Suno’s Grand Plan for the Future of Music

0:00Dan Runcie: Where today we're talking all about AI, music, and the future of entertainment. Suno is led by CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman, and the company is one of the fastest growing consumer products out there right now. Not just in music or media and entertainment, and not just in AI, period. On the flip side, however, Suno has been at the center of a lot of the frustration and controversy surrounding AI music and its role in music and in the industry overall. The company has been sued several times by some of the biggest and smaller rights holders in the space for infringing on their copyright. There's a lot of legal dynamics that have happened over the past few years.

0:42Dan Runcie: Suno has shared its defense over time, and we're going to get into all of that and more with Mikey on the show. I hope you enjoyed as much as we did. Here's my conversation with Mikey Shulman. Imagine you're running a major record label. Let's say you're Elliott Grange. You run Atlantic Music Group. You have five successful artists on your roster. Bruno Mars, Don Tolliver, Alex Warren, Pink Pantherist, and Stella Lefty. All at different stages of their careers, but with a limited marketing budget, where do you invest your dollars? I put this same exact question to Flo, and I asked it to analyze each of these artists' streams, radio, playlist, audience demographics, and social performance.

1:28Dan Runcie: And let's go one by one here. It's really fascinating. Take Bruno Mars. His monthly listeners on Spotify are actually declining, but his followers are increasing. A lot of this is what they call post-release normalization. He released an album earlier in 2026 called The Romantic, so it's more a sign of that, not necessarily weakness, but Flo suggested to focus investment for Bruno on Latin America and Southeast Asia. That's where his audience is already concentrated. Let's look at Don Tolliver. He has the strongest streaming acceleration of the group, but 91 % of his radio airplay is currently in the US.

2:06Dan Runcie: There could be an opportunity to expand that internationally. Let's look at Pink Pantheris. She has exceptional engagement economics, but the challenge isn't connecting with fans, it's reaching more of them. She could be a strong candidate for incremental marketing span. In Stella Lefty, she's breaking out. But 70 % of her playlist reach comes from editorial. Nearly 95 % of her radio play comes from her one-hit song. That's momentum, but there's also a huge concentration risk. The priority is converting some of that attention into lasting fandom. And that breakdown right there for those five artists, that really impressed me.

2:46Dan Runcie: And that's what Chartmetrics Flow can do. It doesn't just tell you who's winning. It doesn't just tell you their streams or their followers. It helps you identify where the next dollar can make the biggest difference. And that's the power of turning music data into strategic intelligence. If you want to check out Flow for your own roster and see what insights you can pull yourself, then click the link in our show notes. All Trapital listeners can use our promo code before you sign up for Flow. And please let us know what it comes up with. All right. Welcome to Trapital. We are here with the CEO of Suno, Mikey Shulman.

3:19Dan Runcie: Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thrilled to be here. One of the things that I've picked up on, especially the past year, when you've described Suno and your vision, you've talked about creative entertainment. And This feels like a term that you've been using more recently. I'd be curious to hear, as you've been building this product for the past few years, how has the vision shifted and what does that look like in terms of creative entertainment and what you are building towards? Yeah. Just to take a step back, creative entertainment is a word that we've been using inside of the company for a while and kind of externalizing only a little more recently.

3:56So I think about it like this, that the way people entertain themselves is good and not great. We are just buried in content. And so everybody has had the experience of scrolling something while something is streaming in the background, or it's just a barrage of stuff for us to consume. And this is a product of the technologies that existed 10 years ago. So that's really good mobile bandwidth and really good recommendation algorithms. And when we think about the new technology of today, which is generative AI, what we can do is not only make more content faster, cheaper, whatever. Actually, what we are able to do is change the way the end user actually interacts with content.

4:41And that is to say, not only does the end user get served content just to consume, actually billions of people have the opportunity to be creative. And I know from myself, from talking to people, not only is everybody creative, everybody enjoys being creative. And so this will be the paradigm, not only in music, we are a music company, but not only in music, this will be a paradigm, I think, in many forms of entertainment of letting people enjoy themselves creatively. And you just feel better after you create for 30 minutes versus scroll or consume for 30 minutes. And that is kind of the North Star that we are driving at.

5:17It is still very early. Creative entertainment is a little corner of the universe today, but I think in a decade, it will be the primary paradigm for consumer entertainment.

