Mikey Shulman

Shulman’s biggest structural call: models will eventually disappear into product. “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.” Harry agrees nobody will pay more for a better model in five years; Shulman goes further — you won’t even know what model is under the hood, because “this is a product game at the end of the day.”

Music AI needs more than text-style scaling. Text benchmarks are objective; music is taste, so “scale is not the answer to all the problems” and models stay relatively small. Suno’s edge is not architecture (it’s a Transformer) but audio tokenization — “take everything from the open source text community for how to make and scale models” — plus a talent thesis of hiring economists (natural experiments) and physicists, because “AI is an empirical discipline and whoever can run more high-quality experiments quickly will win.”

The market-size thesis: music should work like a video game — interactive, social, and paid for like Fortnite, in an industry “so much bigger than the music industry.” Suno charged from day one, users are “paying to create the music — this has nothing to do with listening,” and the paywall doubles as a research instrument. GPU burn is the biggest cost “by far… a few times payroll.”

On the June 2024 lawsuit, a notably candid admission: “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.” If Suno loses at trial, “the company’s not dead but it’s obviously not good for us” — though he thinks a loss unlikely, and frames the fight as the music industry’s “fixed pie mentality” versus growing the pie to gaming-industry size.

The new business models are the tradeable part: artist-licensed personal models (an Ariana Grande who opts in gets unlimited supply of herself — though “she might not even be allowed to do that” under her contracts), prompt-level royalties Spotify Radio never pays, Patreon-style forks of a teenage creator’s model, and the likely Timbaland partnership — not paid in cash, with him as an adviser — that “gives cover to up-and-comers” since most artists “behind closed doors admit that they use and love Suno.”

Distribution scorecard: he thinks TikTok wins short-form discovery and Spotify wins the algorithmic Discover Weekly, and he thinks things may break on TikTok then become famous on Spotify. YouTube beats Spotify on engagement “as measured by the ARPU for ads.” Discovery is already far more algorithmic than people realize — popularity “is a product of recommendation algorithms,” not just quality. Suno refuses the vast majority of gen-AI video companies asking for an API: background music “is not making music more valuable.”

Against the consensus: “everybody believes AI is inevitable and I don’t think it is — we need to go and do it.” His two dystopias if the West sits back: offshore actors enabling unlimited artist impersonation (“endless Ariana Grande songs without giving a cent to Ariana Grande”), and hyper-personalized antisocial streams that know your heart rate and mood — “just hitting that nerve in your brain, it’s like a drug.” Bonus contrarian call: quantum computing “will be amazing but you still should not do it” — it needs government money, not venture, because “I don’t think you’re going to get your money back in a reasonable time.”

🔗 Original source & video: Mikey Shulman, CEO @Suno: The Future of Music, What is Gonna Happen? | E1244