Music <\/p>\n
O<\/abbr>n a frosty February evening in Cambridge,<\/strong> Massachusetts, Mikey Shulman is spinning up a new song. His electric bass guitar hangs idly on a nearby wall. A 61-key synthesizer and drum kit remain untouched a few doors away. Instead, he types a few sparse phrases \u2013 pedal steel guitar, country Americana folk, acoustic guitar \u2014 into his startup Suno\u2019s AI music generation software. <\/p>\n A few seconds later, a song comes to life: fluid guitar strums and human-sounding vocals with a smooth Southern accent soar over an upbeat tempo. It\u2019s instantly catchy, like if Ella Langley met Lana Del Rey. <\/p>\n The tune isn\u2019t a chart-topper or a summer hit, but it\u2019s evidence enough for why more than 100 million people have now used Suno to make music. Suno-created songs have gone viral on TikTok, <\/a>debuted on Billboard<\/em><\/a> charts and racked up millions of streams. Over 7 million songs are made on the app every day, catapulting it to the top of the Apple App Store\u2019s most downloaded music apps in April \u2014 surpassing Spotify. <\/p>\n \u201cThe technology finally allows for billions of people to be creative, to have the fruits of their labor, to feel fulfillment in a different way,\u201d says CEO Shulman, 39. He calls it a \u201cnew form of consumer entertainment.\u201d <\/p>\n But that\u2019s come at the cost of professional musicians. In its early days, Suno said that it trained its AI model on tens of millions of copyrighted songs scraped from the internet, triggering fierce backlash. In 2024, some 200 artists including Katy Perry, Billie Eilish and Nicki Minaj called<\/a> out AI companies for training their models on artists\u2019 work without their permission. In July 2024, Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music Group and the Recording Industry Association of America hit Suno with a massive lawsuit<\/a>, alleging that it illegally downloaded millions of copyrighted recordings from YouTube to train its model without getting permission from rights holders or providing compensation. \u201cIt\u2019s a copyright chop shop,\u201d an industry executive told Forbes<\/em>. <\/p>\n Suno has denied the claims, and the lawsuit is ongoing. \u201cWhat we do isn’t illegal,\u201d Shulman says. \u201cIt\u2019s like listening to a lot of music and learning from it.\u201d Instead, he argues, Suno is simply leveling the playing field. There\u2019s an unfair asymmetry in the music world. Music production has historically been limited to a small pool of savants. Most people just consume, listening to music or singing along at concerts. But Shulman, who admits he\u2019s average at playing the drums and guitar, says the lack of technical skill shouldn’t stop anyone from becoming a musician. Now with AI, that\u2019s possible. <\/p>\n \u201cWe’ve become the Ozempic of the music industry. It’s like everybody’s on it and nobody wants to talk about it.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The music industry\u2019s griping hasn\u2019t stopped the four-year-old startup from becoming a smash-hit success. The startup\u2019s annualized revenue tripled from $100 million in October (about $8 million that month) to $300 million in February (about $25 million that month). In 2025, the startup\u2019s revenue was about $150 million, Forbes<\/em> estimates. <\/p>\n VCs are sold too. Suno has picked up $375 million in funding from top-tier investment firms like Menlo Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Matrix, nabbing a $2.45 billion valuation in November. This year, the startup returned to the Forbes<\/em>\u2019 AI 50 list<\/a>, which spotlights the most promising AI startups in the world, after debuting in 2025. <\/p>\n Today, more than 2 million users hand over anywhere from $8 to $24 per month so they can generate and download hundreds of songs (they also own the commercial licenses to their creations). Most people feed their own lyrics or prerecorded voice memos into the system, then add a short description of the style and genre they want it to produce, like \u201cmelancholic indie pop\u201d or \u201csoft pop piano ballad.