5:26Dan Runcie: And I'm curious when people hear that, whether it's investors or the broader public, and you, to use your words, you say billions of people creating music. How do you differentiate between what might be a North Star in terms of a goal versus, oh no, like we actually see that of the 8 billion people on this world, a large portion of them billions will be creating music. You know, I almost think one of the most important parts of my job is to be able to hold two thoughts in my head at the same time, which is today, it may be only millions of people. And that's exciting and new. And for most of those people, they've never made music before.

6:03And so it's an entirely new experience and they love it. And that also, we have to keep that North Star of, that is the primary paradigm for consumer entertainment in the future so that we know where to build. Otherwise, we kind of will get stuck in some plateau of millions of people or tens of millions of people. From a business model perspective, the business model has to be downstream from what the product experience is. And it's so early in creative entertainment that I wish I could tell you I know exactly what the business model is going to be in 10 years, but I don't. And so the North Star here is delight billions of people, build those products.

6:41A lot of that is an empirical science of actually figuring out what resonates both with that professional audience and with that mass consumer audience. And then from there, actually, the business model should be more obvious.

6:51Dan Runcie: And I've heard you talk about the business model itself, speaking about generative AI overall and questioning whether or not the SaaS traditional vestige that's been here for a decade plus makes the most sense, not just for Suno, but for generative AI overall. And of course, right now you do have the SaaS business model itself, but I heard you compare to gaming or look at gaming's business model. Is that a bit of the future of where you see this going? I think that's very likely that today we have kind of SaaS pricing and it makes sense on the level of that's kind of the closest existing business model to our product, even if it's not appropriate, it's a good thing to try.

7:31But I think about today, the digital musical experiences that are out there, you have SaaS type pricing and maybe freemium, but there's really only one skew or one product in digital music today, which is streaming. And that means that there's one business model, one product, it's very simple, but it really caters to the lowest common denominator. And when we look at gaming for inspiration there, there's so many different kinds of games. There are long games, there's short games, There are multiplayer games. There are social games, games that you play for hours in your basement. And then there's Wordle that gets played by 100 million people every day.

8:05And so there are different products. And as a result, there are different business models. And so while more complicated, what that does, it actually lets you meet the users where they want to be met. And I think the really exciting thing about generative AI and where we find ourselves with technology and music today is that in the future, there are going to be different products for different types of users for different levels of musical intent. And that is really exciting because you actually give people exactly what they want instead of catering to the lowest common denominator. That will come with the downside of more complicated business models, many of which are not known today.

8:42But like, obviously, that's really exciting. Like, that's what gets us out of bed in the morning.

8:46Dan Runcie: Another interesting thing we've seen in gaming is the ability for economies to be created within the game itself. I've thought about Roblox. I called build, where you have developers in the game that are creating their own exchanges there, and then people can build off of that. And I've heard you in a few different interviews and conversations allude to what that could look like, whether it is having different users themselves have the ability to monetize or things like that. There is so much here that is exciting. One of the things we're really looking forward to in the products that we're building actually with our industry partners is the ability for users to play with the music of their favorite artists with opt-ins, of course.

9:29And the reason that's so cool is you're really pulling the highest engaged music users into the creation experience. You're letting them do things they have never been able to do before. One riff on that that is maybe close to the Roblox example is this is almost like fan fiction of I get to really feel like I am co-creating with my favorite artist in a way that is a derivative somehow of my favorite music and that resonates culturally differently from the original, but is actually amplifying it in a very special way. If you read a lot of music press or earnings calls, there's a lot of talk of superfans, of how do we reach the highest music intent, most engaged users so that they can do more than just, let's say, digital streaming and going to concerts.

10:15And when I think about superfans, it's kind of obvious that we want to reach people every day, wherever they are, digitally. And so that means it's probably mobile. And in my mind, the highest form of that would be through music. It wouldn't be an AMA. It wouldn't necessarily be early access to merch. It should be like letting people make music. Like that is the way we elevate the place that music has in culture. And so these are products that we are incredibly excited to be building.

10:42Dan Runcie: And when I talk to people in the space, my take is that they see your partnership, for example, with Warner Music Group as something that can lead to that. But of course, it's not just them having the partnership. If there are particular artists that they're working with, especially some of the household names that they may have, whether it's your Bruno Mars or Coldplay, having the buy-in from them to be able to have their music be part of this as well. So I'm curious for you, of course, the partnership with the label is one thing, but how do you look at the partnerships with those individual artists, especially since so much of that super fan economy is dependent on the underlying talent?

