How Suno's AI Is Disrupting The Music Industry w/ Mikey Shulman

25:44We just put on a dinner party playlist and we walk away and we're not thinking about what comes on. And yes, that artist makes, you know, a fraction of a penny because we were listening to it, but it becomes a really passive experience. I do think that it's a really interesting argument that I hear a lot with AI about the fact that it would force people to lean in a little bit more and to think a little bit more heavily about the music that they're making. And I guess if someone really is not super well versed in AI music, I think what I'm trying to get at when I say that is, you know, after you make a song or after you find a song that you love, being able to tweak it or remix it or customize it.

26:24So it'll be interesting to see. I think it's really exciting. You know, I think, though, back to what I said before, it can be that. It doesn't have to be that. Like, these are choices. Is it going to be the same streaming experience, but it happens to be AI-powered music? Or is it going to be something else that could never have existed before? That's a choice. Like, that's a choice for the people who built it and for the people who use it. And so that's what I mean by human agency of, like, and wanting to do things that have never existed before. And I think that there's something about platforms at true scale, like some of the big platforms today, that they tend to cater to the, let's say, lowest or most passive common denominator, which is the dinner party use case that you said.

27:06And I think that is also that that is a problem with the current business model. If there's one offering, it will cater to the lowest common denominator. And if there are multiple offerings, you have the ability to capture people where they want to be captured with music. And there are just so many more possibilities around that. Yeah. And you guys recently launched a feature that I find to be really interesting. It's kind of a vertical, almost like a TikTok-like, I don't know, would you call it social media? What's it called? Hooks? Hooks? Yeah. Where you encourage people to make videos along with their songs and then from there people can remix them?

27:42Exactly. So the intention is not to keep you scrolling forever. In fact, the intention is the opposite. The intention is to keep you scrolling until you hit something that you really like and then to go do something with it, to go remix it, to go listen to the whole song with one click, to find out a little bit more about that. Something that kind of doesn't exist today. Yeah. I imagine for you, given you just finished up this massive Series C funding round,$250 million raised, that you spend a lot of your time talking to both the music industry and to the investor worlds. And those are two very different groups of people.

28:20Yes, they are. So I'm wondering what are kind of the differences in how they view Suno? Tell me about kind of those different conversations that you have with those two different groups. You know, it's really interesting. I think just to cartoonize it, it's like it's like L.A. versus San Francisco, basically. Right. I mean, you know, that's like a little bit reductive. I think both see the other in some sort of extreme and non-nuanced and negative light. It's just they're both wrong, honestly. You know, and so it's like, you know, I think about this a lot. It's like the tech bros think that the music people just don't get technology and they're Luddites.

28:57And the music people think the tech bros are just here to disrupt everything and not care about art. And obviously the reality is something in between. I'll tell you, like for me, it's actually really eye opening living in either place and having a little bit of distance from both of them. Both cities have like so much day to day interruption, let's say, you know, on your favorite social media platform or whatever it is. And it's like incredibly nice to have some distance. So, yeah, I think, look, I, you know, I have a lot of opinions of my own. I'm sure plenty of them are wrong. But we try to talk about the company the way we like to talk about the company and not the way we think other people like to talk about the company.

29:37Ultimately, like if you're trying to pitch an investor and you're trying to tell them what you think they want to hear, I just don't think that's a good idea. You have to talk about it like the way you think about it and the way you want them to understand it, not the other way around. What do you think some skeptics get wrong about Suno? I think a lot of people think it is just type six words into a text box and out comes a crappy, mediocre song and not realizing that there's so much more to it. and you have to show them. And that's why we have writing camps, for example, right? You have to show them that there's a lot more to it.

30:10If you have three minutes, they're going to see that one very surface level interaction with music and you're not going to have enough time to pull them in. So you were on a podcast a while back and I've heard that this quote has haunted you. So I want to bring it up and see if you have anything to add to it now. You previously said, quote, I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of time they spend making music. this has made the rounds on social media quite a few times. So I'm wondering if you have anything you'd like to clarify or comment on that. Sure. One, I'll say it actually helps not to be on social media myself.