\u201d Hobbyists might use it to add a drum beat to vocals or adjust the pitch of their voice. <\/p>\n \u201cConsumers don’t experiment with tools,\u201d says Menlo partner Amy Wu who led Suno\u2019s $250 million Series C funding round. \u201cThey will only use a product if it’s bringing them joy, really adding value to their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite the outcry, some professional music producers and songwriters are on board, using the program as a demo machine of sorts where they paste pre-written lyrics into the software to generate different ideas for a track before refining it further in an audio editor. But they\u2019re doing it under the radar. <\/p>\n \u201cWe’ve become the Ozempic of the music industry. It’s like everybody’s on it and nobody wants to talk about it,\u201d Shulman says. In September, Suno launched Studio, an audio workstation that allows users to create, edit and layer tracks, speeding up parts of producers\u2019 workflows. <\/p>\n But while Suno might be fun for aspiring songwriters and people who want to make a customized song for their mom\u2019s birthday, does anyone actually want to listen to AI music? Is it even good? And what does AI slopification mean for the human artists struggling to make it in an increasingly saturated music industry? <\/p>\n These are existential questions both for Suno and the industry itself. The record labels, after at first fighting Suno in court, have started to come around. In November 2025, Suno settled with Warner<\/a> and struck a deal to use licensed recordings for its music generation model and limit downloads to paid subscribers. It\u2019s a win-win for both companies. For the $6.7 billion (2025 revenue) record label conglomerate, the partnership is a \u201cnewfound revenue\u201d source, CEO Robert Kyncl tells Forbes<\/em>, allowing the company to tap into Suno\u2019s revenue that it can then share with artists and songwriters who opt in to license their music for training. \u201cTools like Suno make it super easy [for anyone] to create,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n Others, like $14.4 billion (2025 revenue) Universal Music Group, are in a deadlock. The record label believes AI-generated songs should be restricted to dedicated applications. They shouldn\u2019t be downloaded and shared across social media and streaming platforms, where they compete with human artists and make it harder for them to get paid from an already-shrinking royalty pool. <\/p>\n \u201cWe want to make sure artists don\u2019t have to compete with a machine that can spit out millions of tracks.\u201d\u00a0\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Michael Nash, chief digital officer and executive vice president at UMG, said on a Billboard<\/em><\/a> podcast that this issue is a \u201chat hanger\u201d in the settlement talks between the music giant and Suno after it sued Suno in 2024. And until that\u2019s resolved, negotiations are at a standstill.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a limited number of ears in the world and a limited number of minutes or hours that people can listen to music,\u201d says Ron Gubitz, executive director at the Music Artists Coalition. \u201cWe want to make sure artists don\u2019t have to compete with a machine that can spit out millions of tracks.\u201d <\/p>\n But Shulman knows that to some degree, he\u2019s already won. Trying to discourage people from sharing AI music on social media is futile, especially since he sees Suno becoming a ubiquitous part of how music is made in the future. Plus, he scoffs at the music industry\u2019s fixed-pie mentality: If AI encourages more people to engage with music, that could add more dollars into the ecosystem for all artists. <\/p>\n \u201cI don’t want to get to a world where there’s a distinction between AI-generated music and non-AI generated music. It’s all going to have AI in it somewhere,\u201d he says, speaking to a roomful of Harvard Business School students in February. \u201cA tremendous number of professionals use Suno, and it will end up in little bits and pieces in the music that you listen to.\u201d <\/p>\n Luckily for human artists, fully Suno-generated tracks sound like something you might hear on the radio, and forget as soon as they\u2019re finished. The ingredients are there, but anything fully AI generated, from lyrics to bass lines, lacks human quirks and emotional resonance. As one industry executive puts it: \u201cMusic is the language of emotion\u2026 Are you going to want a robot to tell you what it’s like to get over a broken heart?\u201d<\/p>\n Suno\u2019s solution is a \u201cweirdness\u201d slider, which you can turn up to add abstraction and randomness to a composition. Around the 60% mark, it starts to produce decent ideas. But as good as AI is at aping the sounds of the past, it still can\u2019t quite make something truly fresh without a human there to guide it \u2014 yet. <\/p>\n A hardcore Beatles fan, Mikey Shulman’s job as CEO of Suno includes listening to different genres of music including atonal music, a genre that \u201cmost people wouldn\u2019t enjoy,\u201d he says.