11:20Absolutely. I think about this in two ways. First is I wouldn't minimize the partnership with the label itself. And that is because the record labels are some of the most culturally important institutions in the world. You know, music has a very special place in culture and the labels are curators of and growers of stars. And it's because they really understand music and culture. And so I wouldn't be so fast to discount that. On the other hand, yes, we are excited to work with artists. We have always been excited to work with artists. And these products are, of course, on an opt-in basis where nobody's going to be remixing the work of an artist if that artist doesn't want it to happen exactly in the way that that artist does.

12:00And so the thing that's very special there, though, is that it's not an all or nothing thing. It can be some artists. It can be some of their catalog. It could be only old stuff. It could be only new stuff. It can be very restricted. There's only certain things you can do. It can be very broad. You can really let people go wild. For the first time in a long time, product innovation for the end user with digital music, the way the music economy will grow, not 5 % or 10 % or 15 % a year, but 50 % a year, is by innovating enough that the user actually is excited to pay more for a new offering. When I think about this, what we want to do is get out of this paradigm where we are forever trying to just hike prices for digital music subscriptions, find new ways of bundling or unbundling things together.

12:45And while that's good and fine, the way we're going to see the most growth is actually by figuring out what does the user want to do, what is the user excited to do, excited to pay more for, and then build that for them.

12:56Dan Runcie: I'd seen in a recent interview with Bloomberg that Robert Kinsel had shared some comments, particularly talking about Suno. And he had said that on a per-user basis that your platform actually generated the highest percentage of revenue per user than any other platform. And I feel like this speaks to what you're saying in terms of that incremental value add. I think a couple of things here. One is I think there's a common misconception that Suno is only a gimmick or a party trick and not realizing that there's so much more there and that our users are really engaged and really excited about the offering.

13:35The other is if you actually just take a step back and think who are the people who are today where the technology is today? Who are the people who are excited to come to a platform and be creative for the fun of being creative in music? It is the most engaged, most high musical intent people in the world. And so from that lens, I don't think it's that surprising that we have kind of industry best ARPU. And I think, again, there's a lot of room to continue from there. It's still actually very early days in that respect. It may not be obvious to the whole world outside of the company, inside of the company.

14:11It is kind of obvious because we realize we do have the most musically inclined audience out there.

14:16Dan Runcie: We're talking about Warner itself. Your relationship with Robert Kinsel and just more broadly with Warner Music Group has evolved over time. And initially, they were one of the companies that had a lawsuit against Suno. You had reached out to him. And then after a few dinners and a few meetings and others, you eventually got to the point of, okay, let's have a partnership. And then that led to, of course, September of this year, you have a V6 model that includes Warner as one of the companies with their licensed music as part of it. I'd be curious to hear the timeframe of you reaching out to Robert to start that relationship and then, okay, we have a partnership in place.

14:59Dan Runcie: How long was that time period? Just to take a step back, I think many, if not most, if not all problems are kind of human problems. And so I think it was something like 18 months. I don't remember exactly. And probably the first 12 didn't talk specifics about whatever disagreements we had or whatever things we might build together. It was a lot of just realizing that we have a lot of shared understanding of the current state of the world. and most importantly, a lot of shared understanding and common ground about what the future of the world should be, particularly for music and technology. And until you reach that point, you can't start to get into the nitty-gritty of details of a partnership if you don't have alignment on what is the purpose of the partnership.

15:51And I think it took a long time, like probably 12 months, for us to really realize that we are really quite aligned on these principles. And from there, everything actually falls into place pretty quickly. But that is a human problem. It's a human understanding problem. And so, yeah, we're really excited about that partnership. And we're most excited about the things that could not otherwise happen for either party without us partnering.

16:17Dan Runcie: Did you similarly reach out to Rob Stringer from Sony Music or Lucy and Grange from Universal? There's active litigation there. And so it's like unwise for me to talk about things or conversations that may or may not be happening or have happened. You know, what I will say is that our posture here has actually always been the same. We have always been excited to work with the industry. We were working very closely with some of the best creatives before those three litigants knocked on our door. And we continue to work with the best people in the industry after. And so from that perspective, it's like actually not the most important thing to ask.