30:43There you go. I see it on social media then. I mean, yeah, I did say that. I really wish I had chosen different words there. You know, I think people who know me know that I obviously enjoy the hell out of making music and I play music every single day and not just on Tsuno, but instruments. you know the thing that I was trying to get at is there's a lot of tedium in producing music and yes the struggle is an important part of it but there is potentially a different struggle that you can have to hone your skill you know somebody asked me recently like are people still going to have to spend 10 ,000 hours learning their craft and the answer is 100 % what you do in those 10 ,000 hours may be very different in a few years from what it is today but of course you're going to have to do that if you want to be the best at whatever it is that you're trying to be like I said, I wish I had chosen slightly different words, but it's like people who know me know that that's clipped in a slightly interesting way.

31:34Another great quote that you had recently was that Suno is the Ozempic of music, which you meant to say was that essentially everyone's using it, but no one's talking about it. I'm wondering if you could kind of elaborate on that, because I've heard in my reporting around the music industry, there are a lot of professional songwriters and producers, some who are just not willing to be public, that are using Suno every day. What are you seeing on your side? How many people are using Suno right now in music? First of all, let me say, that is not my quote. Oh, was it not? It is not my quote. I'm not that smart.

32:11No, no, no. I love that quote. And I always say, a very good songwriter put it to me like that, who may not want to be public with that comment.

32:20Mikey Shulman:Okay, wait, to clarify, the songwriter I told you and then you repeated it and it was quoted to you. I am not clever enough to come up with that analogy. Okay. I think it's approximately right. Yeah. Yeah, look, we see this from, let's say, our VIP program. We have a VIP program, which is basically a lot of top professionals who use the product, who will help us develop features, who will be on the phone with if they have some problems with the platform. And that's a big list. There's names on it that you know. The amazing thing is one of the ways you can measure any product, but a consumer product is retention.

32:55It's like how often are people coming back to the product and you want that to be really high. And the retention of those DIPs is way higher than it is for anyone else. And it's because they use the product every day in their daily creative workflows. It's a lot of producers and songwriters. Yeah, I don't know the exact number offhand, but it's thousands. So who's your target audience? Is it the VIP program, your professionals or your aspiring professionals? Or is it my mother if she wants to make a novelty song? Like, what are we talking about? I think about this as it's obviously everyone. Everyone loves music.

33:30Why does it have to be that the same platform and tools that can be used as part of making the best music in the world can't also be really fun and engaging and have your mom discover how fun it is to make music? And, you know, we have like a microcosm of this with like people buy guitars, people buy guitars because they like to play guitar. They don't necessarily think they're going to become famous, but it's fun to play guitar. And maybe you have a favorite artist who has a signature guitar and you buy their signature guitar and you feel a little bit closer to that artist. And I think there's something amazing and aspirational about like I am using the same tools that the people who make my favorite music use.

34:11And not a lot of products have that, I think. And it's something that we try to lean into very hard. is it really possible to get everyone to make music? Do people really want to? Like, you know, would my mom actually sign up? And if she did, would she retain for very long? Or would she just make a song and leave? I mean, I think our usage is showing that a hell of a lot of people, way more than anybody expected, want this. And, you know, back to the investors versus artists, I actually think it's something that both got wrong. You know, there were a lot of skeptics at the beginning, like, why does everybody want to make music on the investment side?

34:44Like, why do I want to give you money? Like, your audience is going to be very small. And I think they ultimately got a lot of that wrong. And artists also saying, like, why is everyone going to want to do this? Build me, you know, the most powerful tools that are clones of the current tools that will be less fun and intuitive for everyone else to use. And that's also not what we ought to do. Okay, so now you're in your series, C. I'm wondering how your conversations changed from the beginning when you were initially trying to fundraise for Suno versus now. Because, I mean, now it feels like I could imagine there's a lot of investors hopping on the bandwagon.

35:16But before, it must have been hard to have those first conversations. Yes. Actually, at the very beginning, we raised money before we thought this was even possible. And so that was a very different conversation. Wait. And so how did you do that? Is it just because of the success of your previous startup that you just kind of. We had a working like product that was all around understanding of music and not making of music. And it's because we thought it would be too hard to actually make it, but it's easier to understand it, you can think. It's like everybody can describe music. Only some people can make music, something like that, like a cartoon you can have.

