Suno CEO: AI music is 'come for the gimmick, stay for the joy' — most users just love music but can't play

but uh, kick us off with just a general highlevel interu introduction on you and the company and then we'll go from there. Cool. Yeah, great to be here. Um, I don't know, I'm not so interesting. Uh, the company's much more interesting.

Uh, [clears throat] uh, the way I like to think of it is we are delivering the best, most valuable digital musical experiences, um, to the whole world. And right now the things that are available to the end user are not always amazing. They're not always differentiated.

Um, and I think that's just like a failure of imagination that you can do so much more with music and you can enjoy it so much more. So that's how I think about us. What was the first song that you ever made? Ever made? Yeah. I've been playing piano since I'm four.

Uh, I played in a lot of bands in high school and in college. Um, I play every day. So uh, I don't actually know the answer to that, but it was probably like chopsticks or something. Are you a foundation model company? class or an application layer company or both. Look, the the answer is both.

You know, all the technologies are ours. These didn't exist. Um but [clears throat] I think about and may maybe this will color the conversation and certainly um you know when you guys were discussing us last week or two weeks ago, all that matters here is the product.

All that matters is that we deliver an experience to a user that makes them feel a certain way. And so at the end of the day um like that like if there were a way to do what we're doing without AI like we would probably do that. There just isn't. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So it in in so there is a win condition where you don't even train models and you use someone else's models but as long as you have the best application like that's where the value occurs. I think so. Like at the end of the day story. Yeah.

Users don't care and I I think probably at some point um maybe there's like a last model we officially release. Yeah. Um and the rest is just like amazing product updates. No, no, I I completely agree with that. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

What uh walk us through we we normally don't talk about the history of companies too much during interviews but because you're I mean this is the first time on the show like I'd love to kind of understand the different inflection points for at for the business.

I mean you guys just grown tremendously over the last uh over the last year. So walk yeah walk us through kind of the the history of Sunno and then kind of the history of even AI music and how those two things track. Um, sure. We launched this product a little over two years ago. I think it was in September.

Um, and it was kind of barely passable back then. It was a a Discord bot. This is actually something I got wrong completely. Thankfully, I have good co-founders um who disabused me of my bad ideas. And was that like a mid was that a midjourney? Were you inspired by MidJourney? Makes sense. It was working for MidJourney.

Why not? It was working so well for Midjourney. And I thought we'd be on Discord forever. And then um uh it was like around Thanksgiving we released of that year we released like a really thin web app.

Um it didn't even have the full functionality of the Discord bot and [clears throat] 5 days for 90% of the traffic to move over to the web. It just like ever market signal that I got something wrong that was like very very strong.

Um, and I think slowly but surely, you know, we keep releasing new products, new models, the product gets more engaging, the music gets more impactful, and slowly but surely, I I would say the cartoon you should have is um it becomes more and more appealing to a larger and larger group of people every time you make the product better.

And so, um, it's basically been a lot of iteration. Yes, there are inflection points. Um, everything consumer is like a little bit lumpy, but uh, that's that's the history of it. Yeah. What did what did the early cohort of users look like? How were they using the product?

Where like why were they I'm assuming they were you know you had uh I'm sure you had a cult kind of cult following kind of early. Uh what what did that early cohort look like and and is it that much different than than today or is it just scaled up? Um it's very different today.

So, the early cohort um I would describe as like uh very tech forward and music curious and it's like here's this new thing. You kind of have to suspend disbelief. You need to be really forgiving cuz the music actually isn't all that good. Um and uh as you make the product better, you you grow out from there.

And now it's like people who love music who are like a little bit tech curious. And actually at this point, you don't even need to be all that tech curious. there's like a fairly easy to use experience on both web and mobile that you can just kind of dive into.

And so um I think uh the the early users are indeed like you know if you were on Discord, let me put it this way. If you were on Discord like you are a very different kind of user than the type of person who might um find it. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

And so and so today I think like part of the part of the debate that we were having and and you can uh deliver some some truth around this is like what like what are kind of the key cohorts that are using and loving SNO.

Everyone by now has probably seen you know viral short form videos where people are combining two different songs and and some of the reach on on these assets is insane.

And you'll see, you know, somebody combining like uh uh rap artists like Future with uh jazz music and and you know, getting, you know, hundreds or tens of millions or, you know, potentially even more uh views on this type of content.