16:56Dan Runcie: One of the things that I've heard from other companies that work in AI, this was actually from Richard Karras. He's the VP and GM of media and entertainment at NVIDIA. He said specifically that he works in and partners with some of these same companies as well. And he says that the conversations that he has behind closed doors can be very different from what the press may see or what gets communicated externally. And his distinction is that what gets communicated externally is often more so this like strong stance that needs to be set for shareholders or things like that. But when you actually have these conversations, even with companies that may seem like they are at odds, you can have more of that human connection.

17:39Dan Runcie: Do you feel like that is the case with a Universal or a Sony? That resonates very strongly. And I think it's not just record labels and it's not just whether a company is public or not for its shareholders. I think about this even the broader creative community, how there are a lot of people who – great creatives who use Suno almost every day who don't necessarily want to be public about it. And again, it is the same thing of, you know, the difference between a public stance and what you say behind closed doors being different. That's not special to music. That's like everyday life. I don't ever fault people for that.

18:16Our posture here is never to pressure anybody into saying in public what they say behind closed doors. And so the way I think about this though is in the fullness of time, if we continue to delight our users, whether that is the best of the best creatives or regular people who just enjoy being creative who have a day job, if we continue to delight all of those people, all of these things end up working themselves out in the long run. The flip side is if you had everyone just like, you know, being really public about supporting us, but nobody really liked our product, that is not a preferable situation by any means.

18:54You know, then we find ourselves in a place where we, you know, we kind of have vaporware. And that's obviously not good.

19:00Dan Runcie: Do you feel like from a product roadmap perspective that there's tension there in terms of, okay, what is the North Star for the company? Is it maximizing the growth and the revenue potential that we can have with these core music users who may be the strongest users in terms of what they can generate for the business as opposed to really increasing the consumer product and just the overall daily monthly active users for Zuno? I feel some tension, but it's not that. Like, of course, we care about revenue and we should. And we want to build things that are engaging enough, creative enough that people are excited to pay for it.

19:37Right. And so and, you know, I think we are kind of the only breakout consumer entertainment company right now doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. But I think the tension that is maybe more obvious is these two audiences. Yes, there's a lot in between and we develop a lot in between. But knowing exactly how much effort to put in each camp is a sliding, a moving target of some kind. And so there's certainly some tension there. The North Star of the company, though, is very obvious. It is creative entertainment. Both the consumer experience and the professional experience are creative entertainment.

20:08Falling in love with the new, powerful, engaging ways of making music, whether it is for fun or for your job, why can't it be engaging and fun and creative? I don't see tension at the level of the North Star. There's maybe tension one level lower.

20:20Dan Runcie: I could see that if we're thinking about the future of your business and how big of an emphasis V6 was considering the partners that you had on board for this model or even a future where some of those artists that maybe love their product but don't want to come out publicly, if they in the future say, hey, not only do I want to come out publicly, I would want you to allow my voice to be remixed or allow my music to be remixed in some way. those are things that could be beneficial for your business. So I can imagine that that is somewhere that you would likely want to go. Absolutely. Being able to build those experiences with our artists for their fans, that is stuff that could never have happened before.

21:05And like I said earlier, the thing that gets us out of bed in the morning is not doing the old thing with the new technology. It's doing things that weren't possible until literally today. And so like the other way to think about that is as we get to currently lower musical intent audiences, a great way to get people to start being creative is with the music that they know and love. You know, a huge kind of onboarding problem for us is I give the average person our app and I say, we're going to make some music. And they say, I don't make music. I'm not creative. And we try to guide people through the experience of making that first song and having that magical moment.

21:45But how much easier does that get when it's with your favorite artist? And so, yeah, I think this can be very, very big.

21:52Dan Runcie: And that's for you, I assume, why it's beneficial in an ideal world to have partnerships with most of the major rights holders so that if there is a user that wants to partner with XYZ artists, they don't have to see, oh, well, Suno has a partnership with this major record label group, but they don't have one with that one. So, oh, we can leverage this artist's music, but not that artist's music. Your ideal world would be, okay, we're partnered with everyone so that everyone that's part of that TAM has someone that they could use as a starting point. We are really excited to partner with everyone who wants to partner with us.

22:27realizing that we are very used to today with streaming, just assuming that every single piece of music we could ever think of is on the streaming service of our choice. That may or may not be the case in the future. When people ask, though, like, oh, is that going to lead to fragmentation of platforms? We were thinking, like, is this artist on this platform? Is this artist on that platform? The more interesting and I think exciting thing here is that there will be product differentiation between platforms. And so it's not only which piece of content is on what platform, it is what capabilities are on which platform.

