The CEO of AI Music Company says that people don’t like making music

Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of AI music generator company Suno AI, thinks that people don’t like making music.

“We don’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or make it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion person to experience music you have to create something for a billion people,” said Shulman in 20VC podcast. “And that’s why it’s first and foremost what gives everyone the joy of creating music and it’s a big departure from what it is today. It’s not really fun to make music today (…) It takes a lot time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to be really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think most people don’t enjoy most of the time they spend making music.

Suno AI works like other popular generative AI tools, allowing users to create music by writing text prompts that describe the type of music they want to hear. Also like many other generative AI tools, Suno is trained on a lot of copyrighted music that it feeds into its training set without permission, a practice Suno is now being sued by the recording industry.

In the interview, Shulman said that he was disappointed that the recording industry sued his company because he believed that Suno and other similar AI music generators would eventually allow more people to create and enjoy music, which will only grow the audience and the industry, which will benefit everyone. That may be true, and can be compared to the history of electronic music, digital production tools, or any technology that allows more people to make more music.

However, the idea that “most people don’t enjoy most of the time they spend making music” reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of music, of why people make art, become artist, and the basic human habit of developing skills.

Music is a form of creative expression as old as man himself and exists in every culture. Babies “make music” by clapping their hands and smashing blocks long before they can talk, and they don’t find it frustrating.

It’s true that getting really good at making music takes time. Picking up a guitar for the first time does not immediately bring joy to the perfect execution of a sick guitar solo. You have to start from scratch, maybe learn some theory, and build muscle memory and calluses on your fingers. Some people enjoy this slow process of getting better over time and becoming musicians. Some people don’t and instead spend their time getting good at blogging, carpentry, programming, cutting hair, etc.

The interviewer, Harry Stebbings, interjects as Shulman says that making music isn’t fun and compares it to running, another apparently challenging thing that many people enjoy getting better at. over time.

“Most people quit that pursuit because it’s hard, and so I think the people you know who run, it’s a very biased selection of the population that loves it,” said Shulman.

It’s funny and frustrating that Shulman can’t (or pretends he can’t) connect the dots and understand that the process of learning and challenging yourself is part of what makes music so compelling. During the interview, he repeatedly said that Suno could grow the music industry to become as big as the video game industry by making it easier. This, of course, ignores the fact that video games are designed to be challenging, that the most popular games in the world are extremely competitive and difficult to master, and that most video games are the process of slow- slowly fixing a difficult task. .

This is not an unusual position for the CEO of a generative AI company to take. It is very possible that generative AI will become a more popular way to create images, music, and text in the future. We reported how AI-generated outputs are already flooding the internet, although in most cases the output is derided as “slop” because it is low-quality and annoying to users who struggle to find valuable, human-made content on the internet. Pretending that typing a text prompt into Suno makes one a musician increases the value of that output and the company.

“Every single person in Suno has an incredibly deep love and respect for music,” Shulman said later in the interview.

About the author

Emanuel Maiberg is interested in little known communities and processes that shape technology, advocates, and small meats. Email him at emanuel@404media.co

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