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Photo Credit: Suno<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Music Suno CEO Mikey Shulman walks back on his earlier opinion that most people \u201cdon\u2019t enjoy\u201d making music: \u201cI really wish I had chosen different words.\u201d<\/h2>\n
Last year, CEO and co-founder of AI music platform Suno, Mikey Shulman, made a comment about musicians that stirred quite a bit of controversy, and he seems to regret that now. During an interview on the 20VC podcast, Shulman claimed that the majority of people don\u2019t enjoy most of the time they spend making music. Now, he\u2019s has done some reflecting.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really wish I had chosen different words,\u201d he told Billboard<\/em> in a recent<\/a> interview. \u201cI do have a lot of respect for music.\u201d<\/p>\n At the time, he said the reason behind that thinking was because of what a time-consuming process making music can be, and because it \u201ctakes a lot of practice\u201d to get \u201creally good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we talk about \u2018verticalizing\u2019 inside the company, it\u2019s not like we want to smush TikTok and Spotify together,\u201d he explained. \u201cThose two things already exist, and that\u2019s not going to reap a lot of benefits.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, he said, \u201cI\u2019m thinking, \u2018How do I make discovery way better than it is now?\u2019 Because we are able to do something no one else can do. [The point of Hooks] is to get you off of the feed, playing with content and remixing it. That\u2019s the kind of discovery that doesn\u2019t exist right now.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe major labels are very important, but what we did is legal, and so that\u2019s what we did,\u201d he said, referring to the deal, part of which required that Suno retire its current model and launch a new one trained only on licensed copyrights from owners who opted in. That model is expected to launch sometime this year. \u201cI don\u2019t think of what we did as a settlement,\u201d Shulman added. \u201cI think about this much more like a partnership. [\u2026] It is much more long-term.\u201d<\/p>\n Regardless of Shulman and Suno\u2019s broader feelings on the matter, we\u2019re thinking WMG probably still thinks of it as a settlement. Either way, watching Suno and the broader AI space evolve alongside the major labels, rather than running counter to the industry, is an exciting prospect.<\/p>\n<\/section><\/div>\nNow, he isn\u2019t really expanding on those thoughts. Instead, he shared his vision for the future of his company and what that might look like. Shulman says he\u2019s working to create a \u201cverticalized\u201d service with a TikTok-like social feed (called \u201cHooks\u201d), a streaming service, and a combination of different music tools to make a product that\u2019s accessible to \u201canyone from Grammy winners to grandmas.\u201d<\/h4>\n
Despite Suno\u2019s licensing deal and settlement with WMG<\/a> back in November, Shulman still maintains his position on fair use, which has been a pretty controversial stance in the music industry when it comes to AI training.<\/h4>\n