23:02On this platform, I can listen. Maybe on this platform, I can make covers. Maybe on this platform, I have a much deeper super fan experience. And so the reason that's exciting is, like I said before, we can have product differentiation that meets users where they want to be met. Most interesting for the music industry is in the future, we will have people subscribing to multiple music services. And that's not really a thing today. the average person doesn't subscribe to two DSPs for music. And it's because the products are similar enough that they don't have to and the content is on all of them.

23:34But if you think about video or gaming, people subscribe to multiple ones because they are differentiated in some way. And so when we think about big growth areas for the music industry writ large, not only Suno, product differentiation is a really obvious one. And again, generative AI, because you let users play with the music, the way in which you let them play with it can be different platform to platform. And so this is the type of thing that can lead to not the 5 % or 10 % growth a year, but actually the 50 % growth a year when you think about just adding multiple subscriptions per user.

24:11Dan Runcie: Let's take a break for our Chartmetric Stat of the Week, which is all about AI. The stat is 670. That is the Chartmetric Artist Rank for Tiago Navarro Music. That is one of the artists that has the biggest followings on Spotify that currently has that AI persona tag. And at 670, that is ahead of other artists like Sting, Johnny Cash, Busta Rhymes, and Ice Spice. This rank includes all of the artists who are currently on streaming, both active and inactive, so 670 is pretty high up there. This artist currently has over 2.5 million Spotify monthly listeners as of this recording. has accumulated over 65 million streams on Spotify, and currently generates over 524 ,000 streams daily on the platform.

25:00Dan Runcie: This just gives you an idea of how popular some of these artists are. This artist, Tiago Navarro, specifically does reggaeton and Latino music. Let's get back to the episode. Do you think that you can reach your North Star without partnerships with Universal or Sony? I think that the things that we want to build get better the more partners we have, the more culturally important institutions we have building with us. But the interesting thing is actually like early streaming, you don't need every single piece of content on your platform on day one to make it interesting. And so we will keep building.

25:41We will keep learning. I think that the vision that we have of having people really play with music gets a lot bigger if you can play with the music of your favorite artist. But I think about the flip side of making music by yourself without your favorite artist is a lot bigger than anyone realized. Nobody realized that we could have hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue of just having fun making music. And so I'm not sure that any single rights holder is necessary.

26:09Dan Runcie: Interesting. So that North Star could still be attained without having everyone on board. Of having billions of people entertain themselves creatively? Yes, but it won't be as big as if we have the right partners. I don't think of our North Star in terms of a size, in terms of a revenue goal or a user scale. It's very hard to quantify, you know, how big is it within this scenario or that scenario. And that's mostly because nobody realized how big this can be in the first place without even thinking about that. And so that's the North Star. It's like people will entertain themselves creatively.

26:44I actually don't think any other company has that North Star.

26:46Dan Runcie: And I know it's still early, but V6 does seem like an incremental path towards what we're talking about here. Do you feel like the response that you've seen, whether it's from the users, whether they're more on the consumer side or more of those power users, have validated that? Like, yes, the consumer experience has been better, and it's because of these partnerships that we've done that have changed the model. So yeah, v6 is done in concert with our industry partners. And so that is really exciting to be able to chart forward a path for the future. Both the data that we see from the platform usage and also kind of the qualitative data of talking to all of our users, both the professionals and the consumers.

27:30People really like v6. So we are like super excited about it. It's an interesting thing when we launch models. We actually know in advance how much one model is preferred to the last one because we can do these tests in real life before we launch it. We see about the same amount of negative reaction or users who don't like V6 compared to V5.5 as we did V5.5 to V5. And so I think from that perspective, we are like super excited. Now we have the best model ever, the best free model ever, the most creative model ever. And now we have a platform on which we can build all of the stuff that we want to build with our partners on top of it.

28:09Dan Runcie: And I'm curious for you. So you had this model and then you had the release of it. Your partners are on board. And then within days, you get lawsuits about this model and what it was trained on based on not just what it was directly trained on, but everything that was based on this point. in. I know you've dealt with your lawsuits before, but more from like a human perspective and more the CEO of this company, like when you release something like that and then you see that hit your desk, do you like have an idea it's coming or are you just like another one? Like what is your take when you are running the company and you see, oh, here's another lawsuit?