But then we've also heard of stories of professional musicians using this to like accelerate their workflows. And then we've now heard stories of people that are just using creating music just for personal consumption.

And so what what do the different kind of cohorts look like and what what are you guys what kind of user are you guys most focused on?

So the professional content creator be they professional music creator or other content creator this is like mids singledigit percentage of our user base and the vast majority of people are people um who love music but aren't making music uh for any other purpose. That's just we call it creative entertainment.

is just like a new behavior. And so I think trying to apply too much of what you know from other things, be it consumer social platforms or video games, it's always you always just have to take everything with a grain of salt. Um but most people they come and they find that music making is incredibly enjoyable.

And um if you have studied an instrument and made music with your friends, like you probably already know this and um you just don't believe that it can be done digitally and then you kind of find the product and you realize, oh my god, this can be done digitally. I'm gonna enjoy the hell out of making music.

Um, I usually um try to cartoonize our our average user as people who would say, "I love music. I love to sing. You don't love it when I sing. " That's kind of uh that's kind of our sweet spot. That makes sense. And and and that tracks on like actual monetization.

It's not like those are the free users and then the all the revenue comes from professional people or like API like it actually matches roughly what you described. That That's right. And so that's fascinating.

Um I you know you guys mentioned um a couple weeks ago the Chris Dixon thing the like um come for the tools stay for the network.

I think about it a little differently for us and I I kind of think of it for us as like come for the gimmick and stay for the joy and this is like the party trick of making that song that um even if it's not you know your favorite artist um you know which you largely can't do on the platform but it's you know make the country song about Debbie being late.

That's the party trick, but there's something that is behind the party trick that you get pulled into and all of a sudden you are a music maker and you're enjoying it.

And so, um, I actually I I don't think it's bad, um, you know, there's like this this this song that is meant to be consumed once that you're never going to consume again that like you laugh for 4 seconds with your friend.

And I think you know, one of you said like, I almost just need to know the prompt um, and then I don't need to know the rest of the song. I don't actually think that's bad because there's this amazing experience that it gets backed up with that people spend hours a day on. Totally. Yeah.

And I I when I think about some of the most fun moments of my childhood, it was my dad writing and playing a song for guitar and singing it one time and never singing it again. And I still like just remember the moments and the and the joy of that.

And so like the concept of like ephemeral songs that can be created for a moment that historically you would have needed, you know, studio time. You would have needed to spend all this time like writing the song, you know, producing it, all this stuff. And now it can be done in an instant.

I I think uh it really is it really is totally magical. Where I think this is similar to this is similar to this like there's ephemeral pictures on your phone, right? And you're never going to look at them again unless Apple tells you to. Yeah. Yeah.

Where where where are the rough edges or where where are the edges that you want to be like careful around?

I feel like uh with chat GBT no one was really expecting the whole like getting oneshotted and like psychosis and like be delusions of grandeur like that came out of nowhere in my opinion and then all of a sudden it was like an issue and they had to work on it and of course there's like guardrails that they can put up.

Uh midjourney I think a lot of people use that as art therapy. I haven't seen that many people or heard that many anecdotes about people like going crazy because of midjourney, but there's still like if you're doing image generation, you don't want to generate adult content, for example.

Uh do you have an idea of like the shape of the battle that you're going to be waging against like the the like the risks that you want to like fight off? Yeah. Look, I think for us, they're actually just fairly lower stakes than those other ones.

Like our AI is turning anyone into paper clips and not that I think that that's a real thing anyway. And I I like you said, I don't think we're we're we're inducing psychosis in anyone. Um, you know, this is a tricky question. Music um the the the content has kind of always been filthy in in the best music.

And um I don't really want us to be the arbiter of that. So, we have like some some content moderation that's like pretty um I would say pretty forgiving and and [clears throat] currently that's actually that's it. And then lots of copyright moderation, of course. Yeah.

I was uh I was raised on Little John and the East Side Boys and uh it was it was indeed filthy and and yes, it it would not be your place to necessarily filter that.

I would imagine that you at some point have to do some sort of like KYC, age verification or or even something that's just like parental controls, that type of stuff. Uh that certainly makes sense. Um I I have a follow-up question, but go for Oh, yeah.

