best UI for what it is that we do. It's better for mid journey than it is for music, but like so much more is possible. We released this web app, which is not even the full functionality of the Discord bot in November. And it takes five days for 90% of the traffic to move over to the web.
Five days. There's no world in which you can say that I got that right.
So you wish you'd done the web app and the mobile app sooner? Yeah. If you'd done them sooner, would you not have cannibalized the Discord audience and there would have been no reason for them to be there? I would argue strategically that you now have 400,000 people still on the Discord, by the way.
Well, nobody leaves Discord service. Now Discord serves a completely different purpose, which is it is a community and it is an amazing resource for us to talk to the community and an amazing resource for us to get feedback from the community. But I think that the product would have reached more people if we had built that web app sooner.
You said about kind of the importance and the significance of truly great UI. What is truly great UI to you?
Oh boy. I'm always thinking about like the UI should just in no way resemble what it does today. But I think good UI is just like, what did you enable that is completely not doable in the old pattern? In thinking like that, this would be, what could I not do in a digital audio workstation? It wouldn't be really easy for me to like take a whole song and cover it in a different genre.
But like, if I think about like, oh, that is actually something somebody might want to do. Let me think about that as a first class citizen workflow and let me build that. And that could be a really simple UI, a really beautiful UI, a really intuitive UI, but it's also just totally different.
How do you think about prompt guides? And what I mean by that is you have the, it almost reminds me of knowledge management systems, which, you know, like the screen of death, bluntly prompting, you see the box of death. And for someone who's used to prompting, you're kind of like, okay, I know to be specific to include very pointed directions. For other people, it may be less important.
How do you think about the importance of prompt guides?
Let me preface it with OpenAI, ChatGPT is amazing. They did every AI company a huge disservice because everybody thinks that just like empty text box is now the right interface. And it is for ChatGPT and it is incorrect for basically everything else. I hate to be this guy. I'm going to reject the premise.
I hope that, you know, in six months from now or 12 months from now, we're not using the word prompt. There are just far more intuitive ways to interact with the music. And we shouldn't be guiding you. We should be listening to you.
You know, I had Belsky and Gustav on the show, and they said that we will kind of measure the quality of a candidate by the quality of their prompts. Do you think that is not true?
I really hope that's not true. Somehow, this would be a huge missed opportunity if we are caring about the inputs and not the outputs. Shouldn't you measure it by the quality of the music or the quality of whatever it is that they're doing, right? Maybe if it took a really complicated prompt, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Well, if it took a really complicated prompt and 1,600 iterations, that's a failure of my product, not a failure of the candidate.
I asked you, you know, what did you not do that you wish you'd done? What did you do that you wish you hadn't done?
There's a part of me that wants to say, allow remote work. That's like a spicy one. The thing is, it's not spicy.
I mean, this is the nicest way. Every single CEO, I was walking in the park with a CEO this morning, an enterprise sales company. She was like, I know remote work is killing my company. I just can't get people back.
We never, you know, we built the company in person and we make exceptions for people to be remote. And it is generally worth it. It's just- Is that not very hard? No, it is very hard. Making exceptions. Some people are worth it. But I think as you scale, exceptions are a sign of judgment. I think judgment is like so underrated on how important it is. It's like compared to people's skills.
And as you scale the judgments required to make these exceptions, I think it's very, very hard. We are much bigger than we were a year ago. And I think this is already beginning to get difficult on like, is that person an exception? Is that person an exception, et cetera?
Can I ask you, on the funding side, you've raised now how much? A little over 125. A little over 125. The last round came quite quickly. How did you think about that? Was it important to cement your position in the space as the market leader? Was it needed for GPU spend? What was the rationale behind that?
Yeah, I think about capital as a weapon and you can go and deploy it. And if you have, there are step changes where more capital lets you do something differently from if you just added 10% more capital to your balance sheet. Do you think founders and VCs are aligned? 99% of the time, yeah. There's like lots that I wish I knew before starting this company.
What do you know that you wish you'd known? We reserve a good portion of our fund for capital later on in case you need it. That's code for like, I'm going to take my pro rata and there's nothing you can do about it. Stuff like that. In the good cases. In the good cases. In the bad. In the bad cases, I'm not going to give it to you. Yeah, yeah. No fucking way.
