As music streaming services continue to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave of AI slop, companies facilitating the creation of said slop are exploding in popularity.
AI music app Suno hit two million paid subscribers and $300 million in annual recurring revenue, as cofounder and CEO Mikey Shulman proudly announced on LinkedIn last week, highlighting considerable interest in software that allows anybody with or without music production experience to generate soulless regurgitations of other people’s work through simple text prompts.
Much like their text-based AI chatbot counterparts, the emergence of these apps has sparked a heated debate surrounding copyright infringement. While major label Warner Music Group announced in November that it was settling its copyright lawsuit against Suno and signing a deal with the company instead, other legal challenges remain up in the air.
Case in point, Germany’s music rights organization, GEMA, accused Suno of using its repertoire without the required licensing or artist compensation last year. The organization triumphed in a German regional court, but an appeals process is ongoing.
And that’s just one of several other lawsuits the company is still embroiled in as judges continue to contemplate whether music generators violate the rights of musicians and record labels.
Suno has maintained that churning copyrighted material through its AI models amounts to fair use, despite admitting in 2024 that it was training its models on copyrighted music.
As The Decoder points out, Suno’s defense boils down to its claim that AI music isn’t directly competing with the copyrighted material its AI was trained on.
But whether that argument will continue holding up in court remains to be seen. Menlo Ventures principal and one of Suno’s main investors, C.C. Gong, admitted in a since-deleted February 26 tweet that she had “personally shifted most of my listening to Suno.”
“I was so tired of Spotify giving me the same overplayed recommendations,” she wrote. “When everyone can create, the catalog becomes infinite and music becomes even more personalized. Instead of competing for mainstream hits, AI unlocks an ever-expanding long tail, meaning everyone can find their song, not just a song.”
As The Decoder suggests, Gong’s deleted tweet appears to directly contradict Suno’s claim that the slop being generated on its platform isn’t causing users to abandon platforms with licensed music, a core tenet of its fair use defense.
“This tweet, from Suno’s lead investor, will surely be used in court one day,” composer and non-profit Fairly Trained, Ed Newton-Rex, tweeted. “It is clear to any rational observer that AI music models, trained on copyrighted music without permission, will harm that music’s market & value. But it is still pretty shocking to see Suno’s lead investor admit as much.”
Besides being an embarrassing foot-in-mouth moment for one of the company’s key investors, Gong’s deleted message paints an unsettling picture of the future of music creation — and human creativity as a whole.
It’s a worrying and already all-too-familiar situation playing out across a number of different fields, from journalism and creative writing to Hollywood and beyond. It’s a major point of reckoning as AI tools continue to lower the barriers to entry, but intrinsically don’t offer a way to create anything truly new or original.
Shulman himself argued during a controversial podcast appearance last summer that “it’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” claiming that “the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”
In a recent Substack post, neuroscientist and writer Tim Requarth admitted that he had a visceral reaction to Gong’s tweet, which gave him a feeling of “uncomplicated disgust.”
“I genuinely believe people should be empowered to create whatever they want, with accessible tools,” he wrote. “That’s a real value and I hold it.”
“But I also believe that creative culture — the kind that produced sonatas or ragtime or bebop or punk, that comes out of scenes and deep work and years of apprenticeship — is something worth protecting, and it requires conditions that no tool can substitute for,” he added.
Requarth argued that Gong’s claim that AI music would unlock a new age of personalized music was a distraction.
Suno’s “democratization pitch works because it’s a bit of rhetorical legerdemain, treating individual content creation and creative culture as synonyms, as if what Gong does with a prompt and what [jazz legend Charlie] Parker did in New York City are just different points on the same spectrum,” he concluded. “I don’t think they are.”
Others lamented the continued devaluation of human connection.
Gong’s tweet “is framed entirely by solipsism and convenience,” as developer Jason Morehead, founder of the online zine Opus, wrote in a recent piece. “Music is no longer about discovering connections with other humans and experiencing the world through their unique perspectives. It’s no longer about finding beauty, inspiration, and connection in someone else’s unique artistic expression. It’s no longer about experiencing something that takes you out of yourself.”
“Rather, it’s about curving inwards and reinforcing your own tastes and preferences in as easy and convenient a manner as possible,” he added.
More on Suno: CEO of Song-Generating AI App Says People “Don’t Enjoy” Making Music With Instruments