35:52Funny story. We raised our first round of capital right when there was a bank called Silicon Valley Bank that everybody in tech used. And right when that collapsed. And that was a difficult round to raise. But I think it was actually largely because of that. And most people didn't know where their money was. that's interesting yeah this episode is brought to you by trace minerals most people aren't getting the minerals they need to support optimal movement and your body doesn't make them on its own that's why trace mineral drops delivers over 70 essential minerals to help restore what your body is missing so if you're choosing just one supplement make it minerals trace minerals minerals keep you moving Save 20 % on traceminerals.com with code podcast.

36:37One sweet, melty bite of a Hershey's bar, and suddenly I'm right back sitting on the front porch with my grandmother on a slow summer afternoon. She doesn't say much, just breaks the bar in half and hands me a piece. I open my mouth to say whatever a nine-year-old wants to say, and she replies with a low, shh, listen. So we sat there, listening. That was the first time I learned that quiet can feel full. Hershey's, it's your happy place. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast.

37:18It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Yeah, in the music world, I was just kind of watching that from afar. But yeah, you're in the thick of it. We were in the thick of it. Wait, okay, so what was this previous thing before generating music? It was... Same technologies. Okay. It's ages ago, like before ChatGPT. Yeah, I just don't even think I...

37:52We weren't even alive, but there was still GPT before ChatGPT. And it was a tool that people could use to take paragraphs of text and try to understand them better. And it could be to, let's say, classify it. So you're going to go through all of the old billboard archives and you're going to say, like, is this article about an artist or a manager? And you'll build like a little model that can go through everything and figure out, is this article about an artist or a manager? Okay, so it's stuff like that. Yeah, just data. And like we were building, it's the same technology, but when it is less powerful, it is only able to understand stuff.

38:27And you think like we were building these things to understand, is this pop or is this rock? Like a little more complicated than that, of course. And because we thought it would be too hard. We thought it would take years before you could use the same technologies to actually make music. And we had the right breakthroughs and we were wrong. And that's like the best being wrong in the world. Well, just like set the scene for me. Like, I imagine it's like something out of a movie where like the the mad inventor creates the thing that he never thought he could create. And it comes to life. Like, when was that moment when you were like, oh, we can do this?

39:05I think I was sitting at my co-founder, Georg's, kitchen table next to him. And, you know, you're doing stuff and you've been working on the same thing for months and nothing works. And then you do one more thing and you're like, all right, maybe this will work. And then you click enter and vaguely passable sound comes out. And you're like, huh, OK, let's keep going. Okay, so it wasn't like some big climactic, oh my God, we just changed the music industry. No, actually the big climate, no, not at all. Like the first things that came out, you would be very generous to call music, you know? Organized noise, probably.

39:50Yeah, organized sounds. Okay, okay. And they were definitely sounds. Much more of an intentional decision was actually to say, we're still building the sense-making thing during the day. And we're using these things for fun at night to make music. What are we doing? Like, why are we not doing the thing that, like, you know, we can't put down? And to abandon one thing, like, that was a much more deliberate decision. That I remember much more faithfully. What was the business plan for the previous idea? Like, what were the use cases? lots of people have lots of music and audio and it is really gnarly to understand and make sense of and if you can build people tools to do it they will want to do it and at the time basically the only thing you could do was like very crappy transcription so here's like an audio file could be a song could be a podcast can I like pull the lyrics or the text up that was about it that was about all people could do.

40:53And we said, you can probably do more. And so we started to do more and we did. But it wasn't nearly as fun or impactful or it didn't feel nearly as right as what we wanted to do. Yeah. So when was like the first good song from Suno? Oh, that's such a subjective question. Yeah. But like, was there like a big moment where you're like, okay, this isn't, this isn't just like, this is fun and it's kind of noisy and whatever. This is real. Yeah, I think it was like, I think we called it version one. And it, it could sing and nobody else there were other companies and people out there who could make little loops or notes and nobody could make songs and there's something really special about a song a song is a story it's not background music right and the whole point is to make the best music and to make people able to create the things that are in their hearts and so like that was really really important and so that was v1 that could like really do that and again not good you know but like it but they were songs i remember the first time that i tried suno i i was just really struck by well the quality of the model but the fact that it it really did put together lyric generation voice generation and instrumental because i was reporting on the early stages of ai music and it was mostly just kind of crappy instrumentals from a bunch of different companies.