28:45Look, I think I would obviously prefer these things not happen. But the thing that we're focused on, again, is delighting our users. And from that perspective, like that is the thing that does and should occupy most of my time. I think if we zoom out, these to me are like hurdles in the goal that we ultimately want to achieve, but they're hurdles, they're not insurmountable. I don't want to get into the particulars of those lawsuits. It's like not a good idea because it's active litigation. I would give you a different perspective on this though. I think in general, not just in music, there is a tremendous amount of focus on training.

29:23And I think actually there is too much focus on training. And what we should be focused on is the products that we're going to build on top of these models. Training is like the first step. And in the future, what we should be focusing on is like, how do we monetize at the end user level? How do we monetize at the product level? Like, what are we actually building instead of like zooming all the way back? What are the ingredients that went into it? And I think this isn't only true in music, but just like a tidbit here is from V2 to V5.5 or V5, we had the same training data. And if you go back and you listen to V2 songs, they're not amazing, if I'm being honest.

30:05They were still best in class at the time. But there was so much progress that happened there for largely the same training data. And that is just like a lot of hard-won knowledge about what is it that our users like? How do we learn to guide models in the right way to do what our users want to do? And so, again, I think this isn't only a training question and there's just way too much focus on training. If we focused even 10 % of the effort that we do on training on the end user experience, what do our users want to have? What are the products that we're going to build? How are we going to monetize the products?

30:37I think the industry would just be bigger.

30:38Dan Runcie: So you think the industry is focusing too much on training? I think the music industry, video, the technology industry, text, like actually everybody is focused too much on training. But I'm sure you could understand why they're interested in training if it's their underlying music or their underlying copyright that's being trained on and why that's top of mind for them. Absolutely, I understand it. I'm just giving my opinion that I think if we focused a little more attention on the end users and a little less attention on the first step in that chain, that we would actually all be in a better place.

31:13Dan Runcie: And I think with that, it's probably a good time to talk a bit about your argument that you've had for why you feel like what Suno has done has been fair, particularly relying on the fair use argument of using the copywritten data or the copyright material that's there. Why do you still feel that today that fair use is the argument and the rationale that makes the most sense for Suno? Look, I have to speak only at a very high level about these things because there's active litigation. But I would just, you know, at that very high level, if we think about domains outside of music, fair use has been affirmed to be a valid concept and unclear why we would think differently about music.

31:58And again, I just, I think more about what are we delivering to our users and less about that day to day, because ultimately what we are delivering to our users is the thing where monetization happens, where industry growth happens. And it is a much better use of my time to think about that.

32:18Dan Runcie: I hear what you're saying. And I think even within like fair use, so there is like nuance there, right? In terms of like how something was obtained, whether it was scraped or whether the material was purchased. So even with that, there are some valid questions there that people do understandably have about how material is accessed. Because even with that, we've seen differences where rulings have said, okay, well, if you purchase the material, whether it was buying a book or getting a digital version, that is different than capturing the streaming data or capturing online access to information.

32:51Dan Runcie: So there are some important distinctions there. So you're talking about something that is a little bit adjacent to fair use right now, but I would point you to what we've talked about publicly. We don't go through paywalls. We don't go through CAPTCHAs. We've obtained data on the public internet. This is very similar to how most AI companies do it. And so I understand why people may feel differently about it. But again, the way we have approached this, I think, is actually harmonious with that. And do you feel that Suno can still win in the marketplace if, for instance, there was a future ruling and fair use was not granted or fair use was not the ruling that was given to Suno in a potential lawsuit?

33:36Yeah, that's not like a hypothetical that we think about a lot again. But like when you talk about the marketplace, we're talking about exactly where our focus should be, which is like, what do our users want? How do we actually get people to pay for music? And I think we've shown beyond, well beyond what anybody would have anticipated a couple years ago, that a lot of people want to pay a lot of money for differentiated music products. And so if we're going to talk about winning the market, I think that is the place that we should be thinking about. That is the place we should be spending most of our time.

34:07Dan Runcie: Switching gears a bit, I want to talk about AI music and its role in fraudulent schemes. that bad actors may be doing, particularly to siphon money from the streaming royalty pool. And you all have added in a few different safeguards, whether it's downloading tags or watermarks and things like that. I know it's still early, but I'd be curious to know if you've seen any effectiveness there in the end goal of preventing this type of music. A couple of things to say here. You know, first is there is a sleight of hand, I think, that sometimes happens of equating streaming fraud with AI music. I am vehemently opposed to streaming fraud.