So that's, you know, that's billed as very founder friendly and it's actually the opposite.
How have you scaled revenue in a way that other generative AI, image generation, you name your other forms, have not?
Care about it, I think is the answer. You know, like there's no secrets here. It's like we started charging from day one. Maybe that was a bit of a happy accident. We always looked at it. And, you know, I care a lot more about building a giant platform right now than I do about revenues. But I need to make sure that these things are somewhat commensurate.
Sure, you can come up with edge cases where, like, I have to sacrifice, you know, I have to do the Intel thing. I have to sacrifice all my revenues for this next opportunity. But absent that, the revenues growing is a sign that people are experiencing something that they want to pay for. And that is a good thing. And we shouldn't be ignoring that.
Has there ever been a time where revenue focus has led to deprioritization of growth?
No, because we've always prioritized growth on top of revenues. You know, this is like good people have the capacity to keep both things in their head. Yes, we want to grow, but we also don't want to sacrifice revenues. And if you hold my feet to the fire, maybe I can give you a quantitative number of I care about growth twice as much as I care about revenues.
But like where we are now in our journey, we are not really making tradeoffs yet. You know, we've reached a tiny fraction of the addressable audience for the product as it is today. We are building much more product with way more valuable and fun experiences that will reach an even bigger audience. So like, if I am making trade-offs now, I'm doing something wrong.
How do you think about Sunobi? a social network and what i mean by that is it's quite easy to see it go down the soundcloud route where you have kind of profiles and follow which we have fancy you know but like the followers the likes and it's much more socially interactive and there's real social capital tied to status and profiles
There's a bit of that, I think, where SoundCloud goes wrong. I mean, there's two things. Like one is, it's still hard to make music. You're kind of limited there and it's still kind of, there's the creators and there's the consumers and they don't really mix. And so that's a bit unfortunate. Music by itself is social. Is it social like Facebook social?
Is it social where you have like lots of peer to peer stuff or the long tail of Instagram? Is it social like the top end of Instagram where you have people who look like they spend mid six figures on every post and make their livelihoods doing it and have 100 million followers? The answer is it's both of those and it's everything in between. And so it's kind of crazy.
Like Instagram is a good example here. It's kind of crazy that the same platform lets me DM you something silly and lets me consume content from Instagram. a true professional who spends all day agonizing over this post, why can't music be the same way? Music shouldn't be special like that.
I feel quite unnerved today. And I feel quite unnerved today in this time because I've never known the world in such a state of flux. And obviously there's global conflicts and everything in between, elections just changing kind of the structure of countries so quickly.
But also just like, I really cannot predict the future of labor, the future of content creation, the future of content distribution, the future of information. Everything is up for grabs. And you can say what you want. I mean, in a nice way, like, you know, we've been creating music since before time. And Suna is able to do that in seconds beautifully.
I just feel uneasy that there is so much change so fast. What would you say to me?
I think some of this applies outside of music, but I think to whatever extent there are two sides of this thing. There's like the old industry and then, you know, there are the disruptors. And there's one thing that both sides will agree on. And everyone on both sides will say, well, we know it's coming. We know it's inevitable, meaning AI.
And I think people in the existing industry will say like, we know it's coming. And they say this, I think they don't want to sound like decels. They don't want to sound like hermits, right? And people in the AI community will say it. And because it's like a security blanket, it's like, oh, don't worry. I'm not coming to disrupt you, but we know it's coming anyway.
And I think in both cases, this is a really bad thing to say, because in both cases, on both sides, this is basically just putting your hands up and being like, it's coming. I don't even have to do anything about it. 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.
And I'm quite energized by the fact that like I think we have.
How can you as a public company CEO say of a UMG, how can you say we know it's coming and not address the core of creation?
What that person would do in that case is say, yes, AI is an important part of the creation stack right now and not try to address the like, well, what about all the other people who want to create with these new tools also? It applies just as much to me as it does to the CEO of the Universal Music Group of like, we can actively build a bigger, better future of music with AI.
Or we can just wait and someone else in another country, not bound by US laws, not with the same intentions, will build the worst future of music with AI. And I can think of lots of dystopian futures.
What is the worst future of music with AI?