42:20There was no front runner. Some of them were better than others. Like it just kind of felt like it was more, it was, it was very novelty at the time. And I just didn't really know when it was going to get to the point where you just could do all of those different things and put them together within seconds. And yeah, Suna felt like the moment for me and it. Well, thank you for us too. You know, I think there's something about early product development where you have to make choices of what you're going to try to solve and not solve. And it was very obvious to us that we wanted to make lyrical music or like didn't want to make just instrumental music because that is like, that's what resonates with people.

42:59I think like there's something, I think like we evolved to resonate with the human voice sounds. Like that seemed very plausible to me. But I remember at the beginning, we didn't even have control over the genre. And so the models would basically infer the genre from the lyrics. And so we'd see people hacking their lyrics and, you know, putting like yo, yo, yo at the beginning because they just demanded that it come out as rap, you know, and it was like totally like trigger words. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And then we figured out how to control the genre. You know, it's like so you build it up step by step.

43:31That is really interesting. Man, I mean, already we have so much music out there. We have 100 ,000 songs, I think is still the stat. I think they just updated it. It might be a little bit more than that. But 100 ,000 songs uploaded to streaming services every day. Increasingly a share of that 100 ,000 daily are AI generated songs. I'm wondering how you view AI-generated songs on streaming platforms. Do you think that they should live just right alongside fully human-generated music? And then, of course, the gray area in between, which is most things, where you have AI-assisted stuff that has human parts, AI parts.

44:10I don't know, just in your dream world, how would AI-generated and AI-assisted music be treated in the commercial landscape? You know, in my dream world, there aren't two worlds of music. I think, again, that's just, it doesn't make sense because of all that gray area. It's also just not as good for the end user who doesn't want to be thinking, like, you know, if you rewind history back in the early days of streaming, like you needed to have multiple streaming platforms because not all the music was on one. I don't think we want to live in that world. Maybe we do, but I don't particularly want to live in that world and have to be thinking about what's on which platform.

44:47I also don't want to be the arbiter of where the line is in that gray area. Yeah. And there shouldn't be one entity that is the arbiter of that. That's a societal decision, and that's a decision that's going to change with the technology. And so I think that's something we have to just acknowledge from the get-go. And that's a weird mix of technology providers, music companies, artists, creative, government, all of these things. It's like, this is a messy problem to solve. I definitely don't want to be the one to make that decision. Yeah. And I mean, with the kind of consumption streaming service side of Suno, you're trying to innovate there and make it more interesting, as you were talking about earlier.

45:24Do you ever see a time when you start allowing just, you know, all distributors to upload any music that they'd like to, similar to what Spotify and Apple Music and Amazon Music allow users to do now? Like, could you see human-made music on Suno that people are playing with? There is human-made music. People are uploading their own stuff, and then they cover it, and they play with it. That is a huge songwriter use case. I take a really low-fidelity voice note recording from my phone, not me, but a songwriter who has more talent than I do, of piano and vocals or guitar and vocals, and you can use Suno to instantly basically reimagine that in any genre you want.

46:02Oh, I have tried that. And it's awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's awesome. And you can have that song and you thought it was like a punk rock song. And then it turns out it just worked way better as Afrobeats. And it's not a punk rock song anymore. Sorry. And that's awesome, right? Yeah. So there's already human-made music. But to answer your question, I think in the way that you are describing it, no. But in the fullness of time, for sure. And it's because we want to make these new experiences for consumers around music that are really engaging, that are really interactive. And somebody who wants, who has music that was made off platform, who wants to give the same interactive powers to the people who consume their music, is going to have to upload it to Zuno if they want to have the same experience for their fans.

46:48We're really focused on building things that couldn't exist up until today. A couple companies have started to form their opinions about how they will treat AI music. Bandcamp in particular just decided to ban fully AI generated and it's like substantially AI generated music, which they did not define. I asked them to, but they didn't have a clear answer for me. Additionally, iHeartRadio has their new guaranteed human program, which means on their stations across the country, they will not be programming any AI generated music. I'm wondering what you think of those stances. It seems like AI music right now is receiving quite a lot of backlash and it's being pushed off to the side.