I there was an article in the in the journal yesterday about how uh um Instagram had used uh PG-13 as a heruristic for the type of content that they would show to teenagers on Instagram. And the MPA actually pushed back against that.

And I was very upset about that because I feel like we need shared language for how we describe what is acceptable on new tech platforms. So, like I want you to be able to put the label of like explicit content. Remember that explicit content on every album?

It became so iconic it was actually cool, which it maybe had a bad effect. But if you put that if you put that black and white flag with the explicit on there, I know exactly what I'm getting. And I know that I'm going to keep that out of my hand out of the hands of my kids for a number of years.

Um, and I would hate for I would hate to be in a situation where you couldn't use that and you had to come up with some new jargon for your policy.

I love just building on the shoulders of giants, but have you thought about adapting any of those terminologies or just making your moderation language match what people already know? Is that relevant to you? Um, not as much as it is on other platforms.

I mean, but but it is, you know, I feel like um we should not be the arbiters of a lot of these things and um you know, quite quite frankly, maybe like you don't want us to be the arbittors of these things and that there should be other guidelines set by other things.

And so like yes, if you're dealing with children, you're going to have different rules about the songs that you can make and that you cannot make. And actually, um right now, parents making songs with their kids is actually a mega use case. It's probably half of my usage um which is a lot. I I use the product a lot.

And so it's like right now this is actually not the biggest focus for us. Um like what we have like works pretty well. There are always going to be edge cases. There are edge cases in moderation on every single platform literally, you know, ever. And kind of just through them as they come. Yeah.

What are your conversations like with people in the music industry? There were there was some news earlier this week around the first like AI artist signed a record deal. I don't know if it was actually the first, but that's how it was being reported.

How are the conversations with go are going with your users that are like true pro users that are using Sunno to either like, you know, experiment with like a bunch of different variations of songs, get new ideas, make entire songs themselves. What are those conversations like?

You know, I think there's been a huge shift in the last 6 months. I would say like now I really don't meet a lot of professionals who don't use Sunno at least a little bit. Like songwriters use this a ton. We run a lot of camps.

Um as [clears throat] it's cliche but a creative companion or a creative co-pilot for helping craft the right songs, you know, verse by verse or getting ideas. Um basically every producer I know uses Suno.

This um it was recently put to me just in in an incredibly piffy way of we've become the ompic of the music industry. Everybody's on it but nobody wants to talk about it. Um, and uh, while that might be frustrating for us that in the interim nobody wants to talk about it, in the long run that's actually great.

You know, in the long run, the fact that everybody is using it and loves it is fantastic. And so, um, it's this weird dynamic, I think, where one-on-one people are quite pro, even though like the industry as a whole may have different feelings about it. It's interesting. Yeah.

I wonder I wonder how this like like the creative the creative element of this like really throws me because uh on on the one hand I see if if I'm thinking about Sunno in the creative realm is like you know cursor for your uh for your DAW your your your workstation your your Fruity Loops or your ProTools or your Ableton um and you're generating samples and actually working through that.

I feel like that is something that yes would get to 100% pres penetration but on the flip side like we've had the ability to generate blog posts and text for years now at human touring test level and and yet like we it does not feel like we're close to uh just oh yeah just put in a prompt write a good blog post and it comes out and it's good like you still need that that spark that inspiration and then most people I I feel like are still not they're they're you still in the co-pilot era for sure and I feel like that that that's interesting.

Yeah. I don't know.

I think there's a big difference though here which is that there's a few big differences but for me you know hearing you say that I I it makes me think a lot of um you're thinking of us largely as a tool and it's because a lot of AI products are tools and um the point is not to just churn this blog post out.

Actually the point is to have enjoyed the process of it. I happen not to really enjoy the process of writing so much. Maybe maybe you guys are different, but like um for us the way people use suno, it's like you're coming.

Yes, there is some song at the end of it that you listen to and the fruits of your labor are enjoyable, but the journey of doing it is actually why you're there. And so the actual tool analogy doesn't really work there of like I don't just write in the prompt and it comes out perfect. That's not even the point here.

Yes.

So I I I think what I'm I think where I'm getting is that uh the actual market for AI audio is going to bifurcate in my opinion and there will be people just like there are there are people right now that use LLM to just chat and just have an AI therapist or they have a friend or they just ask ChatgBT40 for you know hey what should I do at work about this they're just having a conversation and then out of text generation, out of LLMs, we also got just the ability to do code completion.