34:50That is a crime. The fact that AI music is sometimes involved. AI music is not a crime. We delight millions of people every day. And these things are not the same. We have been working behind the scenes actually a lot on the streaming fraud problem. Sometimes it's public when we announce things like download restrictions and watermarks. but there's things that happen behind the scenes there also. And actually, we're really excited to continue doing those because fostering the right healthy music ecosystem is actually really important for us as a company. And back to what I said before, most problems are human problems.

35:24It's actually getting the right, in some cases, four parties in a room together to solve a problem like streaming fraud. And if you only lean really hard on one or two, those one or two parties don't have the right tools at their disposal, and it becomes like a much harder problem. I don't know what to call it. Is it a collective action problem, or is it honestly just a human problem of how do you get those four parties in a room together? There's AI companies like ours, there's rights holders, there's distributors, there's DSPs, and you kind of need all of them working together to solve this problem.

35:54And if you just lean really hard, either just on Suno, it's very hard for us to really combat streaming fraud on a DSP without help from other people. Same thing with the distributor. Same thing with just the DSP themselves. And so it's actually like a really tricky human problem. If you have those four parties in a room together, it's actually a pretty easy technological problem. And so this is something where because AI is happening so quickly, I think people just don't have the muscle memory in cooperating across those four parties together. But that actually also makes me quite optimistic because all four of those parties are actually incentivized to solve that together.

36:29And so I think this is kind of a temporary thing.

36:31Dan Runcie: I think some of them are more incentivized than others. Granted. Granted. I think with you all, though, one of the things that people would ask, though, is that if you have the data to be able to determine and have a pretty good understanding for what a user that is using Suno to create music for their kid brushing their teeth or their kid's going to a park or what have you, and being able to distinguish that from someone who may be doing mass downloads or has similar behavior patterns to mass downloads. Is there something that can be done? And I know you mentioned download restrictions, but is there anything more that can be done from understanding that user profile to restricting what they may download from the platform, knowing what their potential intent may be?

37:16Look, it is very hard to identify behavior as our platform changes. We didn't have download restrictions a couple of months ago, and so behaviors change. But also to realize that as you restrict downloads, you're going to push those scammers to other platforms that don't have them. And at that point, it actually becomes a little bit tricky. And so I think it's too early to tell exactly what the right long-term solution is to that problem. And I think it will be a bit of a cat and mouse game.

37:43Dan Runcie: And then on a similar note here, we talked about the distributors, but from the DSPs and Spotify specifically, they had recently put out this press release and an announcement where they talked about pushing human artistry first. And they had removed tens of millions of songs that they considered, quote, AI slop. And they had also deprioritized some of them in their recommendations as well. And I know you've spoken a lot about trying to remove that distinction that people may have falsely about, okay, the importance of this song being AI or the role that AI has. But when you hear this language around like putting human artistry first or even just the AI slop, what is your take on that?

38:24A few things. We are super pro human artistry. And behind every Suno song is a human creator. And sometimes they have done something quick. And it is a song with a lot of levity. And most of the time they have poured themselves into the song. And again, I will just point out that there's such a gray area of what is AI music and what is AI slop of if I used a little bit of Suno and brought it into my other DAW, is that AI music? If I used Suno to remaster a track, is that AI music? If I used Suno to very carefully craft an entire song bit by bit, is that AI music? If I used Suno to make a meme song out of my text messages, is that AI music?

39:04I don't want to be the one that draws the line of what is considered AI music or not. I don't think we want any single party to be the one to draw the line between what is AI music or not. And I think if you look at what Spotify put out, you'll notice that they said it's AI slop and spammy tracks, right? And this is a deliberately, I think, opaque definition. And I think that's exactly the right thing to do because where this line is is going to change. And so I think we would be incorrect and a little foolish to read that as like Spotify is anti people making amazing tracks with Suno and uploading them because a lot of those tracks are really heartfelt, even if a small fraction of them are not or have some fraudulent behavior.