47:33How do you feel about that decision? There's a lot of making policies, like you said, that end up not exactly defining where the line is. And, you know, probably some people in my position would hate on that. I think that's actually the right thing. Like, we don't know where the line is. And so we're going to have some ambiguous policy that lets us figure it out as we go. And I think that's fine. some of it is clearly for publicity reasons and that's also fine um i think at the end of the day everybody is trying to figure out what is the right mix of like what do our users want in the case of all of those platforms it's the people who pay them money or the people who are listening if the advertisers pay the money um and what creatives and artists want and um this is a big messy problem we're all gonna have to figure it out together and that's that's like fine i was looking through the suno reddit subreddit oh it was fun i i'd never been there before but uh someone told me to check it out so i was just like seeing what users say and what people are interested in on there and i i believe there there was a post that you guys have a new um product in beta called sounds is that correct yeah it's um like loops and samples essentially sort of okay okay yeah more um loops and samples has a very particular connotation it's not exactly that it's almost more like sound effects and um because the ability to add these little things into your music and to be able to prompt for them so like as um as a random example you know we were like working with an artist and um we were using suno studio and we wanted to um add like a little ear candy to a track and we're like what should it be and he was like um i don't know owls hooting and i was like there's no way we know how to do owls hooting and he's like well you have to figure out how to do owls hooting because that's what I want.

49:18So it's like stuff like that. Interesting. Okay. Because my question eventually was going to be, if you see yourself as like a competitor to like a splice type product or a beat stars or something like that. Not exactly. You know, the intention is to have a more coherent product, you know, where everything fits together nicely, because that's what delights people. Yeah. And I think for a long time, I think in part because of the majors lawsuit against Suno and UDO, those two companies were often put in the same sentence. UDO is now pivoting its service to be a very different type of platform than what Suno's going for.

49:53I'm wondering now, who do you feel is a competitor for Suno? You know, it's funny. That's a really common question that investors will ask us. Hmm. You know? Interesting. Maybe you actually secret - Maybe I should be an investor. You secretly live in Silicon Valley. We'll wrap this up. Yeah. I'm going to go to Silicon Valley now. I think about it much more from like - We have a vision of the future that we are trying to do. I don't know exactly what other companies have that vision. Exactly that vision, no one. And we're just going to keep going and building that. And, you know, it's, yes, there are big, scary companies with lots of dollars and lots of distribution that could do what we do, but they don't.

50:32And it's because they don't have, I think, the same view of what the future could and should be around music. And honestly, the thing that you said earlier of like having to convince investors that music is a big thing and can be much bigger than it is today is a feeling that lots of big tech companies have also. And so that's our advantage. And we're just going to go and build what we want to do. Yeah, I actually am really glad that you brought that up because I tell this to people all the time. It's like, it is really interesting that in the music category of AI, it's dominated by startups. It's not dominated by open AI.

51:05Like in pretty much every other facet, it's like Google or open AI that we're talking about as the front runners here. But in music, we're seeing startups. And my theory has always just been that a lot of people don't think music is worth it and they think it's too complicated and, you know, all that stuff. I'm curious, would you guys ever sell Suno to, you know, one of these AI giants like OpenAI or Google? I actually have a different explanation for it. Okay. Which is the giants have a few extreme advantages. Dollars and GPUs is one of them. And in the game of we are trying to make general intelligence, it turns out that is an extreme advantage.

51:50It is like throw more compute and more dollars at this problem. Obviously, there's a tremendous amount of very difficult research that goes with it. But you can't compete in that domain if you don't have that. And you keep making the models bigger. You keep making them more complicated. That's not music. Music is not a problem to solve. That like intelligence has right and wrong answers. Music is art. It is far messier. And I don't mean the business. I mean like music itself is far messier. That is why startups can compete there. Interesting. We will be outscaled by Google seven days of the week on spending money on computers.