Two particularly bad ones. One would be like a group in another country that doesn't want to follow the laws will make it so that you can, without permission, impersonate your favorite artist and just make endless copies, you know, endless Ariana Grande songs, like you said, without giving a cent to Ariana Grande. That would not be great.
And it's musically possible today. Totally.
Yeah. Totally. Yeah. You saw this with the Drake Weekend Ghostwriter thing. It's like, and it'll be good and it'll just get better and easier. That's not a good future. There's another bad future, I think, though, which is like, Music is meant to be social, but there's like a local optimum, I think, where music gets less social and it gets way too hyper-personalized.
And so I would hate for the future of music to be you open your phone, you open an app, you hit play, and it knows everything about you. It knows what you did this morning. It knows who you texted yesterday. And it knows your mood. It has your Apple Watch. It has your heart rate. And it just streams you endless music that only you're going to like that is just hitting that nerve in your brain.
It's like a drug. This is extremely antisocial. And somebody might do that also. I think that would also be a shame because it misses out on a lot more that's fun. There is an inherent tension between social stuff and personalization. And I don't want to make the hyper niche genre for only you.
Because as I said, I created a song for my girlfriend before. Is that good? That's fantastic.
no that's at least that's two you made it for somebody yeah like that is so much more social than what exists now where you listen to music from artists you love the music and you see a piece of yourself in the artist but you don't actually interact with them you making a song for your girlfriend is amazing you might say well i really wish you had spent 10 000 hours playing guitar and then you you know you could have done that without the help of suno but short of that like is it bad that you did that no i think it's actually great that you did that
I don't want it to be only that. Music is social, but there's something about art that's all about the artist. And I think a lot of artists won't even care what other people think of the music. It's just a world where that type of stream is just so pleasurable that you forget about everything else, I think is not as big or good or valuable as what could be.
You said the word art there before we do a quickfire. I can't believe I'm quoting Ben Affleck. But he said, I'm sure you maybe saw this in a panel. He said, art is, I'm bastardizing it, knowing what to do. Craft is knowing when to stop. How do you think about that?
Hemingway said, write drunk, edit sober. I think where this all goes is that, and this is a very natural progression that's already happening. Where does this all go? It's increasingly taste is the only thing that matters in art and skill is going to matter a lot less because you're going to be able to make a lot of stuff.
And the people who are going to be recognized are people who are able to pick
from the vast quantity of stuff and use in the case of music their ears to say that was good and that was bad that is accelerating a trend that already exists think about it like 30 years ago you wanted to be a rock star you wanted to be an amazing guitarist who could shred you know and 15 years ago you wanted to be a dj where you had to learn these pieces of software but maybe it wasn't quite as virtuosic as it was if you had to you know spend a hundred thousand hours playing your instrument and now people want to be influencers
I want to be famous for the sake of being famous. In music, it's not really influencers like that. But look, you see this even with playlists. There was a crop of people who made playlists. This is compilations of other people's music. And it's just like, I have good taste and you are going to care to listen to my playlist. And I think this is where it goes. It's like, I have good taste.
I make good Suno music. Yeah, I can't play the piano. I can't play the guitar. But I am very good at picking through the Suno music and finding the way to make it sound like you wanted it to hear. And that makes me a creator.
Listen, I want to do a quick fire with you.
Let's do it.
I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Okay. What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?
That AI is inevitable. I think everybody believes it's inevitable, and I don't think it is. Why is it not inevitable? We need to do it. If we just say it's inevitable, it's not going to come and happen. We need to go and do it.
Do you agree we're going to go through a trough of disillusionment? Everyone is kind of expecting AI now and next year. I went to an event very recently with one of the biggest banks in the world and some of the biggest CEOs. And it's like, the ROI is not here. We thought it was here. And it really felt like we were going on the downward in terms of like an AI winter.
I live in a bubble in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You live in a finance bubble in London. Those people are going to potentially have a disillusionment. But like, is the whole world going to be like that? I don't know. I'm not sure. Because I think most people are still not expecting anything. Should TikTok be banned?
My gut is no, but most banning things, like I have a visceral no reaction to banning things. Apparently, I just learned Australia has banned social media before the age of 16. I don't think that's a good idea either. These things are typically fairly heavy-handed and don't necessarily accomplish what they want. Maybe that's a trade-in tactic. I'm also not sure you want my opinion on that.