39:48Dan Runcie: Do you feel like the labels are accurate on what some of these people determine as what is AI or what is included? I think I've read you question whether or not some of these labels or detections are accurate. Oh, you mean labels like a DSP labeling something as AI or not AI? Yeah. I think – no, I think a lot of the stats that get put out are overblown and don't match exactly what we see and what we hear. And so I think a lot of these are done to promote a certain narrative. And so I would – I just encourage people to be a little bit more inquisitive there. But again, I think if you are using some third-party detector that is going to say whether or not a song was made with Suno, that third-party detector – and let's say it's perfectly accurate, which it isn't.

40:38But that third-party detector is going to say the same thing about a track that got worked on for four weeks in Suno Studio, which is our digital audio workstation where somebody has made things in a full-blown multi-track editor that looks a lot like your favorite other digital audio workstation. That will look the same to that program as I typed six words into the prompt box and out popped a mediocre song. And just one guy's opinion, I don't think we should treat those things the same. I don't think that makes any sense.

41:06Dan Runcie: We should talk about some of your efforts in live because you had acquired Songkick from Warner Music Group last year. And you recently hired a senior executive from Ticketmaster to come join you on the team. So what does Suno's vision in live entertainment look like? A lot to say here. People, I think, are correct to point out that when much more digital music gets made, live music becomes much more important. And so there's an element of that. But I, again, I just think a lot about what could we have never done until today? And that should really be a guiding principle for how we build what it is that we want to build.

41:43And I think as we not only make a lot more music, but as we change how the end user interacts with music and we are getting people to be creative, that pulls people into music more, that makes them want to go to concerts. Now, can we do things in live venues that we never would have been able to do before? And so I imagine the following hypothetical. you are excited in a month from now you got tickets to see your favorite artist in where you know let's say you live in Cleveland and you got tickets to see your favorite artist at your favorite venue in Cleveland and in advance of that you have logged on to Suno and you have made lots of derivatives and interacted with the content of that artist or maybe you even made some mashup of the opening band and the main act in advance of that and what's going to happen is because we can connect the dots here, maybe at the end of the show for the encore, because those two bands are there and they know that you were in the audience because you bought your tickets through Ticketmaster and we have that data, we can look and say, okay, the person who made this amazing mashup of these two bands' works is actually in the audience and those two bands are going to play that song.

42:53And what an incredible cultural moment where you have the audience and the performers interacting in ways that would have never before been possible. How cool would that be? And how exciting would it be for the audience when they find out that, at least in part, that music was composed by somebody who's there, who's not on stage, who's actually in the crowd. So that is one of the possibilities for the future. And I think there's a lot that we will figure out that will be even better than that.

43:17Dan Runcie: This reminds me of a quote or a question that you were asked. You were interviewed by, I think it was one of the partners at Sequoia Capital. And you asked about when is Suno going to be at Coachella? and you had said, oh, we'd love to make that happen. Maybe we'll have some conversations. Have you been talking to promoters like Golden Voice or AEG about what this could look like? We talk to a lot of people. There are, with anything live, there comes hardware constraints. And humbly, we're not at the point where things are like that. And there's always a little delay. And so the way in which we show up and have activations there, we're still trying to figure that out to make that the most elevated version of it.

43:55And so that is why in the example that I give you, it's actually a mashup that maybe got made a month in advance. I think one day this technology will be good enough and fast enough where concerts can be truly interactive if the artists want that. And I think that will be fantastic.

44:10Dan Runcie: Well, with that, we should probably close things out. But, well, let me ask you this last final question. What was the last song that you created on Suno? I was trialing out a remix product. And I can't tell you which artist it was, but I made an incredible dance mashup of two tracks. And the way in which the second track came in was like subtle and beautiful. And it knocked my socks off. It was incredible. Well, I hope there's a point in the near future when you can tell us who this artist is. I'm excited that that point will come in the near future. Yeah. Well, Mikey, I appreciate you joining us.

44:43Dan Runcie: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. And that is a wrap. Thank you again to Mikey for joining us. Thank you to the team at Vibe Shack Studios for capturing the video and audio for this episode. Thank you to G and Eric for everything you do to help make this episode possible. And most importantly, thank you for listening. If there's one person you know that would enjoy this episode on Suno, AI music, and the future of entertainment, then send them a link to this episode. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow. If you're not already following us, tap that follow, tap that subscribe button on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts, make sure that you get the next one.

45:21Dan Runcie: Leave a comment, leave a review. That helps make sure that the algorithm does its thing as well. And again, thank you for listening. Hope you enjoy this one. Talk to you next time.