52:26and that's just fine. Like that's not what's going to make music better. Yeah. But would you ever be interested in selling to a bigger company? Probably not. You know, I think like, again, very common investor question. So you're really doing this well. That's so funny. I think about it like this. Like there's a future we want to build. Is there a company that we think would meaningfully accelerate our ability to go do that? Then we could have that discussion. But until that company, you know, materializes, I don't really see any interest. And another thing that I find really interesting about Suno is your user base.

53:04Like, I didn't realize until I saw your investor pitch check, I noticed that Suno's primary user base are 25 to 34 year old men. And usually when I think of emerging technology, disruptive technology, I think that it's usually going to be a really young demographic that's adopting it in the highest numbers. I'm curious like what you make of your user demographics. Is that surprising to you that it's 25 to 34 year old men? Not super surprising. You know, it doesn't skew that male. And the second biggest demo, if you go back to the pitch deck, is 18 to 25. So it's not like it's not this isn't musically where it's, you know, 13 year olds.

53:43But these aren't boomers. I attribute this to there is, I think, general apprehension around AI everywhere, not just in music. from younger people. And I don't know exactly where this comes from. Is it like AI is going to turn us all into paperclips or something like that? But I think that is like my large explanation for why, let's say, the 13 to 18-year-olds aren't super into Suno. Again, I think just talking to people, I have found, is like the best way to explain it. And it's like, because I get so many questions from people in music who know that I do music, you know, and the questions are always like, yeah, like, is AI going to end the world?

54:23And, you know, I happen not to think it's going to, but like, certainly, Suno is not going to turn everybody into paperclips. Like, that's not the domain that we play in. And just like, why don't you try it? And everybody wants to try it. And most people like it when they try it. I think the thing that a lot of critics within the music industry would probably say is like, maybe Suno wouldn't end the world, but it might in my career, like if I'm a production music maker or some other type of kind of professional music making class type. What do you say to those who are talking to you, they're musicians, and they are just genuinely scared?

55:02I say I understand because, like I said before, technology and music do have a checkered past. It's not all bad, but it's not all good either. And like, I acknowledge that. And I usually encourage people to come to a camp or to try the product. And you actually see that somewhat counterintuitively. It's not all the artists using Suno. It's the people who are a little more behind the scenes. It's the songwriters and the producers who you might at first blush think those are the people whose jobs are going to get disrupted. And it's not. Those are the people who are using it the most. And so usually when people see that, if you're someone who makes production music, like you get it and you want to use it.

55:41And it doesn't have to be I make everything all the time on Suno. It is another tool in your arsenal. And I think that's like actually somewhat apparent from the product. We are not trying to build a full feature DAW digital audio workstation. Okay. I actually was going to ask if you see yourself also as maybe a competitor to DAWs. No. Okay. This is another tool in the arsenal. I think it is an incorrect sort of fixed pie mentality to think like if one tool is more ascendant, another tool is necessarily losing. We are not trying to take up 100 % of your screen real estate or the time that you spend making music.

56:14This is another thing. There's very particular workflows that are amazing in Suno that you can't do anywhere else. And there are things that, like, honestly, we don't want to build because they're done really well in other tools. And that's just fine. And going back to the pitch deck, it says that Suno has a million subscribers, up 300 % year over year. but approximately 25 % of subscribers remain after 30 days. I'm wondering if you could just talk about user retention, subscriber retention, and if you think that, you know, those numbers need to improve in the future and how you would improve them if you could.

56:52You may have misinterpreted that slide on the pitch deck. So bounded day 30 retention is a great metric for evaluating how much your users like your product. And that means I've used it one day. exactly 30 days later, how likely am I to have used it? And so it's actually an excess for subscribers. It's an excess of 25%. That means that's actually quite high. That's not any time in between. That's exactly on the 30th day, a quarter of them have used it again. And actually, if you look over the course of a week, let's say, you know, it'll be 75%. And so amongst our subscribers, this is the amazing thing that nobody believed was possible.