And so we got, you know, windsurf and cursor and codecs and, you know, we got these like coding agents and then we also got like AI therapists. And these are two wildly different things from the same underlying technology. And I feel like the like I would I I would just be shocked if you don't see both emerge over time.

I mean, maybe the different company comes in and takes one more seriously than you because if the market's really big, but I would I would imagine that you wind up servicing both to some degree. No, for sure. I mean, we already service both, but you know, I almost think of this as um in the coding example. Yeah.

You might vibe code something. Yeah. Um and that's just a few prompts. Yeah. Um or you might actually need fine grain control over the thing and then you use a different tool like something that's basically autocomplete on steroids. And I don't mean that in a jar of way. It's like amazing. 100%. music is the same way.

I might vibe create something and have a session where y the music is generally what I'm looking for and I enjoy the process of getting there. Um, but maybe that's the end of it.

And if this is going to be a song that is everlasting and intended to top the charts, I need that fine grain control and I need a different paradigm and a different set of workflows and tools for doing it.

And so, um, there may even be the the same underlying model that powers both of those things and it's a different end user application. Yeah. H how do you think uh like video creation is distinctly different than like music creation?

Because I think you know on our side watching the Sora launch, Sora was like a cool creative tool that had this novel like feature that was the cameo feature. But then immediately those outputs just want wanted to go live elsewhere, right? They wanted to go where these big audiences were.

And I feel like with Sunno, the difference is like you can create music and you want to save stuff and it's actually can be very enjoyable to just listen to the content.

Um, is that is that just a like do you think that will do you think that will always be kind of the dynamic or do you think eventually like video models will catch up to the point where like people are generating videos and then just like consuming them a lot because I haven't again like I think a lot of the the output of something like Aora has been like very ephemeral.

gets maybe shared in a group chat or gets shared on another social media platform but people are not like revisiting the content. Yeah, I think look very fastm moving space and so you know this is just one guy's opinion today. Um I think there's basically two big differences.

One is um the joy in making the music and I think people mostly enjoy consuming the Sora outputs and the the experience of making it is is less interesting.

And then the other thing about video in general, but especially AI video, is it really tends to short form and actually the beauty of music is that it really is meant to grab you for minutes at a time and not seconds at a time. And it makes for a completely different consumptive experience.

And so, um, and I think that's actually a lot of what's broken in music consumption today is there's so much pressure to put on a song and then put, you know, through headphones and then put your phone in your pocket and not even really pay attention to it.

Um, but I I think a lot more is possible where I do have somebody's attention for 3 minutes, 4 minutes, and you can actually tell the story through music in a way that like a 30-second video really does not. And so maybe AI video will get there. Maybe it will get there in a year.

Maybe it'll get there in 5 years, but like today, that's what I see as the the two big differences. Makes sense. H how do you think the music streaming platforms will navigate AI music? I I think they look they they already are. There's AI music on these platforms.

Uh Spotify has announced that they'll start doing AI music. And so, um, I I I I very strongly suspect that in like 5 years, this is not a conversation that's [clears throat] being had because I already know that there's little bits of our music everywhere in in, you know, mega smashes.

And um, the same way you don't think about like was this song digitally produced or was it produced on a giant console in a studio somewhere? And that's maybe something that people thought for 5 years, you know, 30 years ago.

I I my my very strong suspicion or just like autotune where now every song has autotune in it even if you can't hear it. My very strong suspicion is that that is where everything um ends up and the reason is it is better for consumers.

It would really be bad for consumers and therefore bad for the size of the ecosystem if these things kind of bifurcate. Yep. That makes a lot of sense. It's like asking uh I don't even think anyone ever asked the question how will social media apps handle Photoshop?

Photoshop was Photoshop outputs were just immediately the tool existed prior to social media. So it just proliferated immediately. I mean speaking of Photoshop uh Photoshop has had to grapple with the existence of generative images uh through partnerships through rolling their own.

Um, how important is it to you to play in the market of like the enterprise audio workflows, do deals, partnerships?

what we saw in the text in the at least in code at least um every coding platform or and there were a whole bunch of new ones like there's been a real battle for the IDE and I'm wondering if there's like a battle coming for the um this the the the top end of the music production workflow.