I'm like some tech guy who does music.
Tell me, what's the hardest element of being CEO of Suno?
I don't know if this is special to us. I think it's focus. I think at any given time, there are 30 things that we could do that would be very impactful for the company, and we have to choose three of them. And we have to choose carefully. The future of music is greenfield right now. We could be tackling a lot of different things, and we have to be choosy with which ones we do.
What would you like to do but will not do for the benefit of focus?
I mean, off the top of my head, like everybody's asking for an API. Do we want to do that business? I don't know. That doesn't really build the future of music that I want to do. There's always a tension between how much of the power tools, the old power tools do we want to build versus figuring out what the new power tools are for creating music.
What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months?
Ooh, probably that good judgment is more important than good skills. And it's because we know how to assess skills and we don't know how to assess judgment. So everybody's teaching for the test here.
How did having children change how you lead?
The first order thing is I have less time. And so you have to just be a little more ruthless with prioritization. The flip side answer is patience. Like when you see fast learners, you have to be patient with them. Little kids are incredible learners. They pick up things so much faster than you and I do. And it is incredible to see.
Tell me, what concerns you most in the world today?
People are not good at realizing what is the first order effects of the issues they deal with or the things that they are doing. And people usually glom onto the second order effects because sometimes they feel, I don't know if they feel smarter or it feels closer to home, but people are not good at judging effect sizes. I'll give you some examples.
I teach this course at Sloan at MIT's business school. So you need to have an AI policy because it's a course. Are you going to allow students to use ChatGPT? And you get a lot of people saying like GPT is the end of education. And my answer to that is like, no, the first order effect here is that GPT means that every person in the world has like a median competent tutor or sidekick.
This is obviously amazing for education. And if you can't recognize that fact, I'm not sure you have such good judgment. Now let's talk about the second order effect, which is that like, yeah, all my homework's just got hackable by, you know, one good prompt. And my response to that is like, yeah, okay, so I as the instructor now need to change what I teach people.
That's scary and that's a lot of work. But if I don't change what I teach people, I'm not really preparing them for the real world. Most companies are going to let you use GPT when you're like doing your day job. I should probably prepare people to do that.
Penultimate one, sorry. What's the coolest use case that someone's used for Suno that you didn't expect?
Coolest. Tons of usage with kids. Kids love music. Kids resonate deeply with music. Half of my usage of the tools with my three-year-old. So that I didn't expect, but lots of things we didn't expect.
We were at the top of what people put, the Gen AI products that people put on their ramp credit cards, which means that like lots of, and so we were surprised, people are using this for cold outreach, for sales, for marketing, for all kinds of stuff. That's very cool. That's very exciting. That's entirely new use cases.
And it's very hard to say no to cold outreach when somebody wrote you a personalized song. I imagine it's very effective.
Dude, I told you, I sent the Revolut team the song we did for Nick Staronsky, their CEO, and it was great. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Listen, final one. What question have I not asked you that I should have asked?
I think you asked, and then we got sidetracks. It's like, what should the future of music be? Because should is the real word there, because we need to build it. It's the question that I think about night and day more than any other question. The good outcomes here look like a lot more people doing a lot more music for a lot more hours of the day.
And all of the economics will flow downstream from that. And I think about AI as a tool. for achieving many of those ends. It lets a lot more people participate in creation. It lets us recommend music to people more. It will let you tailor a song for your girlfriend to her tastes, which is very, very powerful because it turns out she needs to like the song for that effect to happen.
It's one where a lot more people, I think, can make a living doing music. And right now, not enough people can actually make a living doing music. And I think about Instagram or I think about photography pre and post Instagram. Very few people made a living doing photography. And now a lot more people can make a living doing photography because of Instagram.
And yes, it changes the tenor of photography. Yes, it changes that every individual image is less valuable than it used to be. But in aggregate, this is a much, much better future. That is what I would like to do for music.
Listen, Mikey, I've loved doing this. You know I love the product. I've so enjoyed this discussion. So thank you so much for putting up with my wayward side questions. And you've been fantastic.
This was so fun. Thank you.
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