57:32Numbers like that are unheard of for tools because people don't use tools every day. People use tools weekly, not daily. Those look more like consumer social applications. And that is the big leap here. It's because it's fun. So we were bragging when we said that. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. So that is interesting, though. So, I mean, do you see yourself kind of being put into the category of, yeah, more of like a pastime, like a social media service? I don't know. I don't know. like when people are scrolling do you imagine them making music instead someday yes I don't know tell me about with your permission I'll steal that line from you and use your name behind it it's a pastime that's exactly what we see and I I don't know I think this is like fairly non-consensus I think we're past peak scrolling I think people want to do something else yeah I do think well TikTok's algorithm has been weird in the past few days we'll see if they figure something is going on with something more generally oh yeah they are going under new leadership which is going to make some big changes to the platform but i'm curious to see actually if that leads to any shake up in the social media space it's been such a dominant platform for so long but there are other scrolling platforms that have no um shakeups right now i just think more generally when we look back at today um uh in five years we will realize that we are just past peak scrolling people want something else.

58:57I mean, I hope so. I hope so, too. That would be great because I'm too addicted to it right now, personally. Well, actually, you're not even on social media. No, I have Twitter. I don't have it on my phone. I don't have Instagram. I don't have Facebook. Okay, you're calling it Twitter. So are you like a longtime user? Oh, no, I don't have X. No, I got it posted becoming X. Just culturally, it's Twitter in my head. Yeah, same. I used to love Twitter, but now it's kind of all over the place. So I go on and I'm like, okay, interesting. I'm getting all sorts of things hitting me on the timeline. I'm glad to not know that.

59:33Yeah. Yeah. It seems like you guys are interested in providing all types of things from music creation to also places where you can consume that music that you make or your friends' music that you make. You also have a little bit of a social media-like service. I mean, do you guys have any interest in becoming a record label at some point? No, but I think about us as trying to build the music super app. And that is more of a tech word. And in tech, people more or less associate that with like, let me take a bunch of things and put them together. And there are small synergies between these things.

1:00:12And so combining them is really good. And so you might take your social media platform and add messaging to it and add payments to it and et cetera, et cetera. And that's not how I think about the super app we want to build. we want to build the best version of every part of music that could possibly exist and so that is like the creation thing that was a big hole most people couldn't create music and so we went and we made that and the best consumption experience i think is not something that exists today i don't know exactly what it is but it's something that is more engaging than the things that exist today and so we we want to go and make that i think of a record label is just separate from that it is an important like i said before people think we think the record labels are going away that's obviously not true um they are way too culturally important um it's just it's it's not the thing that is ultimately end user facing um that uh we have opinions on how to make it way way better you know just as a as a thought experiment something we we say a lot is like it's grammy's week so there's a weird question to ask but whatever you're going to do tonight like sometimes you're going to go home and you're going to watch Natch Looks.

1:01:18Why are you not going to do music? And you're not everybody. You're music reporters. But the average person. What is the music that's so good you want to binge watch it at night? Well, the thing about music that's different from film and TV is it's audio and visual. You're totally locked in when you're watching something. Unless you've got your second screen out, which is a problem. You know, back in the 90s people watched a lot of music videos. Yeah, that's true. And there's a difference between an audiovisual music experience that is really music forward, like a music video, and one that it has background music.

1:01:53And why aren't people making more music forward things that are so good? I think K-pop theme in Hunters is like moving in this direction a little bit. But I think more things like that should exist. Do you foresee an AI or an AI-assisted artist making it onto the Hot 100 this year, like our main chart? I mean, I hate to answer the question with a question, but what is AI assisted in this case? Because I'm sure that there's already AI assisted music on the Hot 100. You think so? Oh, yeah. Okay. Like, who do you think it would be from? Just from top producers who just used it in the studio while they were working with an artist?

1:02:31In little bits and pieces, right? And it'll be very subtle. It'll be the artifacted electric piano in the pre-chorus. Just that. Four bars. Interesting. Do you have like a good AI detector tool? Like, can you tell when someone does something like that? Really hard. When it's like a tiny little bit inside it, like you have to know where to look. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because, well, I've tried to check a lot of songs because I never want to say something used AI if it didn't or vice versa. And it's really hard when it gets down to those little granular moments. There was like a rumor going around about like the Playboy Cardi album having a little bit of AI on one of the vocals.

