Suno CEO Mikey Shulman: 'We're a consumer entertainment company, not an AI lab'

companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. And without further ado, our next guest, Mikey Schulman from Sunno. He is the co-founder, and we cannot wait to talk to him about AI generated audio. Let's bring Mikey in from the Reream waiting room into the TBP Ultradome. Mikey, good to see you again. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Welcome back.

One of the most interesting Do you call yourself a Neolab? Is that a fair characterization?

Uh, great to be back. Thanks for having me. Uh, we definitely do not think of ourselves as a Neol. Okay. Uh,

but you are training models. You're doing AI, but you're a product company. Are you a consumer company? How do you think about yourself?

We're we're a consumer company. We're an entertainment company. Uh consumer entertainment doesn't seem so hot right now. Um not exactly sure why, but uh being entertained and fulfilled is like a basic part of being a person. And so um often underlooked part of the market. Um

yeah, we're we're like the word we use here is creative entertainment.

Sure.

We are um giving people the best most fulfilling creative experiences of their lives.

Yeah. I mean, that sounds maybe broader than music one day. Have you thought about video? Are you thinking about uh I mean, I when I'm on Spotify, a lot of times the video will pop up alongside the the the music. Are you thinking about uh expanding or continuing to refine the music model itself?

It's a great question. I think there's a lot of reasons why this is going to work really, really well in music. The least of which is we love music. This is like really the DNA of the company. Yeah.

Um, but I think creative entertainment is coming everywhere. Um, and I I think about it like this, like I think even Claude Code or all of its competitors are creative entertainment. I don't know how much you guys play around with it, but it's like really fun to build things and it's really fun to use what you build and um there's a huge allegory there for music too.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. The tinkerer mindset.

Let's talk about progress since the last time you popped on. You guys grown revenue at all. What metrics can you share? I had heard some rumors uh uh yeah so um growth has been great you know a lot of things have compounded a lot of hard work from the team um and kind of some big step changes in how people engage with the platform

uh so since our last model release

um

yeah to recently we we kind of announced that we had hit uh 2 million subscribers 300 million and we're like one oh

sorry to interrupt and you got cut off a little bit but it's 300 million of ARR are you said, right?

That's remarkable. That's wild.

Insane.

And how much have you appreciated how much have you appreciated the all the other the the labs just slugging it out

like while while you guys just kind of stay stay in your niche, focus and and go after what what clearly is a a massive opportunity, but but maybe is stays kind of off the radar for some of these other labs long enough for you guys to just run away with it. truly I like wake up six days of the week and I think um this is great. We're the only ones really playing in consumer entertainment and I'm really really excited and then the seventh day of the week I wake up and I say like we must be missing something that all these other giant companies know. Uh you know but I I think um yeah it's what it's what I said before like being fulfilled is a much elevated state than utility and everybody is focused on utility because it's straightforward. Um, but eventually like you need something more than that. This is like a basic part of of what being a person is all about. So we love to focus on it. I love watching people slog it out in other domains where scale and compute and dollars are honestly bigger weapons than they are in music.

Yeah.

Uh yeah, we've been we've been I've been enjoying a lot throwing up making making songs for the team. It's just it's an amazing thing to just like be joking and in our use case, we're just like joking around about something and I'm just like, "All right, I'm going to turn it into a song."

It's uh it's a lot of fun. But yeah, talk about the updates on the on the product side, the new voices, functionality, all that.

Yeah, it's um really exciting launch. We a couple hours ago released a new model. It's our best model yet. Uh we'll make the best music, but um I think most excitingly is really gets personal. So, um, you can use your own voice to make music that sounds like you. Um, and if you're not the best singer, it actually sound like a better version of you. And so, there's something beautiful about that.

Autotune.

Uh, yes. Yes. It uh, and without sounding too like artificially autotuning, go try it out. I' I've learned not to try to demo this for people in large groups. People don't like singing in front of their friends. Uh, so I'm I'm not going to try that here. Um and then um some other personalization features on the creation side about how you really kind of tailor um the system to really know everything that you love. Um and then also really exciting is the ability to upload a bunch of tracks from offplatform of your own that you can kind of inspire the model to be more like those. And um we've seen some amazing things happen from everything from like musicians, film composers, producers to like uploading tracks there and getting the model to really um kind of follow their lead. So it's like um an incredible way to uh fall in love with a particular thing that you already love.

I'm I'm super excited to play around with it. John.