<\/span><\/p>\n SUNO<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n Music has always been a crucial part of Shulman\u2019s life. Growing up in Peter Cooper Village in New York City, he began playing the piano at age four and switched to bass guitar at 12. In college, he started a band, performing at gigs in the city. \u201cI pretend to play guitar. I pretend to play drums. I’m not very good,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n Then he went off to Columbia University for a degree in applied physics. In 2015, Shulman got his PhD in physics from Harvard and joined data analytics firm Kensho as a machine learning engineer. There, he led a team of 40 data scientists and met his cofounders Georg Kucsko, Martin Camacho and Keenan Freyberg (all of whom have musical backgrounds). In 2018, after financial intelligence firm S&P Global acquired Kensho, the four of them worked on training audio models to transcribe earnings calls. In the evenings, they would go back to Camacho\u2019s basement for jam sessions. <\/p>\n They soon realized that while audio data was messy and difficult to work with, it held a lot of value to train speech and music models. In February 2022, they left S&P Global to start Suno. In 2023, they released Bark, a popular open source text-to-speech model that generated sound snippets, realistic speech and non-verbal sounds like laughter and sighs. <\/p>\n \u201cI don’t want to get to a world where there’s a distinction between AI-generated music and non-AI generated music. It’s all going to have AI in it somewhere,\u201d\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Training AI to create music is tricky. The Suno team initially thought it would take 100 times more compute and money to train a model that could produce audio that sounded like music. Unlike text, which can be neatly parsed out into distinguishable units in the form of words and phrases, the fast and continuous signals that make up sound are far more challenging to encode. Soon after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, Suno had its first technical breakthrough: it figured out a way to represent elements of music that helped teach the model the structure and style of a song. Sitting at a kitchen table at Kucsko\u2019s Cambridge house in late 2022, the four of them listened with excitement to the model\u2019s first AI-generated melody that actually sounded like a song. <\/p>\n \u201cWithout really telling it anything, it learns to build up from short little audio pieces to longer and longer coherence, all the way to full songs,\u201d CTO and cofounder Kucsko says. <\/p>\n They first launched as a Discord bot in September 2023. Within the first month, more than a thousand paying subscribers from all corners of the world like Brazil and Portugal flocked to the tool, even though early versions of the model sounded terrible, Kucsko says. That opened it up to a \u201cfire hose of feedback,\u201d cofounder and president Camacho says, prompting the team to add the ability for people to upload their own recordings.<\/p>\n The cofounders intentionally never taught the model the traditional rules of music. Limiting its understanding to 12 notes would mean the AI wouldn\u2019t be able to conjure up a sound that\u2019s completely new. \u201cThe crazy thing is the model doesn’t even know that there are instruments or voices,\u201d Shulman says. \u201cIt’s all just sound.\u201c <\/p>\n Suno\u2019s technical edge might not last long as competitors pick up momentum. Rival Udio, founded by former Google DeepMind researchers in 2023, has $10 million in seed funding and 3.3 million monthly users. (It reached settlements with UMG and Warner after it was sued by the record labels in 2024 alongside Suno.) In February, Google<\/a> acquired Suno challenger ProducerAI and trained its own music generation model, Lyria 3, which is embedded in Gemini and can compose entire songs including vocals, lyrics and instrumentals. Suno\u2019s key differentiator isn\u2019t the model itself, Shulman says: It\u2019s the product that keeps users coming back to make more music. <\/p>\n Musical AI slop is already starting to dominate streaming platforms. In April, French music app Deezer said 75,000<\/a> AI tracks are uploaded every day, making up about 44% of total daily uploads. Last fall, Spotify said<\/a> it purged 75 million \u201cspammy\u201d tracks from the platform. Apple Music has started requiring record labels and distributors to include \u201ctransparency tags<\/a>\u201d for music uploads where a material portion of the content (album artwork, song, lyrics and music videos) is created with AI. Now, Spotify is rolling out a similar feature to credit AI in parts of a song where it was used. <\/p>\n But the actual consumption of AI music is low, only accounting for 1% to 3% of total streams, according to Deezer. A leading executive at a major record label says AI music is \u201cmore prevalent in the narrative than in practice yet.