1:03:12And I was never able to determine whether or not that was true because it's just that's like one one tiny bit. So it's going to be interesting to see also how AI detection changes and improves over time. It's really dependent with how forward people are in like there's one world in which we don't need it to be detected because people are just. Yeah, I used a little bit of AI in that vocal. Yeah. So do you think there is going to come a point pretty soon where people just do not care if it's AI or not? Pretty soon? No. I think pretty soon a lot of people will not care because it was AI assisted, right?

1:03:50It wasn't, you know, six words into a text box and out popped a song, right? It was an artist that you loved. And yeah, like there was some AI in it and you love the song and you're not going to care. yeah yeah okay i have lots more questions but we've been talking for an hour so i will start to wrap this up here with our fun game where uh we're actually new and improved game for season two this is episode one of season two i'm the first one oh yeah okay let's do it yeah you're the first one so we're now calling it what would you cube and basically i'm gonna ask you three prompts and for those prompts you just pick a song that you feel like fits that can i ask you a question first yeah all these prompts i'm i'm calling them prompts like question questions yeah i know but it's like a very ai word maybe i've just been reporting on ai too much okay that's probably true and that would that would be that would be a largely soon as well i i actually a lot to talk about if you spent the day inside the company you would not hear that word really yeah we don't use that word i feel like that's um that's a silicon valley word huh i do feel these are prompts though these are prompts in like the the the 10 years ago version of prompts maybe okay Okay.

1:05:00Well then maybe I'm just behind. That could be it too. Either I'm super Silicon Valley and I need to move there and become an investor or I'm just 10 years behind. I support both of those. Okay. Great. Two great outcomes. Okay. What would you cue to take you back to your childhood? So a song. A song. Yeah. A song to take you back to your childhood. We went to a lot of musicals and my parents made us listen to the songs like incessantly before they would take us to probably the opening to Les Mis. Ooh, okay. I did not expect that. Okay, what would you cue to represent your favorite era of music?

1:05:34That's like the era that I most like to listen to? Yeah, like a decade, a time period, a scene. Abby wrote. Okay. The whole album. Whole album. The whole album. You can't narrow it down? No, it's hard to. Okay. It's hard to. That's fine. My Spotify age is 73. I will add it myself. Oh, mine is 89. I don't know too many people who are older than I am yeah no I'm like what did I listen to and I think I figured it out it's Chet Baker oh okay so they were just like yeah she's old she's old but it's good to cook too so speaking of passive listening I grew up music but I am listening to it and singing along so maybe it is active it's great yeah it's it's great okay what would you cue to remember the best concert you ever went to the best concert I ever went to was a fish show at a very small venue in Massachusetts.

1:06:25But I remember we listened to Oasis, definitely, maybe, on the way home. And so I would remember it by putting on that album. That's great. That's great. Are you a jam band guy? Yeah, big jam band guy. I did not know that. Okay. Well, Mikey Shulman, thank you so much for coming to On The Record. I appreciate your time. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company. No matter how you do game day, on the couch, in the crowd, or manning the snack table, athletic brewing fits right in. With a full lineup of non-alcoholic beer styles, you can enjoy bold flavors all game long. No hangovers, no buzz, no subbing out for water in the second half.

1:07:01Stock the fridge for tip-off with a variety of non-alcoholic craft styles available at your local grocery store or online at athleticbrewing.com. Your beer, fit for all times. Thought sweetgreen was just salads? Think again. There's a new way to do sweetgreen. Wrapped and ready, These handheld wraps pack bold flavor and 40-plus grams of protein into something hearty, satisfying, and built for life on the go. From craveable sauces to satisfying textures, they're designed to keep you going without slowing you down. So put that fork down. Try the new wraps today in app or at order.sweetgreen.com.

1:07:39Available at participating locations only.

1:07:42Mikey Shulman:Thanks again to Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno, for joining me on the show today. and thanks to you for listening to the first episode of On the Record Season 2. If you like today's show, give us a follow on Instagram at BillboardOnTheRecord where you can find new clips of the show every single week. We'd also appreciate it if you could rate our show on your favorite podcast platform because all of these things help On the Record grow bigger and better than ever. Again, I'm your host Kristen Robinson and tune in next week for another peek behind the curtain of the music business. We'll come to you live from South by Southwest.

1:08:12Mikey Shulman:We'll see you then.

1:08:23Thank you.