Um, I think there there probably will be a battle, but it will be not nearly the bloodbath that it will be in other domains. And it's just because the average piece of music today is produced in 800 different tools. And so, and everybody has all of the tools.

And so, I actually don't think it's entirely reasonable to think that there will be one tool that uses up all of your screen time. And like that's going to be the thing that you produce 99% of your music in if you are a true professional.

And so there um the the end goal is the perfect song and and a little bit less the journey of how you got there. Yep. Interesting. Code it's like VS Code is just open all the time and I don't want to have another editor. And if you like talk to people who develop iOS, they're pissed off because they have two editors.

Um but it's not nearly the same 800 different tools that it is in music. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes a ton. Makes sense. Uh this is super interesting. Thank you for uh coming on to uh to break it down. Yeah, this was awesome. Thanks so much.

I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna use Sunno uh to try to make uh bedtime with the the my three and a halfyear-old a little bit easier later tonight. So, uh I'll report back. I'm I'm excited. What What are What are the What What are some of your favorite prompts that you use with uh your kid or kids?

Um you know, a lot of them are songs. I have a one-year-old and four-year-old. It's like still too early for the one-year-old. A lot of them are um songs about him in fantastical situations.

Like my most favorite one is just was like last winter after um the the Zamboni driver at the local ice rink let him like ride in the Zamboni and so it was like like a whole album of songs about him riding in a Zamboni doing all sorts of crazy stuff.

Um and yeah, they're like very special and personal and I do go back to those and and um gosh, yeah, I think this is wonderful. Sometimes we joke if we were a kids app, we'd have five times the revenue that we do. You know, it's just like um kids is like the most straightforward way to get me to par with my money.

I'm sure you're the same way. Totally totally agree. Soono kids. Maybe the iPad the iPad app. Yeah. Coming next year. No, not actually. [laughter] But who knows? Uh so great to meet you, Mikey. Thank you for coming on and all the progress. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Uh let me tell you about numeral.

com sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Uh speaking of kids, so nice to drop the HQ. Yeah, drop the HQ. RIP to HQ. Speaking of kids, I want your review of this way to decide how to buy a house.

So, in New York City in 2023, this real estate agent worked with a couple who wanted to purchase purchase an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But they wanted their Pokemon obsessed six-year-old son to have a say. How? by playing Pokemon in each neighborhood before his parents would commit to a purchase.

We spent an afternoon covering four neighborhoods as the child played the game and caught Pokémon characters. It turns out that Central Park West was a hot spot for Pokémon Go characters that day. And we toured a two-bedroom co-op that was listed for about $2 million.

The child ended up catching a Snorlax as soon as we stepped inside Central Park. A Snorlax is a blue green character that looks like a bear and is apparently extremely rare to find because it spends the majority of its life asleep. The child is screaming, jumping up and down. He was so excited to find it.

Although my clients looked at seven other apartments that day, no other area came close in terms of Pokemon action, so they knew that apartment was the one. They wrote up an offer that same day for the full asking price. What's your review? Is that a good way? Is that cute and adorable to bring your kids?

I think it's cute. Or is it weird? It potentially could lead to total heartbreak, you know, if the kids just like, "Yeah, this is the the dry spot now. This is a Pokemon hot spot. " And then they're then the Pokemon dry up a week in after moving in. Good take. And they're like, "What are we doing here?

I know we just moved in here, but we got to I I got to get closer to the Pokemon. We got to We Mom and Dad, we got to book a wander. We got to find our happy place. Find our Pokemon hunting spot. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dream beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concier service.

It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Um, yeah. I don't know. I I think uh I think I like the idea of bringing the kid, the six-year-old into the into the house purchase pro process, but uh let's leave the phones at home and let's develop a taste for uh let's become snobs. How about that?

six-year-old become a snob and say, "No, I I couldn't live anywhere but I don't like the cafe. " The Upper East Side because I have strong opinions about this. Get into the lore. What happened on this street? That's what the six-year-old should do.

I'm fine to delegate to the six-year-old, but not to Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go. Anyway, uh our next guest is waiting for us in the reream waiting room. We have Ahmad from Mercury. How you doing? Good to see you. Welcome to the show. Great to see you. Hey, good to be back. how you doing? Great.

It's been a little bit. Yeah, it's been a while. Little bit. Great back. Give us an update on what's going on in your world and then I want to just talk about all the crazy stuff that's happening in tech. Honestly,