\u201d \u201cThere are some hits here and there,\u201d he says. It\u2019s an open question whether AI music will be a commercial hit in the future. <\/p>\n Worse, 85% of streams on AI-generated songs were deemed fraudulent in 2025, Deezer said<\/a>. \u201cIt’s a royalty diversion scheme tool that has been characterized as a fraud fodder factory,\u201d an industry executive tells Forbes<\/em>. <\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re not going to win. There\u2019s no fighting AI.\u201d\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Some artists have already seen the impact. Tony Justice, a Knoxville, Tennessee-based independent artist best known for country hits like \u201c<\/em>Last of the Cowboys\u201d and \u201cLife on 18 Wheels,\u201d says his income has taken a hit as AI-generated songs infiltrate streaming apps. He says he\u2019s had to look for sponsors and other avenues to make up for that lost revenue. <\/p>\n \u201cYou just feel robbed,\u201d Justice says. \u201cYou feel hijacked and stripped of all your hard work.\u201d In June 2025, he filed a class action suit against Suno along with thousands of other artists, alleging copyright infringement. The startup has moved to dismiss some of the claims and the lawsuit is ongoing. <\/p>\n While some musicians have outright rejected Suno, others are starting to embrace it. <\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re not going to win. There\u2019s no fighting AI,\u201d Grammy Award-winning DJ and music producer Diplo said in a recent interview<\/a>, adding he doesn\u2019t need anyone to sing his songs anymore because AI voices are so good. Alex Pall and Drew Taggart of the Chainsmokers<\/a> have used AI tools like Suno and Udio to spin up new ideas for songs, like using it to see what a song would sound like in a female voice. Pharrell Williams has said<\/a> AI can help with the \u201cminutiae\u201d of song making. Rapper, singer and songwriter Will.i.am is a vocal proponent, even teaching a course on AI agents at Arizona State University<\/a>. He\u2019s said 2026 is the last year that only humans walk the red carpet for Grammys. Next year, it\u2019ll be \u201crobotic artists<\/a>\u201d who\u2019ve used AI to create their hits. <\/p>\n About a year ago, Los Angeles-based rapper Thurz started using Suno to create his most recent album. He typically samples music from big-name artists and records, then pays their estate a 65% cut of the copyright and royalties, leaving barely anything for him and his collaborators. This time however, he turned to Suno to generate compositions that sounded like they\u2019re from the \u201860s or \u201870s. Now he just pays a $24 subscription fee. The AI software has also helped him save time on going into the studio to record and produce tracks. <\/p>\n \u201cIf I don’t have a producer that’s accessible for me at the time, I can literally beatbox an idea,\u201d Thurz tells Forbes<\/em>. \u201cI could do a little drum percussion sound for eight bars and [Suno will] turn that into a real idea.\u201d<\/p>\n Shulman thinks the bigger business opportunity is with consumers. In the future, he sees a world where AI music generation becomes a part of how musicians connect with fans. For example, Taylor Swift could release an interactive version of her album with lyrics or samples that fans could play with for an extra fee, or an unfinished song that they could use AI to complete, he says. <\/p>\n Even with the industry\u2019s sentiment starting to turn in Suno\u2019s favor, AI music is still fraught and messy. In October, a song called \u201cI Run\u201d by the producer Haven went viral on TikTok, started trending on the Billboard charts and hit 13 million streams on Spotify. But the voice, which Haven had generated using Suno, sounded suspiciously like British artist Jorja Smith. The producers said it was unintentional, but when Smith\u2019s label complained, Spotify and other streamers pulled the song down for artist impersonation. <\/p>\n So Haven re-recorded the song \u2014 with a real human voice<\/a> this time. It\u2019s now been streamed more than 160 million times. <\/p>\n Forbes<\/span>Why This AI Law Firm Is Ditching The Billable Hour<\/span>By Rashi Shrivastava<\/span><\/small><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>Forbes<\/span>This 28-Year-Old AI Founder Thinks His Customer Service Startup Can Beat Out Companies 10x His Size<\/span>By Rashi Shrivastava<\/span><\/small><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>Forbes<\/span>Coders Worry The AI From This $2 Billion Startup Could Replace Their Jobs<\/span>By Rashi Shrivastava<\/span><\/small><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>Forbes<\/span>How France\u2019s Mistral Built A $14 Billion AI Empire By Not Being American<\/span>By Iain Martin<\/span><\/small><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
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\nMusic Forbes 2026 AI 50 List<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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