Yeah. Is there I'm I'm interested in like top feature requests and what we can learn. I don't you obviously you don't want to spill your entire road map but uh some of the interesting things that happened in image models where uh you could at at a certain point you know take an image and basically just replace the background and it wouldn't sort of regenerate your face and I feel like there's a there's a lot of opportunity if artists opt in or I have music to say okay I want to keep the the song exactly the same and just change out the lyrics to do sort of a a remix or keep the lyrics exactly the same and change out the style, style transfer, and I feel like all of those are maybe it's going to be more of a a lift on like the business development side to to figure out how to do that. Uh, but but what are you excited about in terms of increasing the level of control from the creator or the user?

Um, a lot of what you said is is coming soon. Yeah,

I think um unlike other media, music has like a very rich history of um basically derivatives from covers to samples to remixes to mashups. And um people riffing off one another is a way to spark creativity. It is a way to keep old works alive. And so you'll see you'll see a lot of that come in in the notsodistant future. Some of it's already on platform, you know.

Yeah, of course. Something people don't know is um like almost a quarter of all songs made on platform are um derivatives of other songs on platforms like a lot of covers basically and so there's a a kind of a social ecosystem around these things.

Yeah. What's the B2B side of the business like? I like we we talked to a lot of AI video generation platforms and it seems like there's a lot of just ad creative like ad agencies basically that are using the tool at volume beyond the creativity and just the fun of making a v an AI video uh for themselves. They actually see it as a way to accelerate creative works on their ad side. And I'm wondering if you're seeing pull from ad agencies saying, "Hey, we we need, you know, a new song for this campaign. We have some AI generated video and we're going to partner with Sunno on that."

Um, we've definitely had a lot of outreach. Honestly, it's just not a huge focus for us right now. Like, we want to delight

everyone like just regular people who love music. And um we're honestly like a lot of the company's DNA is not being um not trying to do the same thing a little bit faster or a little bit easier, but actually to try to do something that is entirely new and like that is changing how people entertain themselves. So um there's probably a big business to build helping people make songs for ads or jingles for companies. Um maybe we can work together on a jingle as a side project. Uh

but for us that'll be a side project. What global superstar has embraced AI music the most?

And is it Meek Mill?

Uh the most? Oh. Um I don't know. There's there's

because you kind of have to go on like a villain arc.

Soldier boy did an AI

like you like there there's there we again the last time we were here I was telling you

somebody I know in the music industry is like every artist is using the the sunno. Every artist thinks it's amazing. Nobody wants to talk about it yet because they're kind of scared of the reaction from the world and the creative industry and all this stuff. And so it feels like the first one or two people to go in a huge way will get some push back and then over time it just is normal. I I think it's slowly changing. Um I don't want to out anyone but um this was this is a quote that is attributed to me but it's actually not mine. and I'm not this clever of everything that you just said ascribing this is the the GLP1 of music. It's like everyone's on it and no one wants to talk about it.

Um and uh I think these things just take time. So I'm not I'm not going to I'm not going to out anyone just yet. Okay.

Um

but it feels like things are changing.

Final question from the chat. Are there deep cuts on?

Uh I don't know.

Deep cuts.

What is what you know what deep cut is? deep deep cut is like deeply underrated like from deep cuts in the vinyl like everyone knows that.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I I understand but it's not it's not for me to say

sure

like what is good and not good. Like we never want to be the arbiters of good music and bad music and like

um

like I have deep cuts of my own that you're going to hate like that I made and I promise you'll hate them. I guess to quantify the question it would be like do you think the listener uh the the the the the plays are less power law distributed than on say Spotify where Spotify probably has like Taylor Swift Taylor Swift Taylor Swift at the at the tall end that's driving a ton of consumption. Do you think that your curve of consumption is a little bit more even?

For sure. For a couple of reasons. One is that the whole purpose of the platform is actually to enjoy creation.

Yeah. and not necessarily to go and browse for other people's music. It's actually to get inspired to make your own music. And so we actually see people falling in love

as much with their own music on platform as they do with other people's music, which is amazing and new.

So it's more it's so the answer is more deep cuts. It's all deep cuts.

More deep cuts.

Yeah. Okay. But in that in that lens, it's all deep cuts on.

I love it. I love it. Uh yeah. I mean, obviously not to paint it into a corner. Uh there there's a million ways to think about this, but thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

Great to catch up. Excited to play around with the new model.

Congrats on the progress. Talk to you